Dear
Bootney Lee Farnsworth
From what I read about the community of Vidor, they made every effort to represent their REAL community
after the Byrd dragging death and criminal proceedings painted them in such a negative, racist light.
The people there banded together for outreach to HEAL the wounds and DEMONSTRATE
that their community could not simply be "branded" collectively by the actions of the men responsible.
Do you think it is fair to the rest of the community that is NOT racist
to condemn their ENTIRE town and image as if that's how they are?
The people of Vidor did NOT want to be remembered or thought of this way.
That's NOT what defines their community which is VERY DIVERSE.
I tried to find the article where the community members were
doing outreach trying to defend their image in the media from
blaming everyone for being racist when their community is bigger than that.
Yes, there is history of racist segregation, but that's not everyone.
It's not fair to the rest of the community.
About - The Byrd Foundation
We kicked the ******* klan out several years before those Jasper racist, now-dead, executed motherfuckers murdered killed James Byrd. (1993 v. 1998) Jasper is 50 to 60 miles to the north, but I assume that the same ******* klan influence caused those now-dead, executed motherfuckers to be the murdering pieces of shit they became (may they NOT rest in peace).
To this day, (26 years later) the Vidor community still has to defend its image from the ******* klan stigma.
That IMPORTED klan stigma was the most aggravating thing about being from Vidor (or the Vidor area), and it has hung over Vidor since the time my great great grandmother was around (she died in 1933). The town remained a "sundown town" despite the entire community trying to work against it for the better part of a century. My grandmother was one of the first students to graduate from the first Vidor school (it was one school of K-12 before Vidor became an independent school district). She would tell me about community efforts to remove the outside influence of the ******* clan when she was young . My mother graduated from Vidor High School in 1964, and the community had been trying to desegregate for decades prior.
My mother and father purchased my great great grandmother's plot of land from my great aunt, and we lived in the same rural community in the piney woods north of the incorporated city limits of Vidor, near hundreds of my relatives until 1987, when my family moved away for my father's work. But, as a Vidor Independent School District student, I remember going to track meets and band competitions in the area where we Vidor students would go out of our way to speak to and interact with black kids from other schools from Beaumont and the surrounding area. It was almost like we all felt the need to overcompensate for the ******* klan's fake bullshit outside influence. Many in the community tried our best to remove the stigma and encourage desegregation, but those efforts would get fucked up by the ******* klan constantly demonstrating, marching, and driving around in their stupid klan school bus painted red and black, hanging their klan flags and the rebel battle flag out the windows along side the Texas and U.S. flags (as if they belong together).
Vidor was one of the ******* klan's last pieces of segregation, and they intended to keep it at all costs. This is why I KNOW that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was
nowhere NEAR the end of the struggle for equality for black folks. It took us
until 1993 (
almost 30 ******* years) to finally get Vidor desegregated.
It's important to understand the make-up of "Vidor" which is way more than just the incorporated city limits. "Vidor" also includes unincorporated communities of Rose City and my ancestral community of Pine Forest.
See Google Maps satalite image from earlier this year:
In fact, the Vidor Independent School District covers the largest area of any in Texas.
All the efforts to end their influence had fallen short because the separate, individual communities that make up "Vidor" are so spread out, disorganized, separated by large tracks of uninhabited pinewood forests, and the big one,
young people often moved away for college and job opportunities instead of staying and continuing to fight the influence.
Hundreds of my cousins and I--all college aged or early 30s who had grown up in Pine Forest--decided that we would
not leave the problem to the next generation, like so many had before. It wasn't just the churches who organized.
We came back in 1993 to stop the ******* klan. One of my cousins came all the way from California.
WE did it.
Where government was its usual, ineffective self, THE PEOPLE made the change.
So, no, it is NOT fair to the Vidor community to be labeled as racists. It was the 180 opposite.
It's another example of the actions of a few assholes ******* up everything up for everybody else. And GOVERNMENT being par for the course.
.
