 | BACKGROUND INFORMATION On June 7, 1998, the most vicious racially motivated murder since the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till occurred in Jasper, Texas. James Byrd, an African American, was chained to a pick-up truck and dragged for three miles until his body disintegrated. Three white men from Jasper, with ties to white supremacist groups, were arrested and eventually convicted for the crime. A collaborative effort between a black and a white.filmmaker, Marco Williams and Whitney Dow, TWO TOWNS OF JASPER was a P.OV. special PBS broadcast on January 22, 2003. We launched our post-broadcast campaign through two widely viewed commerical television programs. On January 21, 2003, one day before the PBS POV broadcast, the filmmakers appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss TWO TOWNS OF JASPER and the outreach campaign. The evening of the 23rd, Nightline conducted a town hall meeting in Jasper, live on PBS and run again later the same evening on ABC, to discuss the film and the impact of James Byrd's murder on the community. Filmed from January to December 1999 during the trials of the three men accused of killing James Byrd, TWO TOWNS OF JASPER records the white and black residents of Jasper with two entirely separate, segregated crews. An all-white crew documented the white community while an all-black crew documented the black community. By filming within - as opposed to across - their respective races, the filmmakers achieved unique "insider" access into the Jasper community. The resulting- film allows viewers of all races to witness intimate moments typically unobservable to anyone outside of a closed community. |
