Jason Vuic

   A Town without Pity is a dramatic account of Florida’s toughest locale—a town named Arcadia, ironically—which, in the 1980s, experienced not one, but 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 had contracted the AIDS virus from tainted blood factor, and who were banished from school and church and forced to leave town after someone burned down their house.

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   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. “We’re 50 miles and 50 years from Sarasota!” locals would say, which was Arcadia in a nutshell: an insular, conservative burg a stone’s throw from modern Florida that seemed to resist modern Florida entirely. 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.