Racial tensions flare anew in Jasper

The grave site of James Byrd Jr. is shown Thursday, June 5, 2008 in Jasper, Texas. Byrd was chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged to death down a country road 10 years ago in the early morning hours of June 7, 1998. less The grave site of James Byrd Jr. is shown Thursday, June 5, 2008 in Jasper, Texas. Byrd was chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged to death down a country road 10 years ago in the early morning hours ... more Photo: David J. Phillip, AP Photo: David J. Phillip, AP Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Racial tensions flare anew in Jasper 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

JASPER — For more than 100 years, a rickety iron fence separated the black graves from the white ones at a cemetery in this East Texas town. Months after the brutal murder here of James Byrd Jr., a black man chained to a pickup truck and dragged to death by three white men on June 7, 1998, the fence was torn down by residents as a sign of unity and reconciliation.

Fourteen years later, Jasper City Cemetery remains segregated: Blacks, including Byrd, are buried near the bottom of the hill, while whites are buried at the top.

“It's our custom, here in the South, here in Jasper,” said Albert Snell, 80, a retired teacher who is white and a member of the cemetery's board of directors. “We have the same cemetery, but we don't mix the white and the black graves. They're separate. Put a black up here? No, no, we wouldn't do that. That would be against our custom, against our way of doing things.”

In recent months, the perpetual, uncomfortable truce between the races in this Piney Woods town of 7,600 has ruptured, and the feuding has become increasingly public.

At the center of the controversy this time is not a vicious crime but a bitterly fought political feud over the hiring and firing of Jasper's first black police chief, Rodney Pearson. Pearson says he is preparing to sue. The Texas NAACP has asked the federal government to investigate. And former and current white officers who worked under Pearson have filed federal complaints of their own alleging racial discrimination.

Recall petitions

The battle dates from last year, when the majority-black, five-member City Council voted to appoint Pearson, first as the interim and then the permanent chief.

Pearson had been a longtime state trooper in the area and was a former Jasper volunteer fire chief. But Pearson's selection was opposed by a number of white residents, who believed the council passed over more qualified candidates, including Gerald Hall, a white police captain at the time and a veteran of the department.

A group calling itself the League of Concerned Citizens circulated petitions to recall three of the four black council members who voted to hire Pearson, accusing them of “incompetence, misconduct and malfeasance in office.” Hundreds of people signed the petitions, and it appeared that all of them were white, according to a ruling in a lawsuit filed in connection with the recall effort.

Two of the three council members were recalled in November. When the new City Council was elected in May, it became a 4-to-1 white majority. Recently, one of the council's first acts was to vote, 4-1, to fire Pearson at a public meeting after council members and Mayor Mike Lout, who is white, questioned Pearson about his handling of the Police Department. Alton Scott, the black councilman, opposed the move.

“The whole thing is racist,” Scott said of Pearson's firing. “It's based on race. It has nothing to do with qualifications.”

Lout, who in May retained his seat after surviving a recall election, did not respond to requests for comment.

White residents opposed to Pearson said their concerns had never been about race, but about his failure in his employment application to disclose bad checks he had written, including one that led to a 1990 misdemeanor arrest. They said Pearson and his supporters had unfairly labeled any criticism of him as racist, and that Jasper had had a long history of black leadership.

Three white council members — Mitch McMillon, Randy Sayers and Raymond Hopson —said their votes to fire Pearson stemmed from what they saw as his lackluster performance as police chief, and that firing him had nothing to do with race, though they believe the decision to hire him did.

“The chief of police needs to be someone of impeccable character, to demand the respect of his employees and officers and really the town,” said McMillon, who runs a senior center in town and who won a seat vacated by a recalled black council member. “Mr. Pearson didn't have that. The decision to hire Rodney was based solely on the color of his skin. That was a racially motivated decision. And I think our town reacted appropriately. They were recalled as a result of that.”

‘You get angry'

Lance Caraway, a white gun-shop owner who gathered signatures for the recall effort against the black council members, is one of the local businessmen who used a racial slur last year. “You get angry at a few people, sometimes you call names, right?” Caraway said. “It was a poor choice of words.”

Gary Bledsoe, president of the Texas NAACP, has asked the U.S. Justice Department to monitor race relations in Jasper and is preparing to request that authorities in Washington withhold federal financing to Jasper because of what he described as racial discrimination in the firing of Pearson. “Clearly he's been the victim of a lynch-mob mentality in the area,” Bledsoe said of Pearson.

While still police chief in April, Pearson filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against the city, alleging racial discrimination. “A nightmare,” Pearson said of his time as police chief. “I feel that I ran the department as best as I could with the support that I had.”

Hopson, a retired state trooper, said his family ties to Berry had no bearing on his decision to fire Pearson. “There's not a blood relationship nor a legal relationship between Shawn Berry and I,” he said. “He was part of our family when his mother was married to my brother. I personally knew Rodney for many years, and I liked him. It's strictly based on performance. It had nothing to do with race.”

At the cemetery, one fence, the one separating the white and black graves, came down in January 1999, but a different one went up years later. A cast-iron fence surrounds Byrd's grave. In 2004, two white teenagers desecrated the grave with racial slurs and knocked over the headstone.