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JUSTICE IN JASPER | PAGE 1, 2, 3
The trial and the town's response to it defy almost all stereotyping -- as does the fact that Jasper's mayor, R.C. Horn, is black. The 110-year-old courthouse, with nine rows on each side in the viewers galley, reminded me more of a church than a courthouse. As in a wedding, the victim's family, all African-Americans, sat in the front pew on the left, while the perpetrator's father, aging and emphysema-suffering Ronald King, sat in the front on the right with the Rev. Ron Foushage, a white Catholic priest who has been counseling him. But the segregation stopped there. One of the Byrd family's primary supporters was Teresa Grimes, a white advocate from the group Crime Victims Assistance, who sat with the Byrds every day. With her arms around Grimes, Byrd's sister Mary Verrett said, "She is so concerned that she can read into whatever we need." The rest of the courthouse was also integrated, made up of roughly half white and half African-American town residents. The residents sat together, talking, trying to make sense of what has happened. Frequently they hugged each other. Of course, race relations in Jasper may not be as rosy as they seem. Ethel Parks, a black woman interviewed before the verdict, said, "Jasper has always been racist. What shocked us was that they would find a white man guilty of killing a black man. I never thought I'd see the day. And his getting the death penalty would be mind-blowing." It was King's venomous bigotry, and the horrendous way in which he and two ex-convict friends, who are yet to be tried, killed Byrd -- dragging him naked, conscious and in excruciating pain for three miles down a logging road, until a culvert ripped his head and shoulders off his body -- that seem to have unified the races. Maybe it took such naked evil to shake up Jasper's genteel small-town Southern racism, in which blacks and whites coexist but don't really cross paths; to place people not just in the same church but in the same pews, weeping, touching. And who knows how long it will last? Yet Renee Mullins, the victim's daughter, told me she had never encountered any racism in her 28 years in Jasper before her father's murder. And perhaps the most extraordinary display of interracial reconciliation came after Ronald King, who has consistently expressed his concern for the Byrd family, called them to ask if he could meet with them to share their sorrow. After he took the stand to ask the jury to spare his son's life, the meeting occurred. Each of the women in Byrd's family hugged the elder King, saying they did not blame him and prayed for him. The prosecutors -- who, like the defense team, are all white -- have vehemently denounced King's crimes as horrifically racist. Assistant District Attorney Pat Hardy described King's crime in language clearly meant to evoke a lynching: "Three robed riders came straight out of hell ... Instead of a rope, they used a chain, and instead of horses, they had a pick-up truck." For me, it was disconcerting and yet moving to hear their accents, ones I would characterize as "white cracker" -- an accent I associate with Southern small-town racism. N E X T+P A G E+| Why Jasper's blacks were reluctant to ask for the death penalty -- even for King |
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