Two Towns of Jasper

Project Lead

For the production of Two Towns of Jasper (2002), filmmaker Marco Williams traveled to Jasper, Texas, where a black man named James Byrd Jr. was brutally beaten and ultimately killed by three white men in 1998. He interviewed both black and white citizens of the town in an effort to understand what had led to this extreme act of violence. To ensure that participants on each side of the heated conflict would speak openly he hired two separate crews – an African American crew and a Caucasian crew.