In so doing, the filmmakers, Marco Williams and Whitney Dow, black and white respectively, record the trial of Byrd's three killers, the reaction of the town's people, both black and white, and offer context and perspectives for the most visibly and horrifying racial killing since the height of the modern civil rights movement.

ABC's "Nightline" host Ted Koppel will present a live town hall meeting immediately following "Two Towns of Jasper."

Williams and Dow, two friends who attended high school and college together, decided to segregate the film crews based on race. Dow's white crew would interview whites; Williams' crew would film blacks. It was an inspired model. The reactions they illicit from the town of Jasper to the murder, to the trials and to each other are candid and heartbreaking.

While the death of James Byrd at the hands of John W. King, Lawrence Russell Brewer and Shawn Berry served as the focal point of the film, it is the seething tension that is deeply troubling to watch and hear.

For example, Dow's crew was able to film a small coffee klatch of middle-class whites known as the "Bubbas-in-Training-Club." In one scene, a member, incensed with the media's coverage, rambles on about how Byrd should be judged by the way he lived - less saint than sinner - rather than the way he died.

And these same people want Shawn Berry, the one killer who is from Jasper, to be judged by the content of his character rather than the act he is accused of committing. He was the one of the three not to receive the death penalty.

In contrast, the black citizens of Jasper are irritated that there is any focus on Byrd's life. This was a murder, but the victim is on trial. A not-guilty verdict would surely send a message that killing a black man was fine; a guilty verdict without a death sentence would mean that a black man's life had less worth. (On July 4, 2002, James Byrd's son, Ross, joined Martin Luther King III and other anti-death penalty activists in a fast and prayer vigil to spare John W. King's life.)

In a town that is 48 percent white and 44 percent black, the political and educational structures of Jasper are well integrated; it has a black mayor. However, the people of Jasper are, to borrow the wording of Booker T. Washington, as separate as the fingers of the hand.

It is this separation at the interpersonal level that is disheartening to watch, and the reason why we shouldn't be shocked by what we hear in "Two Towns of Jasper."

If there is one problem in the film, it is that people are allowed to say things that have no basis in fact. The sentencing of Byrd's killers was not the first time a white person had been convicted of murdering a black man. They may not be the first sentenced to death for killing a black man.

In his book "The Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America," Philip DŠ quotes Ida Wells, writing in the 1890s, that despite thousands of lynched blacks in America after the end of the Civil War, only three white men were executed for crimes against blacks.