Posted on 02/28/2002 4:59:00 AM PST by lonestar
When two lifelong friends from the northeast decided to make a documentary film on the Jasper dragging death of James Byrd Jr., they figured that using two separate crews - a white one and a black one - was an obvious choice.
Whitney Dow, a 40-year-old white filmmaker, and Marco Williams, a 45-year-old black filmmaker who teaches film at New York University, expected different responses from black and white residents.
They figured different crews would be the best way to get the candor they were wanting for their film, "Two Towns of Jasper."
In some ways, they got what they expected. In other ways, Jasper was a surprise.
"It was right from the very beginning we thought this would be an interesting way to approach this project," Dow said in a telephone interview from his New York office. "It was so obvious to us we thought someone else would have done it."
"Two towns of Jasper," a feature-length documentary, picks the minds of Jasper residents just after the June 7, 1998, Byrd murder.
Byrd, a black man, was chained to a pickup and dragged to death on a road outside the town. Three white men with ties to white supremacist groups were convicted. Two men were sentenced to death; one was sentenced to life in prison.
The film is expected to air this fall on a Public Broadcasting Service program called "P.O.V."
Dow and Williams filmed more than 200 hours of video from January to December 1999 for the project.
"The impetus was that it was such a shocking crime and such an upsetting crime, it sort of brought up a lot of issues of how this could happen in 1998," Dow said.
Using separate crews, the filmmakers were able to capture the societal contrasts they were wanting. They also discovered a few differing perspectives between each other.
"Every now and then we found ourselves looking across at each other and finding different viewpoints," Williams said. "I'm a black man with different experiences, and Whitney is a white man with different experiences."
When Dow went to Jasper for the first time to film the Ku Klux Klan demonstration at the courthouse, he admitted he had formed an image of what to expect.
"I had very preconceived notions," he said. "I expected a clich' town and a redneck sheriff. What I found there was very different. The sheriff and (district attorney) are far more enlightened than I imagined they would be. I was really impressed the way the law enforcement handled the Klan rally.
"It was a very complex town, as opposed to the popular image of a Southern town."
Williams, on the other hand, had lived in North Carolina. He said he already had a sense of Southern culture and its complexity. The first drive into Jasper from Houston on U.S. 190, though, was surreal, he said.
"It kind of felt like a scene from 'Mississippi Burning,' like I wasn't welcome," Williams said.
The film begins with Jasper County Sheriff Billy Rowles pointing out the road where Byrd was killed. Rowles stops his pickup and stands outside.
"I knew it was a black man that was dead, hoping that it was a black man who had killed him," he tells the camera. Then he looked to the ground and shook his head once. "But it didn't turn out that way."
The film looks at several community reactions during the three trials. At a beauty salon owned by black residents, employees and customers say that Jasper has a lot of "skeletons" in its closet.
A resident and white supremacist explains how black and white residents are better off separate (he softens his views by the end of the film).
The film shows a fence that separated the gravesites of blacks and whites. It later shows its removal.
It shows blacks and whites who were outraged by the crime. It also shows black and white children playing a game of pickup basketball.
In one of the more personal scenes, William King's father tries to understand what his son was involved in. He looks through old photo albums to find answers.
"Of course, a daddy always grabs at anything he can," Ronald King said as he sat on a front porch. "And it doesn't reduce Bill's culpability in the whole thing, but just the fact that he might not have been driving makes me feel a little better."
He paused.
"Daddies grab at anything."
Although the two filmmakers said there are some things they would have done differently, the final product was close to the lofty goal they had set out to achieve.
"You point the camera at a town or community, and there are lots of story lines and themes and issues and conflict that would make for their own film," Williams said. "The perfect movie is the product of finding a way of melding, synthesizing a black perspective and a white perspective. The consequences are that some perspectives will be left out."
The film was an official selection of the 2002 Sundance Film Festival Documentary Competition, which was held Jan. 10-20 in Utah, and is scheduled to be shown at upcoming film festivals, including South by Southwest in Austin.
By the end of the filming, Dow and Williams discovered that Jasper is not unlike any other small community in the United States.
"I think Jasper is like a lot of towns across the country that are trying to find common ground between each other," Dow said. "It is a metaphor for a lot of towns across the country."
And, ultimately, the Jasper that served as a microcosm for the nation advances more than a discussion on race.
"The film is about Jasper, but is not just about Jasper," Williams said. "In a country like ours, there are differences throughout. ... While we focused specifically on race in this film, you can substitute racism with any other "-ism" that has been known to divide people."
The "fence that separated gravesites of blacks and whites" had to be stood-up because it had fallen and been ignored for years; was put back up for the photo op.
The "beauty salon" owner, a black, who talks of "skeletons" in the closet, is a racist.
The black's admission that entering Jasper he felt, "...like I wasn't welcome," says more about him than Jasper.
"It was a very complex town, as opposed to the popular image of a Southern town."
Thank you Hollywood.
Only problem being no one will have heard of Jesse Dirkhising.
(Thank you ABCCBSNBCCNNNYTIMESWASHINGTONPOST)
But how many presidential letters went out to the family of Ken Tillery?
Who is Ken Tillery?
Tillery, approximately a month ago, walked down a Jasper, Texas, road. Three men offered him a ride. But the men kidnapped Tillery, driving him to a remote location. John Perazzo of FrontPageMagazine.com, describes what happened: "When the terrified Tillery jumped out of the vehicle and tried to flee, the kidnappers caught up with him, beat him and finally ran over him – dragging [emphasis added] him to his death beneath their car's undercarriage." How much coverage did the case get? An online search of 557 newspapers found that 22 covered the story.
Why the deafening silence? Well, Tillery is white, and the three suspects in the case – Darrell Gilbert, Blake Little and Anthony Holmes – are all black. No story.
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