TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Heather Ann Thompson has written a new book that explores fear, how it has become one of the most powerful forces in American life, powerful enough to excuse violence, shape policy and decide whose lives matter. "Fear And Fury" tells the story through a small cast of characters - four Black teenagers, a white man who decided he was under threat, a media ecosystem that turned fear into profit and a political system that rewards weaponizing fear. Three days before Christmas, in 1984, the teens, who were from the South Bronx, boarded the subway, headed downtown. They were loud and rambunctious. One of them asked the white man sitting alone for $5. That man, Bernhard Goetz, stood up, unzipped his jacket, pulled out a gun and shot all four of them.
In the days that followed, Goetz became a hometown hero. Tabloids crowned him the death wish vigilante, and he received thousands of fan letters, cash donations and public praise from everyday New Yorkers to celebrities and powerful media figures who framed him as a man who had done what the city could not. A jury later acquitted Goetz of everything but carrying an unlicensed gun. Thompson argues the case marked a political turning point when white racial fear was sanctioned by law and leveraged by elites who learned how useful fear could be. The book is titled "Fear And Fury: The Reagan Eighties, The Bernie Goetz Shootings, And The Rebirth Of White Rage." Heather Ann Thompson, welcome to FRESH AIR.
HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: So glad to be here.
MOSLEY: I want to start with Bernie Goetz. He was acquitted of attempted murder for the shootings. He served less than a year on the gun charge, and he essentially returned to life in New York. Right now, he's in his '70s. He's still living in the city. He's still giving interviews. He defends what he did. But you actually decided not to interview him for this book. How come?
THOMPSON: Well, in part because the really striking thing about this event at the time, and as it's been remembered since, is that the story is all about him. The story is about writing the justification for what he did on that subway so many decades ago, and so much so that I am really embarrassed, actually, to say that when I began to think about this case again, I didn't know the names of the teenagers he'd shot. And I suspected that I was not alone, that there was a complete erasure, actually, of the serious victims of this crime.
MOSLEY: And what I want to say to that, too, what's so interesting is even right now, as I introduced you and introduced the story, I didn't even name the four boys or the four teenagers.
THOMPSON: (Laughter).
MOSLEY: Yeah.
THOMPSON: Yeah. Well, I mean, it was something I had to really reckon with. And so at the end of the day, I initially thought I would try to talk to everybody, even though most of the work I always do is really steeped in the documents of the moment and the words people were saying in the moment. But when I realized that I wasn't going to actually be able to talk to all of the victims, I wasn't going to be able to talk to one of them because he was permanently paralyzed and had suffered brain damage as a result of his injuries. I wasn't able to talk to another because he had killed himself on the anniversary of this event. I wasn't able to talk to the third because he had died after years of drug addiction, suffering this event. And the other one, the only one I could have talked to, has really kind of retreated from the public eye for all kinds of understandable reasons. And so without talking to them, I thought, you know, I don't want to talk to the shooter. I want to let that moment in the past tell itself.
MOSLEY: I want to get more into the young men and who they were and what you found out through your research. But I want to know what you found out about Goetz, who he was before the day he shot those teenagers.
THOMPSON: I think he is, on the one hand, a very complicated figure because when I began to dig into his own biography, it is a troubled biography, I think, by any estimation. He was the youngest child of a clearly quite strict father and quite domineering father. He grew up in rural New York, clearly felt alone, a bit picked on by his peers as a child and I think raised rather sternly, and I think from the very beginning was exhibiting a problem with authority and feeling misunderstood and anger and all of those things. But I also was struck by the way in which that was not the explanatory thing that we might think it was. He - yes, he was a loner, and he was an electronics nerd who lived by himself and worked for himself in part because he had a difficulty, I think, getting along with others.
But on the other hand, he was a guy who would step outside of his apartment in the 1980s, New York, and just be so irritated and angered at the garbage piling up on the stoop and the sex trade going on on street corners and the scores of people suffering the ever-deepening AIDS epidemic. And he felt a degree of abandonment and fury by that and saw all of it as the fault of a liberal do-gooder government that was not taking care of business, not cleaning things up. And in that sense, he was this every man, white American, who was feeling dislocated and discombobulated by the time of the '70s and ever more so as the austerity of the '80s kicked in.
