PARMA, Mo. — It was about a week after Tyus Byrd made history by being elected the first black mayor of this rural hamlet that things started getting weird.

Hours before her swearing-in last week, she got a call from a television reporter saying that four of Parma’s six police officers had quit. So had the town’s wastewater manager and clerk, who was supposed to administer the oath of office. Ms. Byrd, 40, wondered whether she would even be able to take office. The hamlet’s staff had been whittled to five from 11.

Adding to the intrigue was that the man whom Ms. Byrd defeated, Randall Ramsey, mayor for more than three and a half decades during two separate stints, offered a cryptic reason for the resignations: “safety concerns.”

No one quite knew what that meant at the time. When word of the resignations hit the news wires and then Twitter, people quickly filled the mysterious void with interpretations of their own. With the nation roiled in a post-Ferguson debate over law enforcement in minority communities, many Internet commenters wondered whether this was all about race. (All of the people who resigned are white.)