A Town Without Pity

Two heartbreaking tales of small-town

injustice revealing America's struggles with AIDS and racial bias in the 1980s



In the

1980s, the tiny town of Arcadia, Florida, was "fifty miles and fifty years from

Sarasota." With its cowboy roots, low-wage agricultural industries, and violent

frontier history, Arcadia was a curious mix of the desolate ranchlands of West

Texas and the stately homes and bitter race relations of the South. In A

Town without Pity, award-winning author Jason Vuic recounts two

heartbreaking stories from Arcadia that rose to national prominence at the end

of the Reagan era and forced the town to reckon with not only AIDS hysteria but also the legacies of a racist past.



This

book delves into the case of James Richardson, a Black migrant worker accused in

1967 of poisoning his seven children. Richardson spent twenty years in prison

due to suppressed evidence for a crime he didn't commit. Vuic also tells the

story of the public mistreatment of the three Ray brothers, white school-age children

with hemophilia who contracted the HIV virus from a tainted medicine called

factor VIII. The Rays were barred from attending their local church and school,

and when their house burned down in a mysterious arson, reporters dubbed

Arcadia the "town without pity."



Through

extensive use of newspapers, court records, and interviews, Vuic shows how the

actions of authorities and residents left little room for the voices that spoke

up against bias, harassment, and coercion. At the same time, this cautionary

tale places Arcadia as a microcosm of many small towns in the late twentieth-century

United States, reminding readers of the staying power of social divisions and

prejudice even after the achievements of the civil rights movement.