1998

James Byrd Jr., 49, was chained to the back of a pickup truck by three white men — John William King, Lawrence Russell Brewer, and Shawn Berry — and dragged nearly three miles along an asphalt road in Jasper, Texas until decapitated. King and Brewer had white supremacist tattoos. King and Brewer were sentenced to death; Berry received life. The murder prompted the eventual James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Act.

The CIA Inspector General's 1998 report (declassified) confirmed that CIA-backed Contras were involved in cocaine trafficking and that the agency had failed to report this to the DOJ as required. Gary Webb's 1996 Dark Alliance investigative series in the San Jose Mercury News had documented Ricky Ross, a Los Angeles crack dealer, receiving cocaine from Contra-connected suppliers. The CIA-connected cocaine contributed to the crack epidemic that devastated Black urban communities in the 1980s-90s and resulted in mass incarceration through racially disparate sentencing (100:1 crack-to-powder cocaine disparity). The mainstream press attacked Webb; he died by apparent suicide in 2004.

Tyisha Miller, 19, was shot 12 times by Riverside, California police officers after they broke into her car where she was unconscious from a seizure, with a gun in her lap. Officers fired 24 shots total; four officers fired into the vehicle. A grand jury declined to indict. The four shooting officers were eventually fired — not for the shooting but for making racist jokes about it afterward.

Following James Byrd Jr.'s murder, Texas civil rights advocates and Byrd's family pushed for hate crime legislation at state and federal levels. Texas Governor George W. Bush declined to sign a state hate crimes bill in 1999 citing existing law. The federal Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was not signed until 2009 by President Obama, over a decade after the murder.