Jasper
What happens to a town identified with one of the worst hate crimes in American history?
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AS NEWS OF THE DRAGGING made headlines around the world—"The Town That's Shamed America," screamed one British tabloid—Jasper's residents, both black and white, presented a united front to the outsiders who peered in. "We knew we had problems, but we wanted to settle them among ourselves, like a family would do," said beautician Unav Wade, who was, until recently, the only black business owner on Jasper's courthouse square. Blacks and whites joined together in prayer that Monday night, embraced one another on the street, and gave countless interviews to the national press, extolling the virtues of a town where, they insisted, there was racial harmony. Privately, they wondered. To blacks, the Byrd murder provided evidence of the bigotry that, despite decades of progress since the days of Jim Crow, still lay just beneath the surface. "Many of us looked at the white community in the days following the murder and thought, 'How widespread, how deep, does this hatred really go?'" said Walter Diggles, the executive director of the Deep East Texas Council of Governments, headquartered in Jasper. Many whites, seized by a sense of collective guilt, found themselves searching their own consciences. "We had to ask ourselves some hard questions," said Jasper Newsboy contributing editor Julie Webb. "Did we share culpability? Why did this particular crime happen in our town?"
Until the murder, Jasper had enjoyed a reputation for being more tolerant than its neighbors. As far back as 1909, authorities brought a black man to Jasper to forestall a lynching, after he was convicted in Beaumont of raping a white woman. The Jewel of the Forest, as Jasper is known, had at one time thrived off the timber industry, and it has always had more money and opportunity than the insular logging towns of the Piney Woods. With a population almost evenly divided between whites and blacks, Jasper has little in common with places like Evadale, the all-white stronghold at the southern end of the county, where rebel flags dot the landscape. At the time when Byrd was murdered, Jasper had a black mayor—the only black mayor, outside of Beaumont, anyone can recall ever holding office in this corner of East Texas. It had a biracial Ministerial Alliance, when other towns still had separate coalitions for their pastors. And its neighborhoods, while largely organized by race, overlapped with one another; since the railroad ran around Jasper, not through it, there had never been a natural dividing line between them. The fact that a black man had been dragged to death here—and not in Newton or Hemphill or Vidor, for that matter—seemed, to many Jasper residents, a cruel irony.
But the notion that Jasper had been idyllic was a wishful one. The civic introspection that followed the Byrd murder dredged up old history that some residents felt was best forgotten. As recently as the late sixties, the police had routinely beaten blacks, and white men who had come of age during that time recalled other acts of malice. "When I took a deep look inside my heart, I wasn't ashamed, but I wasn't pleased with what I found," said attorney Gray, who prosecuted all three defendants in the Byrd case. "I kept thinking back to one night when I was a freshman in high school, and I was riding around town with some older boys who were throwing water balloons at blacks. I remember police chief Alton Wright stopping us and asking, 'What're you boys doing?' One of the older kids told him, 'Throwing water balloons at niggers.' And Wright said, 'All right. You boys don't stay out too late.' I couldn't help thinking back on how casually Wright had given us his approval and how I'd thought that throwing water balloons at blacks was legitimate fun in 1968. When a crime happens that's this ugly, you've got to be honest and look inside your heart and not fool yourself. You've got to sit and think hard about what part you played in the whole mess."
For a genteel town steeped in Southern propriety, publicly owning up to a legacy of racism did not come easily. To spur discussion, Mayor R. C. Horn assembled a task force of community leaders to evaluate Jasper's race relations and lead a series of town meetings on the subject. "Search yourself. Examine yourself," he exhorted his constituents. Held in dozens of churches around town, each gathering began with a prayer for reconciliation and understanding. "It was very awkward and uncomfortable," said Diggles. "This had never been done before, with blacks and whites sitting down at a table together and talking about race. We had worked side by side for years, but we had never spoken about these issues aloud." The meetings, which functioned as "giant group-therapy sessions," recalled one participant, had whites owning up to using racist slurs and harboring old bigotries while also expressing their disgust over Byrd's murder. "People were willing to admit that they were prejudiced, and they said they wanted to change," said Father Ron Foshage, of St. Michael's Catholic Church. Blacks questioned why Jasper had no black bank tellers or black court clerks or black salesmen at the local car dealerships. They expressed their anger at the slow pace of progress and asked why the town swimming pool—which had been filled with concrete following integration—still remained closed after all these years.
Not everyone in Jasper welcomed the frank talk. When the task force surveyed school district employees about their feelings on race, the frustration of some boiled over onto the page. "Are we doing this because Jasper needs this or because of national pressure?" wrote one employee. "I resent being asked these questions!" noted another. Other comments reflected the exasperation people felt about living under the microscope: "I am tired of hearing about this!" "The media was responsible for blowing our incident way out of proportion." "I think these kinds of questions cause more trouble and unrest." Jasper's elected officials felt otherwise; the only way to heal the town's wounds, they argued, was to share in a dialogue. "People said, 'Just let it go,' but you can imagine blacks' fear and anger at that time," said Nancy Nicholson, who then served on the Jasper City Council. "They needed to know that we were willing to listen and to change." She remembered when, at one town meeting, the president of the school board recounted how he had been forced to walk in the street as a child because blacks were not allowed on the sidewalk. "These were the finest people, and I had no idea the depth of the pain they had experienced," Nicholson said. "I cried every time. Their stories seeped so deep into your spirit because of the inhumanity of the crime that had brought us together."
In the weeks following the murder, whites braced for violence, but it never came. "Everyone thought this town was going to burn," said Webb. But with Byrd's killers in police custody and with the influential Ministerial Alliance urging nonviolence, Jasper weathered what few other communities would have survived. When the Ku Klux Klan came to town to stir up trouble three weeks after the Byrd murder—protesting, ultimately without incident, opposite dozens of armed New Black Panthers on the courthouse square—residents held a prayer vigil and then followed the directives of their pastors and Sheriff Rowles: They stayed home. The Byrds, as they had done ever since news of the killing first broke, appealed for peace. "Let this horrendous violation of the sanctity of life not be a spark that ignites more hatred and retribution," read a statement issued by the family the day of the Klan rally. "Rather, let this be a wake-up call for America, for all Americans. Let it spark a cleansing fire of self-examination and reflection." Many people in Jasper credited the Byrds for keeping the peace that summer, when the murder did not trigger so much as a shouting match. "The Byrd family set the tone," said Nicholson. "Blacks had every right to take to the streets. They could have rioted and looted and shaken their fists in our faces, and they did not. They reached out to us in mercy. They saved this community."
Had all three capital murder trials not ended in convictions the following year, Jasper might not have been spared. Few blacks expected justice to be served, given what usually happened when black men were killed at the hands of whites. Not since 1854, when a white man murdered a farmer's most valued slave, had a white person in Texas been sentenced to death for killing a black man. Even convictions could be elusive; as recently as 1988, in neighboring Sabine County, Hemphill's chief of police and two sheriff's deputies were acquitted in the murder of a black man they had beaten to death in the town jail. (An appeals court later granted a new trial, and they were convicted by a jury in Tyler of civil rights violations; one conviction was subsequently overturned.) But in Jasper, Guy James Gray defied conventional wisdom and broke with the past when he won not only a conviction for Bill King in February 1999 but a death sentence as well. Seven months later, Russell Brewer received the same verdict, in Bryan. Shawn Berry—who asked to be tried in Jasper, where he was considered a polite, likable young man who did not hold racist views—received a life sentence that November. The verdicts sent a message, Gray believes, "to all white boys in East Texas that this kind of behavior won't stand. We won't look the other way any longer."
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