Chicago Tribune senior correspondent Howard Witt has returned to Linden and Paris, Texas, as well as Jena, Louisiana to discover whether the fundamental racial dynamics of the towns were alterned in any meaningful way after the TV cameras departed and the headlines faded away. Click here for Witt's extensive story. Some highlights from Witt's Chicago Tribune article: Plotted on a map, the towns of Paris, Linden and Jena line up neatly along a 300-mile diagonal that falls across the Texas-Louisiana border. But to many African-Americans, that line looks more like a gash across the beneficent face that the New South tries to present to the rest of the nation. In many ways, Linden no longer resembles the starkly divided town where many white residents once closed ranks around the four white youths who in 2003 assaulted a mentally retarded black man and dropped him beside a garbage dump, unconscious and bleeding in his brain. Instead, many here say that over the last year a new spirit of interracial cooperation has infused the town of nearly 2,300 people, 78 percent of whom are white and 20 percent black. Little has changed in Paris in the nine ...
