Long Dark Road: Bill King and Murder in Jasper, Texas

Psychological profiles of murderers tend to humanize the criminals, neglect the victims, and suggest that we are closer to the former than the latter. Ricardo Ainslie's Long Dark Road follows this formula. The murder of an unarmed black man by a group of white thugs, although tragic, is not surprising to historians of the American South or American race relations in general. But this murder captured the nation's attention not because of the crime itself, but because of the nature of the crime. After a chain was wrapped around his ankles and attached to the back of a pickup truck, James Byrd's body was dragged for over two miles. The man and boy who discovered Byrd near the front of an African American church at first thought the crumpled bundle along the road was the remains of a deer that had been hit by a driver the night before. Within twenty-four hours of the discovery of the body, local police, with the assistance of the FBI, had arrested three men and charged them with murder and committing a hate crime.

The Long Dark Road is not the story of these three men, nor is it a history of race relations in Jasper, or a case study of how the relationship between class, race, and poverty produce the societal ingredients that result in fear, racism, and violence. Rather, Ainslie, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, profiles the life and mind of only one of the three convicted killers, Bill King. Based upon twenty hours of interviews and three years of correspondence (the number and length of the letters is not revealed), Ainslie suggests a variety of reasons that might explain why King became a racist and murderer. For example, at the age of thirteen King discovered that he was adopted, and this news, according to Ainslie, dramatically altered King's perception of himself and resulted in a personality in need of much emotional support. Or, there is the issue that King was bipolar (although who diagnosed King and when this medical analysis was made is not clear), and he often did not take his medication. Then there is the fact that King spent only fourteen months out of prison between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three. And, while in jail, he joined the Confederate Knights of America, tattooed his body with various racist and satanic images, and became friends with one of the two other men who murdered Byrd. King also suggested that he had attempted suicide four times (although whether this pronouncement is true or not is difficult to determine). Thus, Ainslie's profile suggests that an alienated, insecure, medically unstable young man released his anger at himself and the world through the act of murder. Although Ainslie argues that King's life was aresult more of nurture than nature ("our collective failure" he writes on p. xii), he does not provide a comprehensive study of the community that produced King, nor does he provide a comparative study of the three men to explain King's actions more successfully. Most importantly, Ainslie failed to travel the long dark road of American racism to comprehend better why James Byrd's walk home in 1998 was as dangerous as a walk home taken by a black man in 1898.