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

Temple-Raston, Dina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805066527 ISBN 13: 9780805066524

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 2002

Synopsis

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 Texas tells 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

About this title

Review

In the small town of Jasper, in the piney woods of deep East Texas, old slave relations still live below the surface along with an unwritten code of segregation. It was there that James Byrd was savagely dragged to death by three white men in a pickup. His death threatened to blow the town open. Dina Temple-Raston poignantly captures Jasper's desperate attempt to save its image as Jesse Jackson, the New Black Panthers, the KKK, and the media descended. In the process, she delves into such questions as, What does racism look like and where does it come from; follows the murderers to their final destination at Huntsville prison (ground zero for 40 percent of American executions); and shows how death forces people to see things the way they really are--and just how quickly they forget. A Death in Texas is a stunning and painful book that exposes racism in all its subtle and violent forms, and portrays the small heroes who try to change history. --Lesley Reed

About the Author

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0805066527
• ISBN 13: 9780805066524
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336