Word: byrds
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fractious in the three decades since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. led to the collapse of the biracial coalition that produced the civil rights gains of the 1960s. It is, in some ways, more difficult to root out than the blatant hatred that led to James Byrd's murder because those who suffer from it are not even aware of their affliction. It makes it more difficult for people of all races to build on past victories in the struggle for equality because we have to keep fighting the same debilitating battles over and over. Every time...
...South, wrote Faulkner, the past isn't dead; it's not even past. That must have seemed all too true when Byrd was buried last June--on the black side of the Jasper City Cemetery, still segregated in 1998. But the truth is that Jasper has progressed a great deal since pre-civil rights days, and Byrd's killing has moved things along even further. Shortly before jury selection, 75 blacks and whites met at the cemetery to cut down the wrought-iron fence that separated the two races even in death. "Give us the power and the strength through...
That small blow for equality could provide a final bit of redemption. If King is executed and returned to Jasper, he could spend eternity, alongside Byrd, in a place that his violent act helped make a little more free. As Walter Diggles noted last week, "It's almost like the Lord was saying we needed to let people see the evil that is out there in the country." And, he added sadly but proudly, "he wanted it to happen in a place that could handle...
...week full of alarming stories about racial prejudice, the most unsettling was not about the sickening details of how James Byrd Jr. was chained to a pickup truck and dragged to death--a crime that last week led a jury in Jasper, Texas, to impose the death penalty on one of his killers. Nor was the worst situation the continuing fury over the fatal police shooting in New York City of unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo or the equally infuriating police shooting of 19-year-old Tyisha Miller last December in Riverside, Calif...
There are any number of Americans who would make an exception for John William King, the feral white man who chained a black man, James Byrd Jr., to a pickup truck last year and dragged him along a rough country road that skinned him alive and dismembered him. To object to putting King to death for the deed requires a saintliness I do not possess. In one sense, King's case is almost a moral free ride. My conscience would remain untroubled by some other death sentences, but John William King's execution will seem especially just and fitting...