Skip to main content Accessibility

Last defendant in Mississippi hate crime spree sentenced

For weeks in the spring of 2011, a caravan of white suburban teenagers and young adults would pile into a green Ford-250 pickup truck and another vehicle and go hunting for African Americans to harass and assault in the streets of Jackson, Miss., the state capital.

They attacked people with slingshots and beer bottles, fists and feet, sometimes shouting “White Power” as they sped away. The reign of terror culminated in the death of a 47-year-old black auto plant worker, James Anderson, who was badly beaten and then deliberately run over with the truck by his pursuers in the early morning hours of June 26, 2011.


James Anderson

Since then, 9 members of the group have been sent to prison after pleading guilty in the string of attacks and are serving terms that range from life for the driver of the pickup, Deryl Dedmon, to five years for one of the young women riding along.

On Friday, the 10th and last member of the group, Robert Henry Rice, 24, was sentenced in federal court in Jackson to 10 years behind bars for his role in the attacks that stretched from April 1 to the death of Anderson on June 26.

“These are thugs, that’s the only way to describe them,” U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate said at the sentencing on Friday, according to USA Today. “This defendant came to Jackson multiple times to enjoy this aspect of ‘fun’ that they were going to perpetuate on innocent African Americans.”

Rice, of Brandon, Miss., was not present during the killing of Anderson but he had participated in at least three earlier assaults on African Americans, USA Today reports.

Rice’s day of judgment came five months after he pleaded guilty in January to one count of violating the Matthew Shepard-James Byrd Jr., act, which carries a statutory maximum sentence of 10 years and a fine of $250,000.

“The hate crimes to which these defendants have pleaded guilty were as shocking as they were reprehensible – targeting innocent people for racially motivated acts of violence inflicted grievous harm and even claimed a life,” then Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement at the time. “This landmark case should send a clear message: that anyone who commits an act of bias-motivated violence, or who violates the civil rights to which all Americans are entitled, will be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.”

For weeks before Anderson was killed, the teenagers cruised the nighttime streets of Jackson, drinking beer and searching for African Americans to attack. They threw beer bottles and shot metal ball bearings out of moving vehicles at African American pedestrians. Near a golf course, they beat a man so badly that he begged for his life.

Then in the pre-dawn darkness of June 26, 2011 they came across Anderson in the parking lot of a motel. He appeared to be intoxicated, the perfect target. A couple of the young men took turns punching Anderson in the face. Then Dedmon deliberately ran him over with the pickup truck.

As the teens left the lot, one of them shouted “White Power.”

 

 

 

Comments or suggestions? Send them to HWeditor@splcenter.org. Have tips about the far right? Please email: source@splcenter.org. Have documents you want to share? Please visit: https://www.splcenter.org/submit-tip-intelligence-project. Follow us on Twitter @Hatewatch.