MOSLEY: And that viewpoint, that narrative, I mean, New York in 1984, just to put ourselves there, you articulated it quite well, but it was genuinely a dangerous place. Crime was high. The subway was very chaotic. Lots of crimes happening on the subway.
THOMPSON: I remember it. Many of us do. It was grim. It felt dangerous to be in the subways. It felt abandoned to walk down almost any city street, wherever you grew up. And it felt like we were in an absolute crisis in the 1980s. And so it wasn't that I doubted the sentiment on the ground. But what was striking to me was, why was it that people were interpreting that really terrible urban situation as the fault of its weakest residents, its most marginalized residents, those who were already poor, those who were suffering, frankly, this crisis far worse than they were? And that was when I really began to dig into the politics of the Reagan '80s, and more importantly, the economics of the Reagan '80s.
The Reagan Republicans were so fascinating because they weren't new, in the sense that they wanted to undo the social safety net and the kind of legacy of the New Deal liberal America. Rich people in America had long wanted to do that. Conservatives in America had long wanted to do that. But they were kind of brilliant in that they were able to understand the power of racial resentment. They were able to connect that racial resentment to a critique of liberalism in a really kind of brilliant way, alarming but brilliant way.
And so by the time they take the White House, they are, meanwhile, dismantling the very funding that people need for their public schools, to have the trash picked up, to fund public health centers and research for public health. And all of the things that New Yorkers really need are being stripped and are being eroded. But no one's eye is on that ball, right? They are instead focused on the wreckage that they see on the ground.
MOSLEY: And where this takes us to, let's go to this day. Goetz is on the train. These four teenagers are on the train as well. They're traveling from the Bronx to Lower Manhattan. One of the boys, Troy Canty, he either asked for or demanded $5 from Goetz. And then what happened next?
THOMPSON: Well, before we can actually even get to what happens next, I think we need to go back a few years, in the South Bronx, where Troy Canty came from and his three teenage friends that were on the train that day. The suffering that Bernie Goetz saw on the street every day he left his Greenwich Village apartment was all happening in the South Bronx in a far more acute way.
This is a neighborhood where people are absolutely in despair. Public sector jobs have dried up. One of the important employers of teenagers, for example, in the summer, they were called CETA jobs. They're eradicated by the Reagan administration. Funding for drug rehab, funding for occupational and educational opportunities, all of these are being eradicated. And so for these teenagers, there isn't much to do, there isn't much hope. And there's a whole lot of need on the ground to have some money. And there's a few choices, and one of them is the illegal drug trade. But, you know, teenagers themselves were very loath and leery to get involved in that. Illegal markets are always dangerous.
And these four teens were on their way into Manhattan because they wanted to go to a video arcade there to jimmy open the coin receptacles. And we might remember, those old arcades, you'd put in a quarter to play pinball. Well, they would collect those quarters. They'd jimmy it open. They'd get a little cash that day. And so what was kind of bringing everyone on the train together in that moment, including the passengers, was they're all sharing an urban crisis. But they are all responding to it differently, feeling differently about it. And that's how this whole moment kind of ignites, I would say, on December 22, 1984.
MOSLEY: Right. So they're headed to Lower Manhattan to go to an arcade to break into a video game and take the quarters, essentially, take the change and have a little bit of money. And Troy asks or demands that Goetz give him $5.
THOMPSON: Yeah. He says, you know, do you have $5? And even that is an interesting kind of moment because, why does he want $5? He wants $5 because he knows that if they go into this arcade with no money in their pocket, it's not even plausible that they're going to play some games. So that's sort of a, you know, thinking ahead kind of thing.
But by asking for $5, this is panhandling. And the other thing about New York City in this moment is panhandling is rampant. The others on the train that day had also seen these teenagers and were unalarmed. You know, they were unconcerned. And every exchange that these teenagers had with the other passengers - hey, how are you? Do you have a light?
