Hate Crimes

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obvious and clear-cut, the bigotry so blatant that it virtually hits you in the face. James Byrd Jr.’s death is America’s shame: another man tortured for no reason- other than the color of his skin. This essay will use the Byrd murder to explore the cause and effects of , and attempt to draw meaning from it so that a tragedy like this will not happen again.
In the early morning of June 7, 1998, a black man was walking down a road in Jasper, Texas. James Byrd Jr. had just left a niece’s bridal shower at his parents’ house, and was trying to hitch a ride home. Three men drove by and the owner of the vehicle, Shawn Berry, offered Byrd a lift in the back of the pickup. Byrd, handicapped in one leg, didn’t hesitate to accept the apparently kind gesture; little did he suspect his fate that was to follow. Angered, one of the passengers by the name of John King grabbed the wheel and drove to a dark deserted road outside of town. What happened thereafter undoubtedly has to be one of ...

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crime frequently carried out by young perpetrators operating together for the purpose of attacking the members of another group (Levin 16). The murder of James Byrd Jr. satisfies these characteristics, and unmistakably qualifies as a hate crime.
Byrd’s hometown of Jasper is a racially mixed town of 8,000 people located in a rural section of Texas; a Southern town with built in biases, but not racist. Despite of the nature of Byrd’s murder, you cannot stereotype a community because of the actions of a few. According to the Mayor of Jasper, there had been no unusual racial problems in the town in the past (Cropper A16). “The kind of racial problems we had here were the kinds of ...

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