On June 6, 1998, James Byrd Jr., a forty-nine-year-old black man, was hitchhiking in Jasper, Texas, when three white men in a pickup truck offered him a ride. According to one of the men in the pickup, they drove to an isolated area where Byrd was beaten, then chained by his ankles to the back of the truck and dragged for over two miles on an asphalt road. Parts of his body were later found scattered along the road for over a mile. Three ex-convicts with suspected ties to white supremacist groups—Lawrence Brewer, Shawn Berry, and John King—were arrested and charged with Byrd’s murder.

Nearly everyone familiar with Byrd’s case, from the Texas Ku Klux Klan faction Knights of the White Kamellia (KWK) to the FBI, agrees that his murder was a hate crime...