But Judge Ralston, who oversees the county’s legislative and judicial branches, said he was troubled by the funeral home’s estimate that a pauper’s funeral would cost $3,376. He said he asked the funeral home owner, LeRoy Singleton, a former Hempstead mayor, specifically if the $250 charge for a hearse to carry the body from Singleton & Sons to the grave site was excessive when it cost only $175 to bring the remains from Houston, a much greater distance.

Judge Ralston said he most likely would have approved Mr. Singleton’s handling of the body had Mr. Singleton not insisted on a written guarantee that the county would pay the bill. That was not the county’s procedure, Judge Ralston said, and he was concerned about the cost of delay as well, because the Houston morgue was charging Waller County $45 a day to store the corpse.

So, Judge Ralston said, he assigned another justice of the peace to replace Judge Charleston’s order with one directing the body to be handled by the Canon Funeral Home, known as a white mortuary. Judge Ralston said Canon had told him that it would charge $2,950 for the same services as Singleton & Sons. Mr. Singleton did not return calls for comment.

That reassignment angered Judge Charleston as well as the Rev. Walter Pendleton, the black minister who was to have officiated at the burial. Mr. Pendleton issued a news release on Monday accusing Judge Ralston of thwarting the burial of a white person in a black cemetery.

Judge Ralston denied that he was biased, and insisted that until reading the news release he did not know the victim was white. He had assumed, he said, that she was black because her body was to have been handled by Mr. Singleton’s funeral home. Judge Ralston pointed out that he had not been troubled that in ordering the body handled by the Canon Funeral Home, he was, had his assumption been correct, effectively directing the integration of a white cemetery. And he questioned his critics’ motives.

“I think there are three or four people,” he said, “that are out looking for things all the time to try to identify some racial motivation.”

While Judge Charleston and others disagreed, Mayor Michael Wolfe of Hempstead, who is black, defended Judge Ralston as fair-minded and unbiased.