Death in Texas : A Story of Race, Murder, and a Small Town's Struggle for Redemption

by Temple-Raston, Dina

• ISBN13: 9780805066524
• ISBN10: 0805066527
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-01-06
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Summary

An extraordinary account of how a small Texas town struggled to come to grips with its racist past in the aftermath of the brutal murder of James Byrd, Jr. On June 7, 1998, a forty-nine-year-old black man named James Byrd, Jr., was chained to the bumper of a truck and dragged three miles down a country road by a trio of young white men. It didn't take long for the residents of Jasper, Texas, to learn about the murder or to worry that the name of their town would become the nation's shorthand for hate crimes. From the initial investigation through the trials and their aftermath,A Death in Texastells the story of the infamous Byrd murder as seen through the eyes of enlightened Sheriff Billy Rowles. What he sees is a community forced to confront not only a grisly crime but also antebellum traditions about race. Drawing on extensive interviews with key players, journalist Dina Temple-Raston introduces a remarkable cast of characters, from the baby-faced killer, Bill King, to Joe Tonahill, Jasper's white patriarch who can't understand the furor over the killing. There's also James Byrd, the hard-drinking victim with his own dark past; the prosecutor and defense attorneys; and Bill King's father, who is dying of a broken heart as he awaits his son's execution. Just as Bernard Lefkowitz pulled back the curtain on Glenridge, New Jersey, in his classic work Our Guys, Temple-Raston goes behind the scenes in Jasper, Texas, to tell the story of a town where racism and evil made itself at home

Author Biography

Dina Temple-Raston spent her early journalism career as a foreign correspondent in China and Hong Kong and was a longtime White House reporter for Bloomberg Business News. This is her first book. She lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Prologue	p. 1
Dante's Inferno	p. 11
Jasper, Texas	p. 29
'Ain't Nothing We Can Do"	p. 55
Young Men, Go Home	p. 69
Joe Tonahill's Texas	p. 97
Small Conspiracies	p. 113
Outsiders Come to Jasper	p. 135
Beneath the Surface	p. 153
Hook, Line, and Sinker	p. 177
Blood In, Blood Out	p. 189
"My Little Town Stood Up"	p. 211
Death Town, U.S.A.	p. 231
The More Things Change	p. 249
Epilogue	p. 267
Notes on Sources	p. 277
Acknowledgments	p. 301
Index	p. 305
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Death has a way of making even slow people hurry. It scares them into seeing things the way they are, instead of the way they wish them to be. Even small deaths people don't expect to notice, or welcome deaths, which end hard-luck lives or long, painful illnesses, sweep mourners backwards through rooms they have been avoiding for years. So when the black community in Jasper, Texas, awoke one Sunday morning to hear one of its own had been killed in some awful way on Huff Creek Road, the phones began to ring. Ladies who had come to church early, ahead of the Sunday services, abandoned the hymnals in messy stacks and began counting noses. They called relatives, and friends, and friends of friends to see if their men were home, safe, or whether it might be one of their kin dumped on the side of an old timber road.

It was a little after nine a.m. when Sheriff Billy Rowles received the call from the dispatcher about the body. His first thought was a routine hit-and-run-a commonplace accident on the unlit roads on the outskirts of town.

Deputy Joe Sterling, a baby-faced officer, had come on the line a little breathless.

"It's a bad one, Sheriff."

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Excerpted from A Death in Texas: A Story of Race, Murder and a Small Town's Struggle for Redemption by Dina Temple-Raston
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.