Word: jasper
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...macabre throwback to the '60s, a small southern town on Saturday becomes a flash point for America's unfinished conversation on race. The Ku Klux Klan is staging a rally outside the courthouse in Jasper, Texas, but the Klansmen face the unfamiliar experience of having their activities monitored by shotgun-wielding members of the New Black Panther Party, who plan to protect the town's black citizens. The Klan event is ostensibly intended to condemn the brutal murder of James Byrd, Jr. for which three men with white supremacist links have been charged...
...some citizens were not persuaded by the protestations of harmony. "How deep does this river run?" asked Herman Wright, an African American and the manager of a local sawmill. The remarks by Sheriff Rowles were greeted with hoots. In Jasper, people still wonder about the suicide a few years back of a popular black high school football player who dated a white girl. People ask, though without evidence, Did he really hang himself, or was he lynched? And just two weeks ago, a white youth was beaten up by black teens...
Everyone knows everyone else in Jasper. Byrd may have been invited to hitch a ride by one suspect, the truck's owner, Shawn Allen Berry, 23, with whom he shared a parole officer. (Byrd had served time for theft and forgery, Berry for burglary.) The Byrd and King families have been in Jasper for generations. A member of Byrd's extended family had worked as a babysitter for a relative of King's. And yet, if what Berry told police is accurate, his friend King was openly hostile to Byrd and, while beating him, allegedly said he was "starting...
...Kimler, a local attorney. "These are three guys who got mean, got drunk and saw an easy target." But a target for what kind of anger? History lies in wait in the woods that stretch 100 miles through East Texas to Louisiana, biding its time to strike. Towns like Jasper were the refuge for Confederate deserters who fled to the forests after the Civil War. The area became fertile ground for the Klan. "There is a predisposition, a culture over here in East Texas," says John Craig, co-author of Soldiers of God, a new book about America's white...
More worrisome is the fact that Christian Identity churches have begun springing up around Jasper, including one in nearby Burkeville. The ideology, which preaches that white people are the true Israelites, has moved in subtly. "They look for small autonomous country churches with no debt and a bank account," says Craig. "They fire the pastor, they get tax status and what looks like the Shady Grove Baptist Church; well, they are singing Amazing Grace and then saying Sieg Heil." Killing in the name of religious and racial purity is within the moral contract of Christian Identity, say experts. Authorities last...