Time hasn’t lessened memory of Byrd crime
20 years later, relatives of the man dragged to death in Jasper hope to prevent future horror
JASPER — Sometime after church but before dinner, Sgt. James Carter of the Jasper County Sheriff ’s Office knocked on the front door of James and Stella Byrd’s home. He stepped into the living room, removed his white cowboy hat and bowed his head. Then, with a somber look on his face that the Byrds still remember years later, he delivered the news that their son James Byrd Jr. was dead.
The horrific circumstances surrounding his death they would learn later: Chained by his ankles to a pickup by three men, he had been dragged 3 miles, murdered before the sun rose that Sunday morning 20 years ago.
“I just knew something was terribly wrong,” Betty Boatner, 63, one of Byrd’s younger sisters, whispered as she sat on a picnic bench at a memorial park now named in his honor. “It’s such a small town that we had already heard the rumors that a black man was found dead, but we didn’t know who it was. Until the knock on our door.”
The family forgave Byrd’s three killers long ago and made peace with Jasper, the small East Texas town where they have lived for three generations. But as the nation faces a spread in bias crime incidents, the family wants to ensure the public remembers one of the worst hate crimes of the 20th century. In the years since Byrd’s death, both state and federal hate crime laws bear his name.
As part of the 20th anniversary, the Byrd Foundation for Racial Healing has announced plans to open a museum in Jasper, 134 miles northeast of Houston, and digitize an anti-hate oral history project. Earlier this month, the foundation unveiled a memorial bench on the grounds
of the county courthouse where two of the three killers were prosecuted. The inscription reads: “Be The Change That You Want To See In The World.”
“It’s not just about remembering the painful details of our brother’s death,” said Louvon Harris, 60, another of Byrd’s sisters and president of the foundation. “It’s about keeping his memory alive so that this never happens again.”
That has become more challenging in a town almost a generation removed from the crime.
“It’s not something you promote, but we don’t want to forget it. We have the anniversaries and the park and bench that serves as reminders,” said Gary Gatlin, the town’s interim mayor, who was city attorney at the time Byrd was murdered. “If someone comes up to us and says, ‘Who is James Byrd Jr.?’ the answer is a guy who was tragically killed by mean, mean people. We don’t deny it.”
About 15 miles away, in neighboring Newton County, Billy Rowles was in his office the other day listening to Slim Harpo, his favorite swamp blues musician. He looked the part of the archetypal Southern sheriff, with his Wrangler jeans, Texas tie and cowboy hat. Rowles came out of retirement two years ago to run Newton’s force but admits that on every anniversary of Byrd’s death, June 7, he is transported back to the days when, as Jasper’s sheriff, he was in charge of investigating the grisly murder.
Rowles, 73, thinks about the crime that for a while, at least to the outside world, defined Jasper. He sees things this way: What happened on an old country road is a permanent scar that time is finally healing. “Do we ever get over something like that? No,” he said. “And we shouldn’t. But it finally doesn’t come up in conversations every day anymore.”
On that Saturday night, three white men were riding around Jasper. Byrd, who was black, was walking home after drinking with friends when the driver of the truck, Shawn Allen Berry, offered him a ride. At some point overnight, the three attacked him, spray painted his face, then used a logging chain to tie him to the rear bumper of the truck. They drove along Huff Creek Road, an isolated path lined thick with pine and sweet gum trees, for 3 miles as Byrd was helplessly flung side to side. His naked body — decapitated, dismembered, discarded — was found in front of a black cemetery just outside Jasper.
On a recent June afternoon, Rowles returned to the patch of asphalt where Byrd, 49 and a father of three, had been dumped. It has been 15 years since he’d been there.
“They killed him because he was black,” Rowles, who is white, said plainly, nodding his head to emphasize this truth was not negotiable. “This was the first time I heard the words ‘hate crime.’ ”
The police quickly arrested two avowed white supremacists, Lawrence Russell Brewer and John William King, along with Berry, known by many in the area because he managed the town’s only movie theater. Berry confessed, admitting to Rowles that the night had spiraled out of control.
Suddenly, Jasper, a timber town with a population of about 8,000 back then and almost evenly divided between white and black residents, was thrust into the spotlight and viewed nationally through the lens of Southern racial history. Some cast the town and the surrounding region as a den of hate. Others believed Jasper was its own kind of victim, unfairly judged for a crime that was randomly executed there.
In the days and weeks after the killing, the Byrd family called for calm, with its patriarch famously saying, “We are not hating; we are hurting.”
Jasper’s faith community — black and white ministers — worked together to ease racial tension. The Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson Jr. arrived. At one point, members of both the Ku Klux Klan and the New Black Panther Party rushed into town for protests. It was a spectacle built upon the fractured fault line of race.
“We thought this place was going to burn,” said the Rev. Ronald Foshage, pastor of St. Michael’s Catholic Church and three other small churches in the community, and a Byrd Foundation board member.
“It was a terrible, terrible time.”
What started as community conversations about an unfathomable murder grew into an unsparing examination of race relations and inequities in Jasper. The town removed an iron fence that had separated black and white graves in the cemetery where Byrd rests. His own grave is fenced after it was desecrated twice.
All three men in Byrd’s case were convicted of capital murder. Brewer and King were sentenced to death, and Berry was sentenced to life in prison. Harris, her sister Clara Byrd Taylor, and a niece witnessed Brewer’s execution in 2011. King, whose latest appeal was denied in February, remains on death row.