No one felt the need to get off the train. No one felt threatened. No one felt the need to talk to the conductor. It all felt very ordinary, it felt very regular, but not to Bernie Goetz. When these four teenagers are on the train, and when Bernie Goetz stands up suddenly - by the way, Troy Canty thinks he's reaching for his wallet. He's relatively, you know - he thinks, oh, OK, that's nice.
MOSLEY: The man's going to give me $5.
THOMPSON: The man's going to give me $5. And when he turns suddenly and he assumes a combat position, and to use his own words, lays down a pattern of fire and takes out first Troy Canty in the chest, then Barry Allen in the back as he is running. Then James Ramseur through the arm, and the bullet goes into his lungs, as he's trying to flee. He misses Darrell Cabey. And the most chilling part of this story is that he then walks over to Darrell Cabey, who at this point is cowering on his seat. And, you know, not a single one of these teenagers was taller than 5 feet 6. These are slight, small teens.
And he's sitting there cowering. And he says, you look all right - here's another. And he shoots him point-blank range, severing his spinal cord, so he is immediately paralyzed. And that story will grow far grimmer when he then has a terrible episode of pneumonia, because, of course, if you can't - you know, if you don't have the muscles, thanks to paralysis, your lungs do not clear as easily or regularly. He has pneumonia. He goes into a life-threatening coma and emerges brain damaged. And it is an incredibly poignant story of what the wreckage of allowing rage to be unleashed really looks like.
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, I'm talking with Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Heather Ann Thompson about her book "Fear And Fury." We'll be right back after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. And today, we're talking with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Heather Ann Thompson about her new book, "Fear And Fury." I want to play a clip of Goetz. It's a video of his first interrogation. He's talking with authorities about what he did and why he did it. Let's listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BERNHARD GOETZ: If I had more bullets, I would have shot them all again and again. The - my problem was I ran out of bullets, and I was going to gouge one of the guys' eyes out with my keys afterwards. You can't understand this. I know you can't understand this. That's fine. The only reason I didn't do it is because he had changed his look.
MOSLEY: That was Bernhard Goetz during his first interrogation after he had turned himself in. And, Heather, I'm sure that you have looked at this video many times. What did he mean when he said one of the boys changed his look?
THOMPSON: So, yeah. The thing about his confession that he will eventually make after being on the lam for nine days on the run from the law is an extraordinary piece of video. He is confessing to everything he did audaciously, aggressively, and it all comes down to, for him, he didn't like the look in Troy Canty's eyes or, as he put it, the gleam in his eye. And he ultimately decides not to go over there and gouge his eyes out after he's already shot him in the chest because he had changed the look in his eye. Well, the look in his eye was terror and bewilderment.
And so the confession is this astonishing piece of tape that also really resonated with me in terms of the contemporary moment we are in because we are watching someone tell us exactly who they are, exactly what they did, and it will not matter. Up will become down. Down will be come up. And that also felt very, very familiar to where we are today.
MOSLEY: I mean, what's astounding, Heather, is I watch this video - it's on YouTube. And, you know, like people do, I read the comments. And the comments to this day, comments that were written just a few days ago - so many people still see him as a hero. That goes back to what you're saying about what we hear when we hear this confession. In real time, back in the '80s, people wrote fan letters after hearing about what happened. They sent him donations. Joan Rivers even wrote him. First off, how did you find out that detail?
THOMPSON: You know, just as I do, digging, digging, digging, finding pieces of paper, reading articles, seeing where it might have been reported the first time. One of the extraordinary pieces of paper that I first saw and then began digging for more was the hate mail that poured into the teens that were sort of the mirror image of the celebratory, congratulatory messages that Goetz was receiving. And both sets of sentiments were passionate and scary, frankly, really scary. And it made me also realize that the moment we are in, just to keep kind of connecting that dot, is less new than we think. So the question is, what is it that just kind of unleashed it in that moment and has been, I think, unleashing it since?
MOSLEY: You go on in the book in great detail that we continually see this. I mean, we saw it with George Zimmerman after he killed Trayvon Martin, more recently, as you write about Daniel Penny, who killed a homeless man named...
THOMPSON: Jordan Neely. Yeah.
MOSLEY: ...Jordan Neely on the New York subway. As a historian, when you look at this kind of public response to this case and then look at these modern examples, that throughline, that continuity, what is the thing that strikes you the most?
