Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

The entire nation turned its eyes to Jasper, Texas, during the summer of 1998. James Byrd, Jr.'s horrific death at the hands of three white supremacist shocked us all. How could this happen in 1998, we asked ourselves? How could we live in a society where one is beaten, has his face spray painted black, and his dragged to his death behind the back of a pickup truck just because of the color of his skin?

Reporter Dina Temple-Raston has just written what I believe will become the definitive book on Byrd's murder and its aftermath. I'm not sure how an attractive woman reporter from the northeast, with no obvious ties to east Texas was able to capture the essence of our lives, but she did. And she did it brilliantly...with a few exceptions.

I have some problems with her geography and basic facts that a good editor should have caught: Houston is NOT the capitol of Texas (p. 39); Sulphur Springs is NOT in central Texas (p. 71)...it's in north east Texas between Dallas and Texarkana; it's located in HOPKINS county, not Delta County (p. 137); and Vidor is SOUTHWEST of Jasper, not northwest (p. 142). These errors will cost the author some credibility, but they don't take away from the essence of the story: Despite the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement, we have not put our racist past behind us.

We are lucky that Temple-Raston chose to pay more attention to her subject matter and to handle the characters swirling around in the plot with much more care than she paid to her geography. She details the lives of the three killers: Bill King; Russell Brewer; and Shawn Berry with great care. She is honest in her depiction of James Byrd, Jr. as an alcoholic who couldn't keep a job, drove his wife and children away, and even borrowed money from the preacher's elderly mother.

Temple-Raston saves her best writing, however, for Sheriff Billy Rowles. By all accounts, Rowles is the main reason Byrd's death did not rip the town of Jasper clean in two. Rowles pulled Jasper's leaders together and kept order as best he could. With much insight and greater human instinct than most law enforcement officers possess, Rowles used Great New Bethel Baptist Church preacher Kenneth Lyons, Deep East Texas Council of Governments Director Walter Diggles, Jasper Police Chief Harlon Alexander and Jasper County District Attorney Guy James Gray to keep the peace.

I read this book in one sitting. Being from east Texas and living through the segregated 50's and 60's, I am saddened that we're still fighting these racial battles today. I am heartened, however, because in the 50's and 60's, this story would have never been told outside Jasper county and the killers would have not faced the death penalty. At least, now the stories are being told and light is being shed on one of America's most difficult issues.

This book will be a best seller in Texas, guaranteed. It should be required reading for anyone involved in law enforcement and it should be mandatory for anyone who denies the problem of racism in our country.

Kudos to Temple-Raston. This is one of the year's best reads.

I typically would not write a review, but having grown up in Jasper I felt compelled to applaud the author for this book. Temple-Raston does an excellent job of capturing the underlying attitudes and perceptions that many people felt following this crime. She captures information from all sides, giving a true picture. History and other events are intertwined with the main storyline in just the right mixture, providing the reader the necessary background.

The only thing that may detract from the credibility of the story was some obvious mistakes in geographical references. The author and editors should have caught many of these. But these will go unnoticed by readers not familiar with the area.

Overall, Temple-Raston has taken this nationally covered event and presented it in a manner allowing everyone to understand the struggles that still exist today.

After the sensational news reports and the inflammatory speeches by those with no personal stake in Jasper have faded into the nearly forgotten past, this book provides a balanced and comprehensive review of the people, places, and events which put Jasper on the map. It was a quick and compelling read, the sort of book which will keep you up past your bedtime. But you come away from it feeling that you know and understand what happened in Jasper, something which the evening newscasts did not accomplish.

When I first heard about this book I didn't think I would want to read it. I thought I knew everything I wanted to know about the James Byrd murder. Then I started reading. This book is really about the state of race relations in this country and the subtle racism that still exists in our day to day lives. People may want to say this could only happen in an isolated town like Jasper, but it could happen anywhere. I expected to just dip into the book and then it sucked me in and I couldn't put it down. It is written like a novel and you end up rooting for characters and actually feeling like you've been to Jasper and the woods when you are done. I highly recommend this book. Even if you are a little reticent to start a book about a terrible murder, you won't be sorry you picked this one up. Five stars!

This should be read by all Americans. Racial hatred needs to be erased from our minds so it doesn't do to us what it did to these men. The book is ok - it would have been better had it not repeated itself over and over. I felt like I read the same book five times. Could have been much shorter.

If you thought you knew just about everything there was to know about this horrible crime then you are probably in for a rude awakening. To say that Dina Temple-Raston's research of this crime and the background information is thorough is a major understatement. If you read this book, you will come aways a virtual expert on this incident, and the major players involved. The book is so complete that I couldn't imagine another book coming along presenting anything new, unless it was an update after this book was published.

She begins her book simply enough with the discovery of James Byrd's body. You immediately get the feeling of a fuze being lit on a bomb as the word of mouth starts to carry through the entire community. She succinctly traces how the news is passed from citizen to citizen about the torn up body of a black man that has yet to be identified. After the initial discovery, collecting of evidence, and the eventual identification, she then begins to explore the mulitple paths and dimensions that are at first seem very unrelated, but are drawn together in a way that keeps you turning from one chapter to the next.

She explores the make-up of Jasper, and its history. Nothing is left out as she goes way back in the past almost to the beginnings of settlement, and explains how prominent families got their fame, how the lumbering industry helped the town grow, and how earlier racial conflicts affected this part of Texas and this town in particular.

