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Tuesday, June 16, 1998 By Tony Norman, Post-Gazette Columnist
How many times has this happened?
Last week, a black man was found all over Jasper, Texas, decapitated and missing an arm. James Byrd Jr.'s skid-charred torso greeted travelers along an East Texas road just as the sun was rising in a hazy Sunday morning sky.
How many Sabbath daydreams had he interrupted with his messy and very inconvenient death in East Texas? How many denials that anything was wrong died with him in that town of 8,000, a town "with no problems?"
As word spread through Jasper's segregated churches about a head and arm found in a ditch a mile from the body it entered the world with, people of good will shivered under the weight of a sickening deja vu.
James Byrd Jr., 49, was dragged two miles down the road sometime after midnight, his body thumping along paved and unpaved streets like a string of cans tied to the bumper of a newlywed's pickup truck.
That Byrd was the victim of a killing as ghastly as any lynching in the first half of this century was not in doubt, but, for a few hours at least, some in Jasper could avoid thinking about the ugliness and spiritual sickness that accompany a racial killing.
How many hairs stood on end when three young suspects, self-professed white supremacists, were arrested for the killing less than 48 hours later? One of the men, perhaps a little too enraptured with Poe, left a tell-tale clue in the wooded area where Byrd was beaten: a cigarette lighter with a Klan symbol emblazoned on it.
It's the sort of forensic slam dunk prosecutors pray for. After going through all the trouble of covering themselves with racist tattoos, Shawn Berry, 23, John King, 23 and Larry Brewer, 31, will have a hard time refuting the evidence amassed against them at trial.
Already investigators are suggesting a scenario straight out of a John Grisham novel: Byrd, who didn't have a car and thought nothing of walking from one side of town to the other, accepted a ride from the suspects after leaving his parents' home Saturday night.
Since Byrd and Berry shared a parole officer, the East Jasper native may have assumed he was among friends, or at least acquaintances who wouldn't lynch him at the first opportunity.
Berry is already fingering King as the instigator of the beating and murder, but no one in this trio of backwoods felons comes off as particularly enlightened, even by the standards of today's low-rent Ku Klux Klan.
Clearly, the suspects misunderstood the racial climate in Jasper. But has Jasper really come as far as it thinks it has?
The people of Texas have denounced the killers and embraced the family, showering the Byrds with testimonials about the slain man's worth to America in general and the community in particular. Too bad those who eulogized Byrd weren't around to help him find a job in his final years.
Apparently the powers that be thought so highly of Byrd that they sent a high level delegation to his funeral on Saturday to calm passions and assure the people that the rule of law was still in effect, even in East Texas.
Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, Clinton administration Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater and the Rev. Al Sharpton shared the pews with hundreds of other mourners, celebrities and political opportunists at a funeral paid for by the Chicago Bulls' Dennis Rodman, a peace and justice man from way back.
At the podium, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has yet to miss the funeral of a black man who made the front page of a newspaper by dying, sang out in the practiced cadences of a Southern preacher accustomed to trying to make sense of the evil in men's hearts.
How many dreams of brotherhood did Rev. Jackson reignite at that gathering of 800 mourners? How many people had their faith in mankind reestablished because of the right words at the right time?
I wonder how many folks of good will thought it was a damn shame that something as crude as a lynching could happen in their town in 1998, as they drove home to their separate parts of town.
How many times has this happened?
Tony Norman can be reached by email at tnorman@post-gazette.com
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