THOMPSON: Race. I mean, there is an inescapable story here about the way in which this case and subsequent cases like it were fueled and animated and legitimated by the sense that the people who had been killed or harmed or damaged had deserved exactly what they got. And all of that is framed in such a way that it is just inescapably racialized. So, to me, that is the throughline.
And, of course, once you normalize public violence to that extent, it will have spillover, right? You will have - you know, it will also be directed at people that we disagree with politically or that we see as a threat in other ways. But the violence we have unleashed, the lawlessness, the disregard for a rule of law and the absolute eradication of truth as something that matters, facts as something that matters - when that happens, nobody is safe. It doesn't matter if you live in Minneapolis. It doesn't matter if you live in Denmark. It doesn't matter where you live. If the rule of law doesn't matter anymore, and if truth doesn't matter anymore and if facts don't matter anymore, we are all in danger.
MOSLEY: Our guest today is Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Heather Ann Thompson. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley, and today, I'm talking with historian Heather Ann Thompson, whose work explores how violence, race and power have shaped American life. Her new book, "Fear And Fury," traces the 1984 Bernie Goetz subway shooting through the media, politics and national fear, showing how that moment helped redefine who is protected and who is punished in this country. Thompson is also the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prize-winning author of "Blood In The Water: The Attica Prison Uprising Of 1971 And Its Legacy." It's an expansive history of one of the most consequential prison rebellions in U.S. history. And she wrote "Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, And Race In A Modern American City."
Heather, you talked a bit about the reality of life that these boys were living in New York in the '80s. But these young men, during that time period, were vilified. In some instances, they were characterized as the most dangerous criminals in New York City. What was the actual truth of the four of them - of who they actually were?
THOMPSON: Well, if you were to look at the media at the time, and you were just to read the newspaper reports, not just the tabloid media, but even the mainstream media, you would see an account of these being dangerous thugs and animals and articles that recounted all of the criminal charges that these teens had mounted against them. And I went back to the beginning and just started to unpack first of all, who were they? Where did they come from? Darrell Cabey, for example, who ends up in public housing in the South Bronx because he is, originally, as a kid, living in a house with his mom and dad and his brothers, and his dad is hardworking, supporting the family, and his dad is killed. Someone steals his truck, he tries to protect the truck. He ends up killed. He ends up, you know, it's a horrible incident of crime and violence that puts him in public housing in the first start. That's just an example.
These are kids that had a very, very difficult time growing up. And what they did was they were breaking into the video arcades. They were jumping the turnstiles because they didn't have any money to ride the subway. So they had actually accumulated a whole lot of misdemeanor citations. And what was so incredible was once they get shot, they are in the ICUs. They are having surgery. They are in really, really bad shape. And two judges in the Bronx suddenly decide to go back. They look at all of these old misdemeanor citations, and then they issue a blizzard of warrants against these teenagers on the basis of these misdemeanor charges. So suddenly, overnight, the media grabs hold of this and says they are dangerous criminals. Look at all the charges they have mounted against them. Mind you, these are nonviolent misdemeanor citations. And one of the judges actually calls them. This is - and says this is evidence that they are violent criminals. And, of course, everything just flows from that. They then are no longer able to be victims.
MOSLEY: There were essentially two trials. So there was the criminal trial, and it was a mostly white jury that acquitted Bernie Goetz of attempted murder. And then there was a civil trial that happened a few years later, and that was a mostly Black jury, and they found Goetz liable and awarded Darrell Cabey $43 million. But he never received money for that, is that right?
THOMPSON: Yeah, that's right. This trial is an extraordinary example of a jury hearing evidence and Americans hearing a story unfold right before their eyes and nevertheless deciding in favor of the shooter, nevertheless deciding that he should be vindicated. It is a dramatic trial. Bernie Goetz manages to get one of the most flashy, incredibly smart, really brilliant defense lawyers, Barry Slotnick, to defend him. This is a guy who has defended the mob. I mean, he knows how to really spin a yarn and get the jury on his side. But he has this extraordinary moment in the trial where he persuades the judge to reenact what happened on that subway. But what he does is he brings in these four burly looking, kind of menacing looking Black men, puts them surrounding a white guy who's playing Bernie Goetz. And, you know, it's a whole theater, a whole charade of what no witness testified to that never happened. It all plays out right there in the courtroom on the floor in front of the jurors. It's really kind of amazing to watch.
