Wes Ferguson

The ballad of Billy Ray

Whatever happened to Billy Ray Johnson? He used to be a familiar face around town: the middle-aged and mentally challenged black man who was always walking the back roads of Linden.

Morris Dees and Billy Ray Johnson
Morris Dees and Billy Ray Johnson

On a September night in 2003, he was picked up and driven to a pasture party where four young white men gave him beer and told him to dance. They laughed and called him a nigger. Then one of them beat Billy Ray into unconsciousness. Afterward, his body was dumped on the side of a country road.

Johnson nearly died.

The collective shoulder shrug of Linden’s residents drew national outrage. “Old South racism lives in Texas town,” read one headline in the Chicago Tribune.

High-powered civil rights lawyer Morris Dees took up Johnson’s case, and in April 2007, a civil jury awarded a $9 million verdict. “After the case was over, they sat in the jury box and talked about how it had changed the community and the whole region,” Dees said in a recent phone interview.

“They felt the attention brought on the case by the news media was making their town look bad, but when they saw the facts brought out, they showed the nation they weren’t racially biased or bigoted and they could do justice.”

With the trial’s conclusion, the media glare turned elsewhere, and life as usual returned to most of Linden’s 2,100 residents. But Johnson’s story didn’t end there. The fight for his money was only beginning.

Wes Ferguson

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