A Town without Pity

Two heartbreaking tales of small-towninjustice revealing America's struggles with AIDS and racial bias in the 1980s

In the1980s, the tiny town of Arcadia, Florida, was ?fifty miles and fifty years fromSarasota.? With its cowboy roots, low-wage agricultural industries, and violentfrontier history, Arcadia was a curious mix of the desolate ranchlands of WestTexas and the stately homes and bitter race relations of the South. In ATown without Pity, award-winning author Jason Vuic recounts twoheartbreaking stories from Arcadia that rose to national prominence at the endof the Reagan era and forced the town to reckon with not only AIDS hysteria but also the legacies of a racist past.

Thisbook delves into the case of James Richardson, a Black migrant worker accused in1967 of poisoning his seven children. Richardson spent twenty years in prisondue to suppressed evidence for a crime he didn't commit. Vuic also tells thestory of the public mistreatment of the three Ray brothers, white school-age childrenwith hemophilia who contracted the HIV virus from a tainted medicine calledfactor VIII. The Rays were barred from attending their local church and school,and when their house burned down in a mysterious arson, reporters dubbedArcadia the ?town without pity.?

Throughextensive use of newspapers, court records, and interviews, Vuic shows how theactions of authorities and residents left little room for the voices that spokeup against bias, harassment, and coercion. At the same time, this cautionarytale places Arcadia as a microcosm of many small towns in the late twentieth-centuryUnited States, reminding readers of the staying power of social divisions andprejudice even after the achievements of the civil rights movement.