A Town without Pity: AIDS, Race, and Resistance in Florida’s Deep South

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 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.