LITERATURE + LECTURES

Brazos presents an Author Appearance: Michael Berryhill - THE TRIALS OF EROY BROWN.

In April 1981, two white Texas prison officials died at the hands of a black inmate at the Ellis prison farm near Huntsville. Warden Wallace Pack and farm manager Billy Moore were the highest-ranking Texas prison officials ever to die in the line of duty. The warden was drowned face down in a ditch. The farm manager was shot once in the head with the warden's gun. The man who admitted to killing them, a burglar and robber named Eroy Brown, surrendered meekly, claiming self-defense.

In any other era of Texas prison history, Brown's fate would have seemed certain: execution. But in 1980, federal judge William Wayne Justice had issued a sweeping civil rights ruling in which he found that prison officials had systematically and often brutally violated the rights of Texas inmates. In the light of that landmark prison civil rights case, Ruiz v. Estelle, Brown had a chance of being believed.

THE TRIALS OF EROY BROWN, the first book devoted to Brown's astonishing defense, is based on trial documents, exhibits, and journalistic accounts of Brown's three trials, which ended in his acquittal. Michael Berryhill presents Brown's story in his own words, set against the backdrop of the chilling plantation mentality of Texas prisons. Brown's attorneys--Craig Washington, Bill Habern, and Tim Sloan--undertook heroic strategies to defend him, even when the state refused to pay their fees. THE TRIALS OF EROY BROWN tells a landmark story of prison civil rights and the collapse of Jim Crow justice in Texas.

Michael Berryhill is the chairman of the journalism department at Texas Southern University in Houston. He previously served on the faculty of the Jack J. Valenti School of Communication and has worked as a journalist for more than 25 years. His freelance work has appeared in the New York Times magazine, Harper’s, The New Republic, Vogue and Sports Illustrated. He has been a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Houston Press, fine arts editor for the Houston Chronicle, and editor of Houstonian Magazine and Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine. He also directed news and publications at Rice University.

In 1994 he was named Print Journalist of the Year by the Press Club of Houston. He has won state-wide and national recognition for his environmental writing, features and investigative reporting. He is particularly interested in teaching writing. Before becoming a journalist, he taught American literature and creative writing at Vassar College and was Fulbright junior lecturer in American studies in Lyon, France. His poems have been published in The New American Review, Paris Review and Western Humanities Review. He earned his A.B. in English at Kenyon College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in American studies at the University of Minnesota.