"Familiar Road"

"Did you hear about the old man who shot up the Holocaust Museum?"

"What about that man at the Holocaust Museum yesterday?"

"Dude, what's up with the old dude who shot the guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington?"

These were snippets of conversation I overheard today. On the 150 Metro bus. At Union Station. At the Cal State L.A. station platform. Young and old, black, white, Hispanic. Folks were talking.

Unfortunately, hatred is alive and well in these United States.

I listened to the talk of the deadly chain of events in Washington, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where white supremacist James von Brunn, 88, opened fire with a rifle. A museum guard, Stephen T. Johns, was killed in the attack. Johns, 39, was black. Listening the way I did, all the talk took me back... to about 11 years ago, when another hate-fueled incident occurred that had people talking.

James Byrd was tied/chained to the back of a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas, and dragged until his body was torn apart. Byrd, 49, was black. His three assailants were white. I, along with most others who learned about Byrd at the time, was horrified. Outraged. I wanted to do something. I had to.

So I pitched a story idea to my editor at the NAACP Crisis magazine, where I freelanced at the time, and about a week later I was in Texas, walking along the road where Byrd had been lynched. I counted the spray-painted circles on that road where authorities had found pieces of Byrd's body. Before I'd reached 30, tears were streaming down my face.

"I don't understand how the guy got a rifle into the museum in the first place."

"Me neither, homes. That was crazy!"

"Sick."

"Yeah, sick."

I've been to the Holocaust Museum, too. About a week after it opened back in '93. And before I got to the second floor that day, tears had filled my eyes.

Three thousand miles away and years after my trip to Texas, listening to the snippets of conversation about Wednesday's incident, I felt like crying again.

Onions and racism.