DEBORAH TREFTS
Staff Writer
“Celebrating Excellence: A Week in Partnership with the Pulitzer Prizes” has been selected as one of the nine Chautauqua Lecture Series themes for next season.
So, it is particularly fitting that the Contemporary Issues Forum, sponsored by the Chautauqua Women’s Club, will kick off the final week of this season with a lecture by the 2017 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History. It is awarded “for a distinguished and appropriately documented book on the history of the United States.”
At 3 p.m. Saturday in the Hall of Philosophy, Heather Ann Thompson, Ph.D. — urban and civil rights historian, professor, documentary film adviser and activist — will discuss her new book, Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage (c. 2026). This will be the last of CIF’s 2026 lectures.
Fear and Fury “investigates the 1984 subway shooting in New York City and analyzes its profound implications for American race relations, politics, and democracy.”
Thompson — who has received numerous honors and awards throughout her career — is the Frank W. Thompson Collegiate professor of history and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts and a professor at U-M’s Residential College of Liberal Arts in Ann Arbor.
“We need to understand the past a lot better than we do if we want to understand the present,” she said. “… The 1980s was a key moment; a turning point. I dig into bigger events as a storyteller — not as a political scientist or quantitatively, but qualitatively. Rather than go to prison [for shooting four Black teenagers – Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty and James Ramseur — at point-blank range], Bernie Goetz becomes a hero. What does that have to do with the ground we lay today?”
Although she resided in Kansas, Indiana and England as a child, Thompson said that as a teenager, she lived in the inner city of Detroit. She attended a largely Black magnet high school named after a U.S. Army officer, senator and slave owner who died in 1866. Both of her parents “were always social justice oriented.” Her father was an activist-scholar, and in time, her mother became a labor lawyer.
“I thought Detroit was underrated,” she said. “People said it was the worst city. … But what was the reality on the ground, and why was there so much hostility?”
After earning her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in history at U-M and becoming a mother — her first of three children — Thompson completed her Ph.D. in American history at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey.
Her doctoral dissertation on Detroit evolved into her first book, Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City (c. 2001/2017), about “whose city is it, and why it came to be.” She finished it while teaching history as an assistant professor at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
“History and writing … were a way to delve into what was of interest to me,” Thompson said. “It’s a way of being a storyteller in a serious way, to look for documents that we don’t know about. We all have a perceived narrative, and we tend to get it from politicians and the media. But what was actually happening at the time?”
In Philadelphia, where Thompson was an associate history professor at Temple University, she began working on Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. It won the 2016 Bancroft Prize, awarded by the trustees of Columbia University for books on diplomacy or the history of the Americas, as well as the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for history (administered by Columbia University), soon after she became a full professor at U-M.
“About Attica, [I wondered] what is going on with this civil rights event that’s [happening] behind bars,” Thompson said. “I realized we really didn’t understand it [and how] we became the largest prison nation in the world. Our criminal justice system is so vast and punitive. … How did we get here?”
Blood in the Water was 13 years in the making. “The state of New York had closed down the archives,” she said. “They didn’t want anyone to know. I had a whiteboard in my office and it looked like the one in the film, ‘A Beautiful Mind’ (2001) … [I wanted to know,] who has a copy [of documents], who was there, who has film footage. History is being a detective as much as a scholar.”
Since there was “a cache of records in the Erie County courthouse in Buffalo, Buffalo and Batavia were my home away from home for many years,” Thompson said.
While she was finishing this book, Ava DuVernay’s documentary film, “13th,” came out on Netflix. It examines the U.S. prison-industrial complex encompassing race, the justice system and mass incarceration.
With Thompson and others also shining a spotlight on prisons because of the massive change occurring, a new field called “carceral studies” started.
“At Michigan, I wanted to create a center for major research and inquiry in partnership with community folks to reconnect with that history and the people, including family members, who had experienced it most directly,” she said. “This country had slavery for many years, and during the New Deal, there was an effort to interview people about what it was like. We partnered with the law school, the school of public health and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.”
Their collaboration led to the formation of the Carceral State Project, which documents criminalization, confinement and resistance. Its “mission is to document and challenge the historical and contemporary processes of criminalization, policing, incarceration, immigrant detention, and other forms of carceral control in the state of Michigan and beyond.”
Thompson said that historians don’t start with a theory or premise. “In history you always start with a question – ‘What happened?’ [Then you ask], where would I find and who would have the information that allows me to piece this together?”
“Historians are trained to make the arguments, but not about how to be a writer,” she added. “How you take something that’s so grim and painful, and write about it without inuring [readers] to the violence.”
In New York City in 1984, there was “an iconic act of vigilantism, yet no one had a clue about these boys’ names,” she said. “What actually happened on that subway train?”
At CIF, Thompson will talk about how she researched, documented and ultimately pieced together the story of what did happen there and in the aftermath of the shootings, including the rebirth of white rage.
