The Devil Deryl Dedmon

He’s in jail for a hate crime — but his black friends disagree. Tony Dokoupil reports

IT’S midnight in Brandon, Mississippi, home to what the FBI calls a gang of “racist thugs” as bad as any in southern America’s history.

I’ve apparently just met some of them at an all-night car wash, the “village square” in a town where wrecking and wiping-down your pick-up truck marks time as reliably as the calendar. Since last summer, when a local teenager, Deryl Dedmon, was accused of murdering a black man because of his skin colour, reporters have been regularly here and at the Sonic Drive-In next door.