Heather Ann Thompson is a historian at the University of Michigan as well as the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft-prize winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy. This 2016 book received a five additional book prizes and was also a finalist for the National Book Award as well as the LA Times Book prize. It is currently being adapted for television. Thompson is also the author of Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (2001, 2017). She writes regularly as well on the history of policing, mass incarceration and the current criminal justice system for myriad scholarly and popular publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, The Atlantic, and the New Yorker. She also works in the film and television industry as an historical advisor as well as a consulting producer. Thompson’s additional work in the policy arena includes having served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the United States and on its standing Committee for Law and Justice, as well as currently serving on other policy boards. She currently co-runs the Carceral State Project at the University of Michigan. She is now working on two books—one about Bernie Goetz’s notorious vigilante shootings on a NYC subway in 1984 and the other will be a long history of the 1985 police bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia.
Project: As a Carr-Ryan Fellow I will complete my next book on an important but underappreciated event that took place in the Reagan 80s: The so-called “Subway Vigilante” shootings of 1984. This book will examine the phenomenon of white citizens’ self-deputized policing of Black citizens as its deepening legitimacy as the 20th century wound down and the 21st century unfolded. It argues that the toxic cocktail of white fear and fury that bubbles so menacingly just below the surface of virtually every public encounter today, was in fact mixed in a cauldron of Reagan-Era retrenchment and misinformation about crime and aggressively marketed by a new and growing Right-wing media empire, with profound and devastating consequences.