Word: jaspers
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...more satisfying resolution than many blacks had dared expect. East Texas, with its dusty small towns and cotton fields, is more Dixie than Lone Star. And the South hasn't been a place where blacks always found justice in the courtroom. In towns like Jasper, not long ago, blacks--even black lawyers--were routinely called by their first name in court, often excluded as jurors, their testimony discounted again and again. Black life was so cheap that whites almost never got the death penalty for killing blacks. After Byrd's murder, King gloated to an accomplice that "we have made...
...from a party on a lonely stretch of Highway 96 and offered him a ride. They drove him to a deserted corner of the backwoods and, after a struggle, chained him to the truck by his ankles. Then they dragged him for three miles along a rural road outside Jasper. Byrd was alive for the first two miles, a pathologist testified at trial, and deliberately twisted his body from side to side, trying to keep his head from hitting the pavement. He may have been conscious at the time of his death, when his head was finally torn...
John King grew up among blacks and went to school with them. (The black jury foreman was a classmate at Jasper High School.) King's life took a bad turn after his junior year of high school, when he was arrested for burglary--along with Shawn Berry, one of the two men with him in the pickup last June. The two were sent to boot camp together. Upon release, however, King violated probation and was given an eight-year prison term in July...
During his time in jail, prosecutors say, King was making plans to form a Jasper chapter of the Confederate Knights of America, to be called the Texas Rebel Soldiers. Brewer was King's first recruit, the government says, and Berry was the second. William Matthew Hoover, a fellow inmate of King's and an Aryan Brotherhood member, testified that King may have been planning an initiation ritual for his new gang that included kidnapping a black man, driving him to the woods and killing him. "They have to take someone out," Hoover testified. "Blood in, blood out. You have...
...Jasper, which calls itself the Jewel of the Forest, is not a frozen-in-time, bigoted Southern town. Although it is 60% white, Mayor R.C. Horn and other influential political figures are black. But the killing had the potential to reopen a lot of wounds and set whites against blacks. That calm reigned is in significant part because of the Byrd family, which preached harmony and refused to blame the entire white community for the acts of three men. King's father, for his part, apologized to the Byrds for the murder. "Please pray for the Byrd family, who have...