Tyrant, Draw Thy Sword

The year was 2007, and conditions in Bello Gardens, one of the most squalid and dangerous housing projects in America, were at their worst. Decimated by poverty, tortured by crime, and suffocated by neglect, the slum known cynically as the Joke faced a lonely, unnoticed death. When its residents were displaced through a deal to sell the land to an overwhelmingly white Christian university, tensions in the community rose to a breaking point. Finally, a televised debate about the crisis led to a Congressman's unforgivable public slur, and a civil rights radical's shocking act of martyrdom. It was then that the last remaining inhabitants of Bello Gardens—desperate gang members turned remorseless freedom fighters—vowed not to give up its deserted streets without a battle to the death.

Tyrant, Draw Thy Sword is the oral history of the tactical siege of the Joke, told from a distance of two decades by both those who were there and those who have inadvertently distorted events they never knew first-hand. Over the course of the story, dozens of characters struggle to understand the December night when this country's troubled divide between cultures erupted in chaotic house-to-house warfare.