A Life For A Life

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ut this time the white person lost badly. The jury took only 2 1/2 hours to return the toughest verdict possible, capital murder. Jurors then listened to two days of penalty-phase testimony, which included a tearful plea for mercy from Ronald King. He arrived in court in a wheelchair, with an oxygen tube, needed because of his emphysema. Although some in the courtroom were visibly moved by this frail father's appeal, the jury unanimously voted for the death penalty. A critical factor, a juror said later, was that jail officials had recently found an 8-in. homemade knife in King's cell, and this indicated, the jury felt, that he was primed for more violence. Brewer and Berry, King's alleged accomplices, still face capital-murder charges of their own; their trial dates have not yet been set.

Whites joined blacks outside the courthouse to applaud the verdict. Some onlookers shouted "Bye-bye!" and "Rot in hell!" as King was led off to death row. "I hate to say people were happy, but they were," says Jasper Chamber of Commerce president Diane Domenech, who is white. "I feel like we stood together, black and white, and everyone's just as happy as the next one at what happened."

In the days since Byrd's death, blacks and whites in Jasper have talked frankly about the killing and racial topics previously not discussed. "One man said he had a granddaughter who was half black," says Walter Diggles, the black executive director of the Deep East Texas Council of Governments. "He had had a hard time with that, but now he is accepting her." The sense of unity was difficult at first. At a city council meeting in August, Nancy Nicholson, a member who is white, recalls, "You wouldn't have believed how bad it was. The blacks were so angry, and the whites didn't know what to do. But we've come a long way since then." "It's changed people," says Wade. "There is still subtle racism here. When a white person and a black person enter a store at the same time, usually the white person is served first. That sort of stuff goes on." But, she says, "Jasper is going to be much better because of what happened."

In fact, there is hearteningly widespread dismay over a white boy suspended from school five times in the past month for wearing a buckle with a symbol of the Confederate battle flag. Says Herman Wright, who is black and a former head of the school board: "I have never seen anything like this outright display by a student with deep, deep convictions about race."

In the South, wrote Faulkner, the past isn't dead; it's not even past. That must have seemed all too true when Byrd was buried last June--on the black side of the Jasper City Cemetery, still segregated in 1998. But the truth is that Jasper has progressed a great deal since pre-civil rights days, and Byrd's killing has moved things along even further. Shortly before jury selection, 75 blacks and whites met at the cemetery to cut down the wrought-iron fence that separated the two races even in death. "Give us the power and the strength through this rotten and broken fence to repair the fences in our own lives," prayed the Rev. Ron Foshage of St. Michael's Catholic Church.

That small blow for equality could provide a final bit of redemption. If King is executed and returned to Jasper, he could spend eternity, alongside Byrd, in a place that his violent act helped make a little more free. As Walter Diggles noted last week, "It's almost like the Lord was saying we needed to let people see the evil that is out there in the country." And, he added sadly but proudly, "he wanted it to happen in a place that could handle it."