Far too many poor Black communities struggle with gun violence and homicide. The result has been the unnatural contortion of Black families and the inter-generational perpetuation of social chaos and untimely death. Young people are repeatedly ripped away from life by violence, while many men are locked away in prisons. In neighborhoods like those of Wilmington, Delaware, residents routinely face the pressures of violence, death, and incarceration. Murder Town, USA is thus a timely ethnography with an innovative structure: the authors helped organize fifteen residents formerly involved with the streets and/or the criminal justice system to document the relationship between structural opportunity and experiences with violence in Wilmington's Eastside and Southbridge neighborhoods. 

Earlier scholars offered rich cultural analysis of violence in low-income Black communities, and yet this literature has mostly conceptualized violence through frameworks of personal responsibility or individual accountability. And even if acknowledging the pressure of structural inequality, most earlier researchers describe violence as the ultimate result of some moral failing, a propensity for crime, and the notion of helplessness. Instead, in Murder Town USA, Payne, Hitchens, and Chamber, along with their collaborative team of street ethnographers, instead offer a radical re-conceptualization of violence in low-income Black communities by describing the penchant for violence and involvement in crime overall to be a logical, "resilient" response to the perverse context of structural inequality.

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“Murder Town, USA covers essential terrain for sociologists and other social scientists to more aggressively venture into such that the complexities of contemporary African-American life can be more fully unpacked. The scholarship is sound and the writing is clear.”

"“Most debates about the urban gun violence epidemic exclude the voices of those who are most grievously impacted. By centering the experiences of street-identified residents of Wilmington, Delaware and situating them within their structural context, Murder Town, USA is required reading for anyone in search of solutions.”
 " - author of On Shifting Ground: Constructing Manhood on the Margins