The Beating of Billy Ray Johnson
On a Saturday night three years ago, a mentally disabled black man from Linden was taken to a party filled with white kids half his age. A few hours later, he was dumped by the side of the road, bleeding and unconscious. But of all the crimes that were committed, none was worse than how the small East Texas town responded—and who were considered the victims.
Lee says: I’m heartbroken by this story. As a black mother who has children it breaks my heart that I have to teach my children about things to this nature. I have a child who attends school in the Linden ISD and each week he has a new story to come and tell me about something that has occured at school. He recently made a comment about how he felt as if one of the teachers at school didn’t like blacks. He stated that a group of white children were playing together on the playground and when the black kids went to join in the the play they were all made to stand in timout by one of the teachers. So racism is still alive and well. I was speaking about a personal experience that I had encountered once and was told by a white lady that she has never experienced any racial behavior while attending school and my response to her was "why would you". (May 1st, 2011 at 2:38pm)
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They turned off Old Dump Road, down County Road 1620, and unloaded him onto the road’s shoulder. From there, Colt drove to the car wash in Linden, where he cleaned blood and vomit out of the bed of his pickup. Panicked, Dallas drove to a friend’s house and woke him up to tell him what had happened; then he ran to the bathroom and got sick. Wes went to Corey’s house, and they decided to drive back to check on Billy Ray. He was still breathing, but they could see he was bleeding from his mouth. Almost two hours had passed since he had been knocked unconscious, and they wondered if he might be dying. Corey called the sheriff’s department on Wes’s cell phone. “There’s a black man out here on the side of the road,” he said. “He must have got drunk and fell out.”
THE INVESTIGATION DID NOT BEGIN in earnest until that Thursday morning, four days after the attack, when Lieutenant Copeland sat Corey down to ask him a few questions after he finished his shift at the jail. When Copeland asked him to describe what had happened early Sunday morning, Corey recounted what he had already told Deputy Elder—he and Wes had been riding around when they came across Billy Ray—and he expressed concern for the stranger’s welfare. “Do you know how he’s doing?” he asked, adding that he had called the hospital a few times to check on Billy Ray’s condition. (He did not tell Copeland that he had also visited the hospital with Wes and had made inquiries about Billy Ray at the front desk.) Their meeting ended with the investigator’s asking Corey to write a full report detailing what had occurred. Several hours later, Copeland received a call. “I need to talk to you about what we discussed this morning,” Corey said, and asked if Copeland would come by his house.
Corey had heard from someone at the sheriff’s department that he had been fingered as Billy Ray’s assailant, and when Copeland arrived, he was quick to try to set the record straight. Waiting on the porch with him were Wes and Colt, who let him do the talking. Billy Ray had in fact been assaulted, Corey told Copeland, and it was his friend Colt—whom he pointed to—who had done it. As the investigator listened, Colt then narrated his version of events: how he had been sitting alone by the bonfire, waiting for his friends to return from town, when a black man had approached him on foot from out of nowhere. The man had been physically aggressive and had advanced toward him, demanding that he turn off the country music he was playing. Colt had repeatedly asked him to leave, and when the stranger moved toward him again, Colt had knocked him out with one punch. Frightened, he had single-handedly loaded the man into his pickup, driven him into the woods, and left him by the side of the road. When he was finally able to track down Corey and Wes, he showed them where he had left the man, Colt said, and his friends had notified the sheriff’s department after he had gone home.
Colt’s account started to unravel as soon as Linden police investigator David Martinez began to interview other people who had attended the party, particularly Lacy Dorgan. (After Colt gave his statement, the case was turned over to the police department, since the pasture where the crime had taken place was located within the city limits.) As a fuller picture emerged of what had happened that night, Martinez voiced the opinion that Linden might have a hate crime on its hands. That, an officer at the sheriff’s department told me bitterly, “was like striking a match to dry brush.” Police chief Alton McWaters called in the FBI to investigate possible hate crimes and civil rights violations. The Associated Press picked up the story, and TV news trucks from Shreveport began rolling into town. The following week the Texarkana Gazette ran the first of four damning editorials. (“We were vilified,” one resident recalled.) Linden residents who braved the media did little to burnish the town’s image when they tried to downplay the crime, talking about the “good boys” involved who had been remiss only in letting things get “out of hand” and who deserved “a slap on the wrist.” Wilford Penny told the Chicago Tribune one month after stepping down as Linden’s mayor that the incident had been “an unfortunate and senseless thing” but that “the black boy was somewhere he shouldn’t have been.”
