Texas Executes White Supremacist Who Killed James Byrd Jr. In Famous Hate Crime Case

In a historic win for hate crime laws, the state of Texas executed John William King, one of the killers in the brutal murder of James Byrd Jr. The execution took place on Wednesday, April 24 after the Supreme Court rejected King’s request to live.

The execution comes twenty years after Mr. King, among two other men, offered James Byrd Jr, a 49-year-old black man, a ride home with the most sinister of intentions. The men proceeded to beat up Byrd, spray paint his face, chain him to the back of their pickup truck and drag him for miles on a back road. Byrd, awake for almost the entire ordeal, died after hitting a culvert in the road and being decapitated. The men continued to drive for several more miles until eventually dumping what remained of his body in front of a black cemetery.

The unthinkable act of hate made mainstream news quickly and focused national attention on the dominance of white supremacist gangs and the dangers they create. The murder was strongly condemned by civil rights leader Jesse Jackson as well as the Martin Luther King Center.

The murder prompted an overhaul of Texas’ hate crime laws and led to the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, as well as opened the national conversation about the importance of hate crime legislation.

Byrd’s sister, Louvon Harris, stated before King’s death that it could never compare to the pain her brother went through. In a statement to The New York Times, Harris shared “He’s not going through any pain; he’s not chained and bound and dragged on a concrete road, swinging back and forth like a sack of potatoes… When you look at it at that angle, I don’t have sympathy.”

King’s execution is the first time in Texas history that a white man has been sentenced to death for the killing of a black person. This is quite the milestone, considering Texas has had hundreds of lynchings of people of color in the decades following the Reparations era.

Although the execution itself may be a victory, Harris claims that hate crime laws and justice for victims have a long way to go. “The last 21-years will never be given back to James Byrd Jr.,” she says, “and it does not eliminate the decades King lived hatefully...[This execution] doesn’t change the fact that hate still exists in society.”

By Annie Levy