The Atlanta Youth Murders and the Politics of Race
Bernard Headley

December
ISBN 0-8093-2214-5 / cloth / $49.95s
320 pages / 6 X 9 / 14 b&w illustrations
The Elmer H. Johnson and Carol Holmes Johnson Series in Criminology
Criminology / American History / Sociology

Bernard Headley examines the political and racial elements surrounding a catastrophic period in the history of one of the Southıs most progressive cities.

Between the summer of 1979 and the spring of 1981, a killer terrorized Atlanta. Some thirty black youths, twenty-eight males and two females, were reported missing, and the bodies of twenty-nine murder victims were eventually found in and around the city. Atlanta appeared often on the nightly news, burning what came to be known as the "Atlanta tragedy" into the national consciousness.

The fury and fear steadily intensified as the death toll mounted and rumor raged. But the arrest, trial, and conviction of Wayne B. Williams for the murder of two adult males whose names had appeared on the special police task force of Atlantaıs missing and murdered brought an abrupt halt to this Atlanta story.

Examining the various law enforcement and legal details of the case, Headley does not seek to remake or refute the case against Williams; in fact, he ends up believing most of the state's case against this young black man. His objective is to put the interweaving and often conflicting details in historical perspective and, from a sociological point of view, to chronologically recall a set of events that were inextricably tied to a larger American dynamic.

Bernard Headley is a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. A former Senior Fulbright Scholar, Caribbean Regional Lecturing Program, he is the author of The Jamaican Crime Scene: A Perspective.

"Bernard Headley has produced a solid piece of work about an important historical event which has wider and more profound implications concerning race and class in the United States. . . . In my judgment, his explication of the roles of race and class in Atlanta (and by implication the United States) is exactly accurate."

—Richard Allen Morton, Clark Atlanta University