Home › Exhibits and Resources › Exhibit list › Jasper, Texas
Jasper, Texas: The Healing of a Community in Crisis
The exhibit was organized by Dr. Ricardo Ainslie in collaboration with documentary photographer Sarah Wilson, and aided in part by a grant from Humanities Texas.
The project presents Jasper’s experience as a model for other communities while also facilitating healing in the town itself. Residents of the town praised the project for focusing attention on the strength of their community—a subject often overlooked when the eyes of an international audience were focused on the gruesome crime.
Exhibit
The exhibit offers images of the idyllic Huff Creek Road, its residents, and the church where Byrd’s battered body was discovered the next day by a six-year-old Marlon Forward and his stepfather. In directing viewers’ attention to Forward and other lives changed by the murder, the photographs suggest the extent to which James Byrd Jr.’s death was a communal tragedy for this small town in the Pine Timber Belt of East Texas. Other photographs layer the account of the murder with a narrative of how Jasper ministers used their relationships with each other and with their congregations to keep the incident from becoming a catalyst for more violence. The Ministerial Alliance, a group comprised of clergy from black and white Catholic and Protestant churches in the area, had been meeting together for years before it was called upon to respond to this tragedy.
Exhibit format
It features 28 framed silver gelatin prints and requires approximately 80 feet of linear wall space.
Supplemental Materials
- A booklet, The Road to Redemption. Jasper, Texas: The Healing of a Community in Crisis. Interviews and text by Dr. Ricardo Ainslie. Photographs by Sarah Wilson. One copy free with exhibit rental.