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For many years there were billboards on the highway coming into Jasper that read:

NIG#GER, DON’T LET THE SUN SET ON YOU IN VIDOR.

You lie...or are very confused. Vidor is near Beaumont on I-10. Jasper is 60 miles north of Beaumont.

Why would there be a sign in Jasper about Vidor.

I live in Jasper! I've never seen such a sign...ever!

BTW, Brewer was visiting Jasper that weekend and was the ring leader in this deal. The Jasper boys were much younger and went a long.

Several local blacks were witnesses for Shawn Berry because they had grown up playing with him and didn't consider him a racist.

King was a racist because he was raped in the pen by a gang of blacks.

The night the dragging took plac they were all drunk and doing drugs.

They rode around for a while, Byrd went along willingly...and this would not meet the criteria for a hate crime.

Vidor, on Interstate 10 a few miles west of the Louisiana border, was founded by the father of the movie director King Vidor. Its economy is largely dependent on jobs from the much bigger refinery towns Port Arthur and Beaumont. But until the early 1970’s it was known for being something else: a hotbed of Klan activity.

At least six competing branches of the Klan had bases here, including one that set up its headquarters and store on Main Street. A hand-lettered sign stood untouched near the entrance to the town for several years in the 1960’s: “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Set on You in Vidor.”

While there are still Klan sympathizers here, the official Klan apparatus has drifted away, people here say. The city canceled a 1982 Christmas parade after an outside Klan group said it would enter a float. But now Mr. DecQuir’s move has brought back the specter of Klan rallies, even as most of the participants came from out of town.

For instance, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, based in Waco, rallied in Vidor on Feb. 20, protesting the integration of the housing project as well as a recent subpoena served by the Texas Department of Human Rights that sought the Klan group’s membership records.

http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=105334

http://creditboards.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=221568
http://www.rtis.com/reg/bcs/pol/touchstone...il99/vidor.html

SHORT HISTORY OF NASTY VIDOR
by Danny L. Yeager

Jasper, TX, is the East Texas city where James Byrd was killed as he was dragged behind the truck of local racists. Jasper lies in a county directly to the north of Orange County, home of Vidor, TX.

In The Touchstone’s summer issue last year, Lara Kasper-Buckareff wrote on the Ku Klux Klan rally that occurred in College Station [The Touchstone, Vol. VIII, No. 3, Summer 1998]. In that article Lara presented some background on the Knights of the White Kamellia Ku Klux Klan headquartered in Vidor. Since then The Touchstone has gotten some letters from people who were upset [The Touchstone, Vol. VIII, No. 5, Nov./Dec. 1998, The Touchstone, Vol. IX, No. 1, Feb./Mar. 1999, The Touchstone, Vol. IX, No. 2, April/May 1999].

One was from a Vidor resident whose father is a Mexican who had lived in Vidor for a number of years. He claimed that his father had never feared for his life, had never been the victim of a hate crime, and had never been threatened by the KKK.

That may well be true for some, perhaps even all, of the few Hispanic-Americans who live in Vidor. According to the 1990 census, Vidor, a town of about 11,000 had 252 people of Hispanic origin. There were zero blacks. In fact, for over seventy years Vidor had no blacks at all. In the 1920s the last blacks were driven out of town by a number of terrorist incidents lead by the numerous Klan members in the town. This was racism tied to economics — the blacks owned the land and the whites wanted it. The whites in and around Vidor succeeded in getting the land through intimidation and terror.

Vidor is located approximately 10 miles from Beaumont across the Neches river. The river and nearby swamps made the logging town of Vidor an isolated and unpleasant place to live for much of its history. The surrounding thick forests provided some cover for secret meetings of the Klan. With improved transportation and the draining of some of the swamps, Vidor became a haven for Beaumont racists in the 1960’s and 70’s who were fleeing that city because of the inchoate civil rights struggle there, school desegregation and the rising power of the black minority.

The unpleasant living conditions in and around Vidor insured that only people from the lower economic classes would make the move. Vidor was known for two prominent hand painted signs on the outskirts of town. One read, “Niggers read this and run. If you can’t read, run anyway.” and another that simply said “Nigger don’t let the sun set on you in Vidor.”

In 1993 on orders from the Federal judiciary, integration was attempted. Four black families or individuals were relocated into the previously all-white HUD housing complex in Vidor. Within months all four were driven out after enduring many racial taunts, snubs from local white-owned businesses , and death threats — including “security patrols” around the town by the Klan in a refurbished Texas Department of Corrections bus. Within months all four had left. The last black person to leave was Bill Simpson. Simpson was murdered on the streets of Beaumont in 1993 on the day he moved out of Vidor. Some have said that the murder was retaliation and was arranged through the drug connections of some Texas racists and black Beaumont street gangs.

Vidor was dubbed “Texas most hate-filled town” by the December 1993 Texas Monthly. This is a moniker it appears that the city of Vidor justly deserves.

___________________________________________________________

In more than one case in Texas the Census lists a hundred or 150 Blacks living in a town - they are all servants. I have been in more than one town where there simply was no Black population. You didn’t see any in the stores, businesses, driving around after work, hanging out on the corner. The townspeople made a decision that they didn’t want any and that’s how it was. Nobody ever spoke out loud or wrote a ruling. It was quietly determined by the city fathers and that’s how life was.

____________________________________________________________I didn’t write this list. I doubt if they are still all white today. No, that’s not the term because there was Mexicans in the towns I knew of.
______________________________

Posted 13 December 2006 - 12:48 PM
here is a list of suspected sundown towns in Texas

Archer City
Big Spring <—— I lived in this one while a dependent at Webb AFB and believe me its as racist as you can get
Bowie
Comanche
Comanche County
Copperas Cove
Cumby
Cut and Shoot
Dallam County
De Leon
Glen Rose
Goldthwaite
Grand Saline
Hamilton County
Highland Park
Holliday
Iowa Park
Irving
Killeen
Kirvin
Montague County
Moulton
Paradise
Pasadena
Robert Lee
Santa Fe
Scurry County
Shamrock
Slocum
Sunnyvale
Throckmorton
Vidor
Wheeler County
White Deer
Whitesboro