By James Elam, IV and Shoshana Schiller On June 7, 1998, three men — two of them avowed white supremacists — lynched James Byrd, Jr., a Black man, in Jasper, Texas. After beating him, they brutally and barbarically killed James by dragging him 3½ miles behind their truck before dropping his body in front of an African American church. Just a few months later, in October 1998, Matthew Shepard, a gay college student, was beaten, tortured and left to die tied to a barbed-wire fence. The year before James and Matthew were murdered, legislation to expand and strengthen the existing...