Fading back to the present we go into the interesting backgrounds of the major players in this sad saga. Interviews, quotes, and background of the most important people are at the heart of this book: members of James Byrd's family, the Sheriff, the minister crucial in the black community, and the perpetrator's family members. However, an added plus are the interviews and perspectives of the seemingly not so important people: the owners of the cafe/inn across from the courthouse, a local journalist, former employers of the perpetrators, etc. It is incredible how she takes the various opinions and perspectives including the very extremes with the Klu Klux Klan, and the New Black Panthers, and yet still weaves them into this tragic story without missing a beat or unduly breaking up the flow of the important sequential events. The murder is followed right through the trials, and the reader is not lacking for any details or other information.

She ends her book not with the perpetrators, but appropriately in the community where it all started, and the future of the community - its children. We gain a sense of where the town might be headed from her by how she gives us a picture of the ways in which kids are dealing with this crime that threaten to divide the races even more. After reading this book with all its attention to detail, brute reality, humanism, and the strength of the good people pressing to rise beyond this tragedy which is felt so clearly, I cannot imagine this book being any better than it already is now.

Dian Temple-Raston waited until the furor died down a bit to examine the Texas town of Jaspar and how conditions there led to the brutal hate crime perpetrated against James Byrd. I worked for a newspaper in Little Rock, Arkansas a number of years back and never fully believed the myth of a new South. Racism and hate are alive and well in places like Jaspar, just as they are alive and well in places all over this country. By going in directions that took her off the well-marked path of the pack of reporters who descended on the town after Mr. Byrd was dragged to death by the back of a pickup truck, the author succeeds in getting at the essence of a small Southern town that remains a place of venom and poison for people of color or different sexual orientation -- even if the affront to liberty and choice are not acted out on a daily basis. She helps expose one of the great myths in America: that somehow racism and hatred are less of a problem today because laws have been passed and we like to think of ourselves as more tolerant and open than the generations that came before us. This is an important book, well researched and written and one that deserves a wide audience.

Naively, I expected "A Death in Texas" to be an indictment of a small Texas town that was thrust into the national spotlight as the unfortunate host of a hideous hate crime. Just the opposite, the book is about an event that changed the lives of everyone in Jasper, Texas, not only forcing a community to take a long hard look at itself, but pointing out that in trying times, unlikely heroes emerge. As the media and interest groups descended on Jasper in the summer of 1998, either bent on labeling the town as "racist" or using the tragic murder of James Byrd to hoist their own political agendas, the local sheriff and townspeople worked together to solve the crime, punish the guilty, and ultimately heal each other in the process. As expected, it will take years for Jasper to overcome this terrible tragedy, but one gets the hopeful feeling that Jasperites will somehow find a way to do it. Dina Temple-Raston has not only written a page-turner, but an important expose' on a town in crisis.

Frankly, I wondered whether there was any more I needed or wanted to know about this murder, but there was, and I was quickly hooked. This is a remarkably well reported and well written story, not just of the grisly murder itself but of all the complex events that led up to it and all the contradictory reactions that followed as the East Texas town where it took place tried to smooth over its racial divide and finally failed.

What drew me most were the characters, and though the author makes clear there's pure evil at work here, in her capable hands not one of the figures turns out to be the one-dimensional hero or villain I was expecting. Temple-Raston brings the hard-luck town of Jasper convincingly to life and puts the murder and the trials in a larger context that is fascinating. Best of all are the details and the surprises that come from what was obviously a lot of hard digging. Typical is a tiny scene that describes one of her first interviews, with the father of one of the killers, who was so wary of a reporter that he never got out of his car or took his foot off the brake pedal for 45 minutes, as he sat weeping and, against overwhelming evidence, insisting his son could not have done such a horrible thing. An extraordinary read.

Let me be frank. I have never heard of the town Jasper in Texas, or for that matter about the brutal racial murder that shook that town on June 7, 1998. The murder described is so shocking, so brutal that it is difficult for me to imagine it to be a true incident.

James Byrd Jr., an unassuming middleaged black man is found murdered. The murderers had apparently chained him to the bumper of a car & dragged him for more than three miles along a rough country road. Hours later the victims body is found in pieces with the flesh shorn off & the organs dismembered. The predominantly white Jasper community is shocked  a town that believed racism was a thing of past  a town that took pride in its peaceful enlightened outlook was suddenly in the heat of racial prejudices & disharmony. Evidence leads to three white men, Bill King, Shawn Berry & Russell Brewer. The three are charged with the murder.

From the initial investigation reports to the ultimate trial, A Death in Texas takes the reader through the life in the Jasper Community following this dastardly incident. Through the eyes of Sheriff Billy Rowles, author Dina TempleRaston paints a picture of a whole community coming to accept the truth  such as it is. Billy Rowles emerges as the true hero in this crisis. He kept in check the racial tension, & the growing tension between the Ku Klux Klan members & the Black Panthers in the aftermath of this heinous murder. The author also forcefully brings out the gritty determination of District Attorney Guy James Gray & the fight unto the last stand taken by defense attorney Joe Tonahill in describing the highly publicized trial.

Dina TempleRaston is a journalist & this is her first book based on her experience in covering the Byrd murder trial. The authors fictionalistic narration is effective in bringing home the true, harrowing & brutal effect the murder had on a whole town. The authors authoritative & detailed account without mincing words is impressive & praiseworthy.

The epilogue mentions that two of the accused are awaiting an execution date  & whatever be arguments for or against the death penalty  this is one of the rarest among the rare cases (the words used by famed Supreme Court Judge of India, Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer while confirming a death sentence in a murder trial) that truly deserves the death sentence.

To say that I enjoyed the book would not be correct, it is disturbing, enjoyably disturbing!