Posted Date: June 11, 2008

Byrd Family, Town Observe 10 Anniversary of Dragging Death

By Gordon Jackson
Special to the NNPA from the Dallas Examiner

   JASPER, TEXAS (NNPA)—Last week, a small east Texas town remembered the gruesome murder of James Byrd Jr., one of the most shocking hate crimes in several decades.
    It was similar to the deaths of Emmitt Till in Money, Miss. in 1955; the three civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman who were killed in Philadelphia, Miss. in 1964; and the famous four little girls, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Denise McNair who were killed inside the bombed 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham one Sunday morning in 1963.
   “A lot of people are still scarred by what happened,” said Louvon Byrd Harris, one of James Byrd’s sisters and co-founder of the James Byrd Foundation for Racial Healing. “And there are some who would like to literally forget what happened. Through the years, we have basically kept it out to the public.”
    Harris said observing the 10th anniversary will determine how much the town of 8,000, located 110 miles northeast of Houston, may have healed, or progressed in terms of improving the racial climate.
“Sometimes we get lots of support, sometimes we don’t,” Harris said. “People want to just go on with their lives. As a family, we just cannot do that.”
   Former Jasper County Sheriff Billy Rowles admitted to some underlying racial issues in Jasper 10 years ago, but never felt that the crime was totally reflective of the city or county’s racial climate.
  “The race relations in Jasper have improved. I really didn’t think they were real bad before, until you start analyzing things,” said Rowles, now a practicing attorney. “I know a lot of the people here in the Jasper community took a second look at things when this event happened and made the adjustments necessary accordingly.”
   That included himself.
   “I didn’t think I had any problems with race whatsoever until this happened and, lo and behold, I was probably no different than a lot of people. I had to make a few adjustments. I did and a lot of the people here have.”
   That fateful night, June 7, 1998, forever changed history for Byrd, 49, who was walking home from a niece’s bridal shower when he accepted a ride from Shawn Allen Berry, Lawrence Russell Brewer, and John William King (whom Byrd already knew.) Instead of taking him home, the trio beat Byrd behind a store then tied one end of a chain around his waist, the other end to their pickup truck.
   Byrd was stripped naked and dragged for approximately three miles. When his body hit a sewage drain on the side of a road, it decapitated him. Eventually, more body parts would be dismembered from the dragging. King, Berry and Brewer took the remains of Byrd’s mutilated body and left it in the town’s black cemetery.
    The three men went on to attend a barbeque. They were later arrested.
By the morning, over 75 pieces of Byrd’s remains were found by police. With King and Berry being well known as White supremacists, the murder was ruled a hate crime.
    Harris, living in Houston, got the word that her brother was killed in an “accident.” Upon arriving in Jasper, she found out the horrid details of just how Byrd was murdered.
   “To hear that, I became numb and said you’ve got to be kidding me,” Harris recalled. “Something like this had not been done to a human being in this decade.”
   With the town being 48 percent white and 44 percent black, it was the kind of information that could have polarized and angered both groups to the point of sparking a full-scale race riot.
   “All they had to do was call for revenge—and there were people waiting for them to do that,” said Cherry Steinwender, founder of the Center for Healing Racism. “This county could have been totally burned down.”
I think that could have very well happened,” said Rowles, describing that emotions were very sensitive on all fronts.
   Rowles acted quickly to defuse the time bomb. He called a meeting of Jasper’s ministerial alliance, made up of both black and white ministers. And the type of privileged detailed information usually withheld during a homicide investigation was given to the ministers to keep them fully informed.
  “We did this early, stomping rumors and just trying to head off any potential problems that may arise,” Rowles said. “The ministers in this community kept their churches pretty much on top of things. It turns out that by doing this, our preachers had a large hand in maintaining peace and harmony in this community.
  “The Good Lord took over and kept our community calm.”
   Three separate trials for King, Berry and Brewer were held in 1999.
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