Sublime

In December of 1982, the Cuban-born Luis Alvarez, a Miami police officer, shot and killed Neville Johnson Jr., a young Black Caribbean American man, in an Overtown arcade as Johnson was playing a video game. The following conflagration left eighteen dead and shut down more than two hundred businesses. There was no conviction.

Goad had been corresponding for a while with Richard Ramirez, who as the “Night Stalker” was responsible for killing over a dozen people. “After I sent him the Rape issue, his letters stopped,” recalls Goad. “One of Ramirez’s pen pals later informed me that Ricky had asked him, ‘Don’t you think that issue went a little too far?’”

largely on circumstantial evidence, motive might be a persuasive consideration—for either guilt or innocence.

sent more Black people into the clutches of violent cops, who killed twenty-two Black people for every White person in the early 1980s. Black youth were four times more likely to be unemployed in 1985 than in 1954. But few connected the increase in unemployment to the increase in violent crime.

Laughlin’s credo was simple: “To purify the breeding stock of the race at all costs.” As journalist Edwin Black notes in his 2003 book, War Against the Weak, Laughlin’s plan of attack was threefold: “sterilization, mass incarceration and sweeping immigration restrictions.” In furtherance of these goals, Laughlin created the imposingly named, feroci

Lyndon Johnson, as part of his War on Poverty, wanted to “follow through” on the vanishing gains seen from Head Start. Concerned that “poor children tend to do poorly in school,” the Office of Education and the Office of Economic Opportunity sought to determine what types of education models could best break this cycle of failure. The result was Pr