HATE CRIME

Solidly reported by a Dallas-based journalist, the grim tale of the notorious 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr. and the ensuing legal and media drama.

When three young white men dragged African-American Byrd to his death behind a truck in Jasper, Texas, the case outraged America for its savage brutality and unmistakable similarity to past southern race murders. Authorities in Jasper, an East Texas community with a black mayor, a white sheriff, and generally harmonious race relations, quickly arrested three suspects. John William King, Lawrence Russell Brewer, and Shawn Allen Berry were known troublemakers, and the author, herself an African-American Texan, does a good job of tracing their backgrounds. King and Brewer had been strongly influenced by the white-supremacist culture in the state prison where they met; just as many 19th-century lynchings stemmed from sexual anxiety and rage linked to the South’s dysfunctional social dynamics, this account implies that King’s hatred of blacks was fueled by sexual abuse he had suffered while incarcerated. The hour-by-hour re-creation of the crime, its investigation, and the courtroom proceedings is also meticulous, showing overwhelmed local officials struggling to vindicate Jasper and see justice done under the glare of international press scrutiny. While the Byrd case recalled a type of crime that historically went unpunished, in this instance both the justice system and the wounded community responded with strong condemnation, comforting the afflicted and punishing those responsible. (King and Brewer received death sentences; Berry got life.) This makes for compelling reading, although the author’s reportorial skills are not matched by her prose. Repetition, clunky or florid sentences, and her disorienting habit of switching abruptly from past to present tense mar an important book that would have benefited from tighter editing.

Despite some stylistic shortcomings, a definitive account of the crime that came to represent much of what was both encouraging and discouraging about race relations in America at the end of the 20th century.