FLOWERY BRANCH, Ga. -- Sean Weatherspoon could have carried hatred in his heart. Instead, the Atlanta Falcons linebacker used a racially motivated murder in his hometown years ago to better understand how to break down racial barriers.
On June 7 of 1998, an African-American man named James Byrd Jr. was dragged from a truck along an asphalt road and killed by three white men -- two of them white supremacists -- in Jasper, Texas. One of the convicted murders, Lawrence Russell Brewer, was executed by lethal injection.
Weatherspoon was just a 10-year-old boy at the time, but he was old enough to understand the racial divide created by such a gruesome incident.