And then we switch gears later, and, you know, Shirley Cabey, Darrel's mother, is refusing to let this be the last word on her son. And she insists that there's going to be a day of reckoning in civil court. So we then switch to a courtroom in the South Bronx. And what is interesting about that is that by the time that trial happens, crime is so serious. People are, you know, the Black community is not loath to - you know, to send someone to jail if they have committed a crime. So the fact that it is resoundingly in favor of Darrell Cabey is another powerful moment.
MOSLEY: One of the things that I keep using the - I keep saying astounding, but, you know, you mentioned how race wasn't at the forefront in this criminal trial. They managed to downplay race entirely. I mean, Goetz's lawyer portrayed him as this pan-racial urban hero. And how did they pull that off, and why did it work on the jury? Like, there were all of these racial undertones that were right there and very apparent, and yet race was downplayed in the trial.
THOMPSON: Well, I think the word you used is so deeply significant. Race is there fundamentally. It's living and breathing in that courtroom, but it is an undertone. It is implicit. It is never said. Slotnick routinely refers to them as men, not teenagers. He routinely refers to them as thugs and animals. He routinely refers to their long criminal records. He is constantly evoking a racialized language without evoking a racialized language. And so part of this story, actually, is about the way in which all that is uncoded and - that is coded, I should say, and that everybody, white and Black knows exactly what's being said and knows exactly what messages are being sent, over the years, will just get unveiled. One of the most striking things about the moment we're in is that there is no more artifice. White people say exactly what they think and exactly what they feel. That was not so much the case then. Everything was much more coded. And therefore, it was much easier to say this has nothing to do with race, when I doubt seriously that anyone there in that - in real time would have believed that if pressed.
MOSLEY: Is it right that this case changed New York's self-defense law?
THOMPSON: It was the gateway to changing self-defense law really everywhere. Before the Goetz case, the National Rifle Association is largely in the South and in the West and, again, is much more associated with, you know, sportsmanship and hunting. The Goetz case just fits nicely with its own desires to make gun ownership much more - much easier and culturally much more acceptable as a means of everyday self-defense. And so they have a legal arm that they start to put a lot of money in and start to work at the state level, places like Florida where we get a stand your ground law, places like New York, and at the Supreme Court level to change gun laws so that they are more favorable to ordinary people being able to carry and to be able to use their guns without criminal sanction.
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, we're talking with Pulitzer prize-winning historian Heather Ann Thompson about her new book, "Fear And Fury," which traces how a 1984 New York City subway shooting helped shape the politics of fear we're still living with today. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, I'm talking with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Heather Ann Thompson. She's the author of "Fear And Fury," a new book about a 1984 subway shooting and how it shaped the politics of fear and power in America. Thompson also wrote "Blood In The Water: The Attica Prison Uprising Of 1971 And Its Legacy," which won both the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes, and "Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, And Race In A Modern American City."
Heather, one of the most fascinating characters for me in this book is the media. There is this phrase in journalism - if it bleeds, it leads. And what you're asserting here is something that we know to be true, that not all blood leads. It's a specific blood, specific bodies. And the Post was loud and visceral and specific about its heroes and villains. And as you said, it was very much racialized. How did that style of coverage really migrate from a New York tabloid to local news across the country and eventually to Fox News?
THOMPSON: Oh, such a great question. I mean, for starters, Rupert Murdoch, who is in New York, has recently purchased The New York Post, and the Goetz story is gold because it is the right mix of rage and sensationalism and the ability to spread a conservative message in the way people want to hear it. And it is going to be the beginning of the rise of the Murdoch, a conservative media empire. When The New York Post is on the rise, its main competitor, The Daily News, doesn't want to lose readership. I mean, they're going to match each other tit for tat in terms of the sensationalism and increasingly the racialized coverage. I think The New York Post certainly wins that race, but pretty soon, everyone is knee-deep in it.
