The state of hate: 10 years after Matthew Shepard

http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/washington/news.aspx?id=100781
Erica L. Green
10/14/2008

WASHINGTON--In the year following his death, Matthew Shepard's name evoked a gut-wrenching image of a bloodied young man hanging from a fence.

In the next five years, Shepard's name provoked community activists to fight the discrimination that killed the 21-year-old gay college student three days after two men took him to a remote location in Laramie, Wyo., pistol-whipped him and left him for dead.

A movement in Shepard's name has prompted changes. But his mother believes in the decade since her son's death there has been little real progress in the nation's attitude toward hate crimes.