Fear and Fury: Bernie Goetz, White Rage, and the Long Reach of the Reagan 80s

media release: UW Havens-Wright Center event.

Doria Dee Johnson Lecture in History & Social Justice

In 1984, as the Reagan Revolution was taking its toll on cities across the country, a white loner named Bernie Goetz would gun down four Black teens on a NYC subway and would become an overnight hero—the so-called “Death Wish Vigilante.” This one event, and the political and economic moment in which it unfolded, would matter more to the fate of this nation than anyone grasped at that time.

Co-sponsored by the Department of History, Havens Wright Center for Social Justice, Center for Campus History, and Department of African American Studies