And the mainstream media is so interesting here because it - you know it is also interested in readership, and it is also interested in what is the story that resonates with people? What is the story that feels right? And I'll give you an example of this. When this very first happens, the boys, not surprisingly, have screwdrivers - two of them have screwdrivers in their pockets. They are zipped up. They were never displayed. No one ever said they were, including Goetz. No one knew about them, but they had them.
MOSLEY: They had these screwdrivers because they were going to use them to open up those machines to get the quarters...
THOMPSON: Exactly. That's how they...
MOSLEY: ...At the arcade.
THOMPSON: Yes, that's how they would jimmy open the coin receptacles on these arcade machines. So they were in their pockets. That fact, that - the existence of these tools in their pocket will be initially reported as they just have screwdrivers in their pocket, is one of the many facts that were reported. You know, and even that was, you know, a little bit of a, you know, wink and nod, but nevertheless, they are just the screwdrivers. Very quickly, they become, according to the more conservative and salacious tabloid media, they were sharpened screwdrivers. And that story that they were sharpened screwdrivers, which was simply not the case, becomes the story. And soon you can find it everywhere, including in mainstream news outlets across the country.
Indeed, most recently, I noticed when I was doing the book that when Bernie Goetz is interviewed about Kyle Rittenhouse's act of vigilantism on that station that was covering the story, again, the sharpened screwdrivers come up. And this is now, you know, 40-some years later. It's now become fact that they were sharpened screwdrivers. And, of course, that from there flowed everything. One can only visualize the man who's being surrounded by these thugs and these animals with sharpened screwdrivers, and, of course, then everything he did thereafter was justified.
MOSLEY: You mentioned something about Goetz speaking about Rittenhouse. Does he get called into news shows to this day to discuss things that happened - cases?
THOMPSON: Absolutely. He was asked about Daniel Penny. He was asked about Rittenhouse. He is asked today what he thinks about the fact that books are being written about him. I mean, people want to know - people want to make sure he's being treated fairly. People want to know what he has to say. I often just find myself wondering, have they reached out to the family members of the young men that he shot? I suspect not.
MOSLEY: There's this media vocabulary that you trace that really kicks in the moment a story like this breaks. I mean, there are many of them. But the white shooter, maybe a vigilante or, in Rittenhouse's case, a scared kid when he went to Wisconsin during the protests after George Floyd's murder, a scared kid who was in over its head. For Black people, especially Black victims, there's always an interrogation of who they were that tries to give justification for why they were targeted - a thug. He was no angel - he had a record. It's almost automatic. What was it like for you to go back through those archives, the headlines? And as part of your research, did you go into it really understanding and knowing this, or were you surprised by just the clarity of that pattern?
THOMPSON: Well, believe it or not, even though (laughter) I've written quite a bit over these years about the power of moments just like this, the ways in which racialized rage can animate American history. And yet, again and again, I find myself just kind of taken aback. But it's also important to remember that there was always a response to this. From the very beginning, you know, Black New Yorkers are really clear about what is happening here, and they are demanding justice for these teens. And the civil rights community is largely - extremely outspoken, in fact, about what is actually happening here and the hypocrisy. If a Black man would have gotten on that train and shot four rambunctious, horsing around white teenagers, would this story even remotely resemble the one that would unfold? And I don't think anyone actually even believed that it would have been the same, and yet it didn't matter.
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, I'm talking with Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Heather Ann Thompson about her book "Fear And Fury." We'll be right back after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. And today, we're talking with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Heather Ann Thompson about her new book, "Fear And Fury."
I want to take us to more current day, 30 years later, 2013. After George Zimmerman is acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin, President Obama walked into the White House briefing room and said something that no sitting president has ever said before. And I want to play it. Let's listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BARACK OBAMA: Trayvon Martin could've been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why in the African American community, at least, there's a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it's important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn't go away. You know, there are very few African American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. I think it's going to be important for all of us to do some soul-searching.
