Beneath The Surface

By Howard Chua-Eoan

The Ancient Greeks told of a mania that masquerades as clarity, one that demands tearing a human being limb from limb and scattering his or her remains to the winds to quench some dire compulsion for cosmic order. That kind of bacchanalia, bloody and bestial, did not perish with the age of Sophocles. The remains of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper County, East Texas, are testament to its endurance.

Byrd's body was found on the morning of June 7, torn apart as if some wild animal had set upon it. His torso was at the side of a country road. His head and an arm were just over a mile away, ripped from his body as it hit a concrete drainage culvert. Police marked a piece of flesh here, his dentures there, his keys somewhere else--75 red circles denoting body parts and belongings along a two-mile stretch of asphalt. Fingerprints were the only key to Byrd's identity. The night before, the 49-year-old African American, on the way home from a family reunion, had apparently hitched a ride on a truck with three white men. They drove him to a wooded area, where he was beaten, chained by his ankles to the pickup and dragged down the road for at least two miles, maybe three. His body fell to pieces. Among the remnants, someone had dropped a cigarette lighter with the Ku Klux Klan insignia.

Primal myth now intertwines with a modern one, that of the New South. In Jasper, which is 55% white and 45% black, the New South is embodied in a black mayor and a white sheriff, both of whom came swiftly forward to declare the attack an isolated, containable hate crime. "We have no Aryan Nation or K.K.K. in Jasper County," said Sheriff Billy Rowles. Mayor R.C. Horn reinforced the notion: "We don't show any animosity here. This town has been about loving each other. If it was different, I wouldn't be mayor." Residents of Jasper (pop. 7,500) loudly decried the murder; so did relatives of the suspects. Ronald King, whose son John William, 23, is in custody, wrote to a local TV station, "It hurts me deeply to know that a boy I raised... could find it in himself to take a life. The deed cannot be undone but I hope we can all find it in our hearts to go forward in peace and with love for all." Even the Imperial Wizard from the nearby town of Vidor sent condolences. The Klan, he wrote, had nothing to gain from the "senseless tragedy."

But 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 The Turner Diaries early," a reference to the antigovernment-conspiracy novel that is a must-read for white supremacists.

"Don't go reading far more into this than these guys deserve," says Rife 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 supremacists. "It does not express itself all the time, but it is rampant over here." An all-white militia group, he says, operates a 200-acre training facility in the county. Even Kimler acknowledges that "there is a lot of quiet support for the Klan."

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 week were checking if any of the three suspects had associated with the area Christian Identity churches.

The pedigree of prejudice often leads through prison. Berry and King served time on the same burglary charge. It was in prison that they met the third suspect, Lawrence Russell Brewer, 31. Says Bill Hale of the Texas Human Rights Commission: "If someone has a predisposition to racism, it will be reinforced in prison." King was involved in a racial disturbance between Anglo and Hispanic prisoners in 1995. The Houston Chronicle reported last week that he sent letters from prison proclaiming race hatred and allegiance to the Aryan Brotherhood, a white-supremacist gang founded in California's San Quentin State Prison in the 1960s. Texas prison officials declared that the tattoo found on Berry indicates membership in a white-supremacist organization. An ex-general of the Aryan Brotherhood sniffed that his group would never have recruited petty thieves like King, Berry and Brewer: "We recruit criminals."

But hatred does not need organization to destroy. "Ninety to 95% of hate crimes are not committed by hate groups," says Brian Levin, director of the Center on Hate and Extremism in Pomona, N.J. The local economy around Jasper is not good, and young white men there see minorities compete against them for jobs with what they perceive as unfair advantages, including affirmative action and other government programs. Many lumber mills and poultry-processing plants have recently turned to Hispanic workers, adding a new ingredient to the racial pot.

All that helps feed into what some authorities see as a decentralized, amorphous white-supremacy movement, drawing on what Levin calls the "elastic pool of disenfranchised white males who are susceptible to the message of the hate movement." He explains, "It's a do-your-own-thing franchise" that no longer needs the old Klan structure.

And what did all this mean on a night in June? "This was an opportunity crime," says Craig, as simple as finding a black man alone on a country road, as simple as having a chain in a truck to drag that man down that country road, as simple as cowardice buoyed by beer, as simple as a majority, a band of three against one. As simple as all that and yet as complex as horror.

When Byrd's sisters heard he had been killed, they thought he had been shot. Like ritualistic Fates, they went to his apartment to find his best clothes, to lay him out as splendidly as could be for one final viewing. Then the family learned what had happened. There was nothing of their brother left to see.

--Reported by Hilary Hylton/Austin

With reporting by Hilary Hylton/Austin