We have known each other for twenty-five years. We attended the same high school, shared holidays and weddings, and at times even lived in each other's homes. Both of us went to similar northeastern colleges and ended up with similar careers as filmmakers in New York City. Our belief was that the bond of our shared histories trumped the fact that one of us is black and one of us is white. That all changed with the murder of James Byrd and began a five-year odyssey that has culminated with the film you are about to see.
When the news broke that three men from a small southeastern Texas town had chained a black man to the back of a truck and dragged him three miles to his death, we called each other and spoke about the murder. What happened confounded twenty-five years of friendship and all of our commonalities-we saw the murder in startlingly different lights. One of us, who is white, was outraged at the murder and expressed shock and disbelief that such a crime had taken place at the dawn of the 21st century. The other, who is black, was outraged but felt no special shock or surprise at either how or why James Byrd was killed. This fundamental difference in our reactions led us to conclude that making a film about the crime would provide an illuminating window on how race is lived in America.
In the three years it took us to complete Two Towns of Jasper, we did something that few friends or colleagues do: we interrogated race and race relations in America on a daily basis. In so doing, we discovered that despite our commonalities, we experience life in America in drastically different ways, solely due to our race.
Investigating and representing these differences in the form of a narrative that would speak to viewers of all races across the nation became our mission. We hope as you watch the film and work through the study guide, that you will think of Jasper not as a faraway place where a terrible crime occurred, but rather as a text for better understanding and improving your own community.
Whitney Dow and Marco Williams
Co-directors
Two Towns of Jasper