Billy Ray had regained consciousness on Wednesday, but the trauma to his head had resulted in permanent brain damage. (Having retained no memory of what had happened to him, he was unable to help investigators.) There was little dignity in his condition; he drooled and soiled himself, and his speech was severely impaired. When he tried to talk, his lips and tongue would not cooperate, and to all but a few family members who grew accustomed to the way he grunted his words, he was unintelligible. He had difficulty swallowing food and walking unassisted, and he often sat in his hospital bed and cried in frustration. After a month, when he still could not feed or dress himself, he was transferred to a nursing home in nearby Texarkana, where he gradually learned to walk again and recovered control of his bodily functions.
And yet, after Corey, Wes, Colt, and Dallas were each arrested and charged that October with aggravated assault (Lacy, who cooperated with investigators, was not charged), they were seen, by some, to be victims as well. “These boys’ names are ruined for life,” Corey’s mother, Martha Howell, later told one reporter. “And [Billy Ray] is better off today than he’s ever been in his life. He roamed the streets, the family never knew where he was. Now in the nursing home he’s got someone to take care of him.”
Sympathy for the four young men only deepened tensions. “She talked as if her son had done us a favor,” observed Lue. And the casual attitude about the harm done to Billy Ray was not limited to one defendant’s mother; among most whites, the crime seemed to provoke little outrage. “When this happened, the white community was quiet,” said the Reverend David Keener, of the Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church, where blacks have worshipped since 1843. “No one stepped forward and said, ‘This is wrong.’ What had happened was awful enough, but the silence was worse.” To blacks, who make up 20 percent of the town, the indifference was only the latest symptom of what many considered to be an Old South mind-set that permeated life in Linden, most plainly in a mural that had hung in the town’s post office since the late thirties called The Cotton Pickers, in which three dark-skinned, barefooted sharecroppers are depicted toiling in the fields. The image and its prominence in one of Linden’s most public buildings were telling, some said, since neither native sons Scott Joplin, the ragtime composer, nor T-Bone Walker, who introduced the electric guitar to the blues, had ever been memorialized. “Generations of blacks saw that mural every time they sent a letter or bought a stamp,” Benjamin Dennis, the president of the Greater Texarkana NAACP, told me. “And the message they took away from it was that they shouldn’t aspire to be anything greater than a cotton picker.”
But the criticism from outsiders struck a nerve. Residents did not want to endure more scrutiny or hear assessments of their town’s flawed race relations. Most of all, they worried that any stain on its reputation could scuttle chances of economic renewal. Linden, which lacks even a stoplight, is bleak. U.S. 59, which used to be the main thoroughfare through town, was rerouted around Linden in the fifties, and two decades later, a Wal-Mart opened in the nearby town of Atlanta. Now the courthouse square is deserted, even in the middle of the day, and handwritten signs that read “Closed due to illness” and “Back later” hang indefinitely in empty store windows. People must commute to find steady work, and so they punch the clock at the paper mill in Domino, the steel mill outside Lone Star, and the Army depot west of Texarkana. Civic leaders had hoped to bring in visitors by showcasing Linden’s rich musical heritage, using the Music City Texas Theater, a restored American Legion hall that had proved successful in booking big-name acts, as an anchor. (The Eagles’ Don Henley, who has played sold-out shows at the theater, also grew up in Linden.) But the bad publicity threatened all that, and many locals hoped that if they ignored what had happened, it would simply disappear.
When I visited Linden last fall, few white people would agree to speak to me about the case. Those who did were wary of being quoted, and few of them showed much sympathy for Billy Ray. Anger still ran deep, and not at the defendants; it was Billy Ray, somehow, who had brought this upon Linden. People told me he was “a street person,” “a drunk who wandered the streets,” “a homeless guy who danced for money,” “a known crackhead.” Never mentioned was the defendants’ own prodigious alcohol consumption. By his own admission, Dallas had drunk ten beers before arriving at the pasture party, and he knocked back eight or nine more once he was there. But he and his friends were “typical teenagers,” residents told me, and “good kids.” Billy Ray was not even mentally disabled, I was informed by the executive director of Linden’s Economic Development Organization, Russell Wright. “He cooked his brain on drugs,” he explained. To see things any other way was to see Linden in a very ugly light.
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