Word: byrds
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Byrd's murder was a heinous crime against a man and his family, but it was also something larger. Lynching is the iconic Old South crime, used to punish slave insurrections. Lynch mobs traditionally hanged their victim from a rope tossed over a tree limb. But dragging deaths were not uncommon, first from horses, later from cars and trucks. Lynching was at once a brutal act of vigilante injustice and a larger statement--a warning to blacks to remain subservient...
...blacks, Jews, Hispanics and a variety of "race traitors." White women who date blacks are "whores," he said, and they should "hang from the same tree as their black boyfriends." At Beto, King shared a cell with Lawrence Brewer Jr., the third man in the pickup truck the night Byrd was killed...
...prison in 1997, he got to work planning the Independence Day kickoff for his Texas Rebel Soldiers. He wanted something to call attention to the group, prosecutors say, and what he had in mind was a racial killing. As it turned out, opportunity--in the form of Byrd ambling along the highway--presented itself a few weeks before July 4. It seemed precisely the kind of dramatic action King had been working toward. King dragged his victim's severed torso through a black part of town and dumped it near a black church and cemetery. He wanted Byrd's death...
...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 endured unimaginable pain and loss," he said. At one point...
...days since Byrd's death, blacks and whites in Jasper have talked frankly about the killing and racial topics previously not discussed. "One man said he had a granddaughter who was half black," says Walter Diggles, the black executive director of the Deep East Texas Council of Governments. "He had had a hard time with that, but now he is accepting her." The sense of unity was difficult at first. At a city council meeting in August, Nancy Nicholson, a member who is white, recalls, "You wouldn't have believed how bad it was. The blacks were so angry...