Heather Ann Thompson on the Legacy of Bernie Goetz
Pulitzer-winning historian examines how the 1984 subway shooting weaponized racial fear and fueled mass incarceration, with journalist Chenjerai Kumanyika.
Why we picked this
Thompson won the Pulitzer for her account of Attica — she traces the direct line from one subway shooting to decades of mass incarceration with the precision of an investigative journalist and the depth of a historian.
In December 1984, Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teenagers on a New York City subway, claiming self-defense. He became, for a significant portion of the public, a folk hero — a symbol of a city fed up with crime. The case was acquitted, the narrative calcified, and the political momentum it generated helped build the infrastructure of mass incarceration that defined American criminal justice for the next thirty years. Heather Ann Thompson’s book “Fear and Fury” argues this was not an accident but a deliberate transformation of fear into policy.
Thompson won the Pulitzer Prize for “Blood in the Water,” her exhaustive account of the 1971 Attica prison uprising and its brutal suppression, which took decades of FOIA litigation to fully document. She brings the same methodological rigor to the Goetz case, situating a single event within the larger machinery of racial politics, media amplification, and legislative consequence. Her work shows how a moment of vigilante violence became a template for how urban crime would be understood — and punished — for a generation.
Chenjerai Kumanyika, the journalist and media scholar known for his work on the Peabody Award-winning podcast “Uncivil,” brings a practitioner’s eye for how narrative shapes public memory. His presence in conversation with Thompson promises more than a lecture — it should surface the questions about what endures from the Goetz era and what has (or hasn’t) changed about the politics of race and safety in American cities.