From The Files

      Ku Klux Klan Terrorists Active In Texas

      Jasper, Texas, July 11, (PANW)--Two of the three white men accused of dragging James Byrd Jr., a Black man, to death behind a pickup truck June 7 near Jasper Texas have been indicted on murder charges. The third is cooperating with the prosectuion in the lynching which has horrified the nation.

      There have been strenuous efforts to downplay the role of the Ku Klux Klan in fomenting racist violence in that part of east Texas including Jasper, itself, which is nearly half African-American.

      Jasper County Sheriff Billy Rowles, whose officers arrested three suspects in Byrd's lynching has repeatedly said, "We have no organized KKK or Aryan Brotherhood groups here in Jasper".

      But two of the suspects, John William King and Lawrence Russell Brewer are members of the Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist outfit they joined while serving prison terms.

      Their arms are tattooed with white supremacist emblems and a cigarette lighter with a Klan emblem belonging to King, was found at the scene of the crime.

      The Ku Klux Klan staged a demonstration in Jasper June 27, purportedly to deny they had any connection with Byrd's death. The rally quickly degenerated with Klan leaders hurling racist epithets and barely
      veiled incitements to racist violence.

      William Hale, director of the Texas Commission on Human Rights, himself the target of a Klan murder plot, charged that the Klan's June 27 rally was one of several Klan operations in Jasper over the past year. Hale told Newsday, "There are six active Klan groups operating in Texas and two have been particularly active in the Jasper area.

      "There are 3,000 to 5,000 card-carrying white supremacists in Texas, most of them in east Texas... Klansmen were openly passing out leaflets in Jasper during the last year trying to recruit members...They were very active".

      Civil rights groups cite a long train of lynchings and other racist abuses, including several murders of Black men by white police officers:

      -In 1990, the police chief of the east Texas town of Hemphill, Thomas Ladner, and two sheriff's deputies, Billy Ray Horton and James Hyden, were tried on charges of bludgeoning to death a Black prisoner in the Sabine County jail.

      The prisoner, Loyal Garner had been arrested on a drunk driving charge and requested a sobriety test. He was beaten to death instead. All three officers were convicted but Horton's conviction was later reversed.

      -In Cleveland, Texas, west of Jasper, Kenneth Simpson, a 30-year-old African American, was arrested in 1988 on charges of stealing a fountain pen.

      He, too, was beaten to death in jail by white officers. Half the local police force was suspended but later acquitted of murder charges and returned to work.

      -In Rusk County in northeast Texas, a 24-year-old Black motorist, Troy Lee Sterling was shot to death in 1987 by a white trooper who had pulled him over.

      -A grand jury returned no indictment but Sterling's family has filed a civil rights lawsuit which is still pending 11 years later.

      -In Newton, near Jasper, sheriff's officers were accused in the 1970's of covering up the murder of a young Black man named Anthony Peacock. His family charged that Peacock had been hanged and castrated for dating a white woman. The Sheriff office claims he was killed by a hit-and-run driver.

      When Black families attempted to move into the all-white town of Vidor, south of Jasper, three years ago, Klansmen terrorized them with death threats. Hale and his Human Rights Commission, which has powers to prosecute, brought several Klansmen to trial in 1995. A witness told the court of one incident in which three hooded Klansmen showed
      up at a Black Woman's newly rented apartment in Vidor and told her, "Get your Black babies out of here or else".

      The Klan retaliated by attempting to murder Hale and Texas Attorney General Dan Morales, who was also investigating the Klan's incitements in Vidor. Police arrested a parolee who had been hired by the Klan to carry out the murder and he was returned to prison.

      Hale charged that the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia KKK are the most active in east Texas. Charles Lee, head of the Knights of the White Camelia KKK, argues that there is such a thing as "positive violence".

      He was among the Klansmen tried in 1981 on charges of intimidating Vietnamese fishermen in Galveston Bay. The court later ordered Lee to shut down Klan paramilitary schools that offered weapons training in east Texas.

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