Let’s Talk About Florida – A Town Without Pity

LET’S TALK ABOUT FLORIDA – Zoom Book Discussion

Join in a lively conversation about Florida history as depicted in literature about Florida. Free and open to all. Register below for Zoom link.

A Town Without Pity: AIDS, Race & Resistance in Florida’s Deep South by Jason Vuic

Moderator: Jason Vuic

About the Book

A Town Without Pity is a dramatic account of Florida’s toughest locale—a town named Arcadia, ironically-—which, in the 1980s, experienced two national news-making events: the first, the exoneration of Black migrant worker James Richardson, who spent 20 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit; and the second, the very public mistreatment of the HIV-positive Ray boys, 3 white, hemophilia-suffering brothers who contracted AIDS and who were banished from school and church and forced to leave town after someone burned down their house. Their stories were heartbreaking, and for a time focused the public’s attention on Arcadia, whose cowboy roots, poor-wage agricultural industries, and violent frontier history made it perhaps the most “out-of-place” place in Florida. This was a town without pity, which, during a 2-year period at the end of the Reagan era, was forced to confront not only the AIDS virus, but the remnants of a racist past.

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