MOSLEY: That was former President Obama talking after the acquittal of George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin. The reaction from conservative media was immediate. A Fox News radio host called him race baiter in chief. And you write about this moment in the book. What did Obama's willingness to speak - he's speaking as a Black man, not just a president - actually expose where we were at the moment, as a country? What did it unleash?
THOMPSON: Oh, you know, virtually every president had doubled down, after Reagan, on the economic conditions that then left us where we are today - right? - the anger, the disillusionment, all the things that we see today. But Obama came of age at a time when there was some pushback to that. There was some real pushback on the ground. Occupy was a pushback to that consolidation of wealth and what that was really looking like in ordinary people's lives.
And Black Lives Matter was pushing back at that unleashed violence, particularly against - and I would say, with respect to President Obama - not just Black men, of course, Black women, too. And there was this moment of hope, I would say. But it was so, as you point out, so - the hostility to it was immediate. It was profound. And it actually then fueled the Fox News reaction that you read on steroids. And then we start to see an even more virulent misinformation media come in that wake.
MOSLEY: With President Donald Trump.
THOMPSON: Yeah, exactly. And you can really see that Trump himself understands this. Trump had tried to run for president. He had switched parties so many times. He courted the Reagan White House. He courted Bill Clinton. He understood that he needed a national presence, so thus "The Apprentice," thus being on, you know, WWE wrestling. He understood all of that. But what he really understood was that the Obama moment could be his moment if he stoked those flames exactly right.
MOSLEY: You've spoken about your origin story, about growing up in Detroit during a period of what really was profound racial and economic change, I mean, in the same way that every major city was dealing with it. But we're talking about the '80s in particular, the '70s and the '80s. You were a white girl in a majority Black city. And I know the neighborhood that you're from because I'm from there, too. I just found that out, that we're from the same neighborhood.
THOMPSON: (Laughter).
MOSLEY: How did that shape the questions that you ask?
THOMPSON: Well, I think from the beginning, it has very much shaped who I am as a historian because, as you mentioned, I was a kid growing up in a city that was literally reviled by the nation and, frankly, the world. Detroit had been dubbed the murder capital of the world. And that was it, right? There was no other questions. I can remember, you know, any time I would talk to white folks that didn't live in the city, it was always, how can you live there? And don't you feel scared? Do you do carry a weapon?
And there was such a disconnect for me growing up with the city that I knew, the school that I went to, the neighborhood that I grew up in - everybody who I knew who was making this city a pretty extraordinary place. And somehow, no one had any idea (laughter) who that was or what that really looked like. So from the beginning, I have always tried to think about, what are the stories that we are not asking about, we don't hear about? Because those are the stories that animate so much of American history.
MOSLEY: You know, Heather, this book, it aligns with your previous work. But it also feels kind of different in tone. It feels more intimate and it feels more insistent, more urgent. Did it ask something different of you as a historian?
THOMPSON: Wow, that's a great question. I felt, doing Attica - because I was writing that as we were in the grips of and trying to make sense of mass incarceration, trying to make sense of why this country locked up more people than any other country on the planet. It felt pretty pressing to me to understand that deeper history of that. But this moment felt like the entire democracy is at stake, that we are now in a society where violence is unhinged, that damages everybody and all of the time. And it did feel, I guess, more - I felt it a little bit more pressing, like, got to understand how we got here. And I feel that we're all trying to make sense of this moment in our way.
MOSLEY: Heather Ann Thompson, thank you so much for this book.
THOMPSON: Thank you so much for allowing me to share it with everyone.
MOSLEY: Heather Ann Thompson's book is "Fear And Fury: The Reagan Eighties, The Bernie Goetz Shootings, And The Rebirth Of White Rage." Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, Tucker Carlson's rise to become one of the most powerful figures on the far right. Political reporter Jason Zengerle joins us to discuss his new book, "Hated By All The Right People." Zengerle argues that Carlson's trajectory mirrors the broader transformation of conservative politics and media over the last 30 years. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at @nprfreshair.
(SOUNDBITE OF ERIC DOLPHY'S "JITTERBUG WALTZ")
MOSLEY: FRESH AIR's executive producers are Danny Miller and Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.
(SOUNDBITE OF ERIC DOLPHY'S "JITTERBUG WALTZ") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
