In Texas, decades-old hate crime forgiven but never forgotten

JASPER, Texas — 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 truck 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 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 pro-

WILLIAM WIDMER/ THE NEW YORK TIMES Betty Boatner, left, and Thurman Byrd stand at the grave of their brother, James Byrd Jr., in the Jasper City Cemetery, in Jasper, Texas. The family of Byrd, a Texas man dragged to his death in 1998, is working to preserve the memory of a racially...