It was one of the most horrifying and unforgettable events in this country’s recent history. In the pre-dawn hours of June 7, 1998, a black man named James Byrd Jr. was walking home from a party in Jasper Texas, when he was stopped by three white men. John William King, Lawrence Russell Brewer and Shawn Berry were cruising and drinking beer, and they offered Byrd a ride home. He got in the bed of their pickup truck, but they didn’t take him home. They drove him to a desolate, wooded road east of town, chained him to the back of the truck by his ankles, and dragged him for more than three miles along the road.