an African American family’s lawn. Striking down
the ordinance, the Court declared that the First
Amendment prohibited “viewpoint discrimination”
or punishment for the expression of offensive ideas.
The decision left a number of questions unan-
swered; in particular, it did not clearly distinguish
between offensive speech and threatening speech. A
decade later, inVirginia v. Black, the Court would
clarify that government has the authority to punish
persons for speech that is intended to intimidate or
threaten to harm other persons.
Instances of Hate Crimes Although hate crimes
represented less than half of one percent of the re-
ported crimes of the 1990’s, their aggregate num-
bers were nevertheless large. In 1996, the FBI re-
ported a total of 8,759 instances of hate crimes,
including 4,600 attacks against black victims, com-
pared with 1,445 attacks against whites. Among the
known offenders, 5,891 (or 66 percent) were white,
and 1,826 (or 20 percent) were black. The FBI also
reported 907 antigay crimes, including 757 crimes
against gay men and 150 crimes against lesbians.
The 1990’s saw many sensational hate crimes tar-
geted at blacks, including the 1991 beating of
Rodney King by police officers in Los Angeles. In
1997, two New York officers pleaded guilty to beat-
ing and using a police stick to sodomize Haitian im-
migrant Abner Louima. The most highly publicized
incident was the 1998 murder of James Byrd, Jr., in
Jasper, Texas, in which three white men chained
Byrd to their pickup truck and then dragged him
about three miles. As a result, Byrd was decapitated
and his limbs were scattered along the road. Al-
though Texas had no hate crime legislation, two of
the offenders were given the death penalty, while the
driver of the truck, who did not have any proven rac-
ist connections, was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Although minorities were victims in a majority of
hate crimes, whites were also victims. For three days
in 1991, the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brook-
lyn, New York, was the scene of anti-Jewish violence
after the driver of a Jewish leader accidentally struck
and killed a young African American boy. One
group of about twenty young black men attacked
and brutally murdered a Jewish university student,
Yankel Rosenbaum. The Los Angeles riots of 1992
erupted after a jury acquitted the police officers who
had beaten Rodney King. For the next two days,
many rioters targeted Korean businesses as well as
whites like Reginald Denny, a truck driver who was
beaten over the head with a fire extinguisher. More
than fifty persons died in the riots. The following
year, Jamaican immigrant Colin Ferguson boarded a
Long Island commuter train and opened fire, killing
six people and wounding nineteen. Police discov-
ered that Ferguson possessed antiwhite literature
and had written an explanatory note expressing hos-
tility toward whites, Asians, and “Uncle Tom blacks.”
Impact During the 1990’s, fewer instances of preju-
dice-motivated violence against minorities occurred
than in earlier periods of American history. Some
critics believe that a fixation on hate crimes pro-
moted alarmist and pessimistic perceptions about
social fragmentation, even resulting in a self-fulfill-
ing prophesy. Deciding whether a particular inci-
dent should be classified as a hate crime is a complex
matter of interpretation. Many crimes of rape, for
example, are thought to be motivated by animosity
toward women, but cases of rape are rarely classified
as hate crime. Criminologists and jurists disagree
about whether the prosecution of hate crimes re-
sulted in a decrease in such incidents. Without hate
crimes laws, of course, almost all bias-motivated of-
fenses would still be criminally prosecuted, and ju-
ries would usually have the option of considering
motivation as one of the aggravating or mitigating
factors for deciding the appropriate sentence.
Further Reading
Altschiller, Donald.Hate Crimes: A Reference Hand-
book. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 1999. A useful
guide to the relevant legislation, chronology, and
statistics, with annotated references to published
and Internet sources.
Jacobs, James, and Kimberly Potter.Hate Crimes:
Criminal Law and Identity Politics. New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1998. A balanced analysis
emphasizing that the notion of hate crimes
emerged because of the desire to give symbolic
support to historically disadvantaged groups.
Jenness, Valerie, and Ryken Grattet.Making Hate a
Crime: From Social Movement to Law Enforcement.
New York: Russell Sage, 2004. An insightful socio-
logical study with historical information about
the social forces that led to the criminalization of
hate crimes.
Levin, Jack, and Jack McDevitt.Hate Crimes: the Rising
Tide of Bigotr y and Bloodshed. New York: Plenum
Press, 1993. Pioneering study of hate-motivatedThe Nineties in America Hate crimes 407