New battle opens Texas town's racial scars

Reporting from Jasper, Texas?

On June 11, just before the City Council fired this town's first African American police chief, the Rev. John D. Hardin addressed the packed council chambers, blacks sitting on one side, whites on the other.

Hardin, the 82-year-old pastor of the black Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church, paraphrased lyrics from an old song by Texas country legends Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, "Just to Satisfy You":

Somebody's gonna get hurt before we're through,

And don't be surprised

If that somebody is you.

It wasn't so much a warning as a plea for this East Texas logging town to avoid racial conflict.

But a battle was already underway, especially between two men: the police chief standing in the back and the white mayor sitting up front, preparing to oust him.

Both felt they were acting against racism. Both took the struggle personally. Fourteen years earlier, both had witnessed the aftermath of a hate crime that would long define their town. And both had hoped Jasper had moved beyond that awful time.

***

In the wee hours of June 7, 1998, three white men in a pickup traveling a road at the edge of town offered a ride to a black man headed home on foot.

Later that morning, the mangled remains of James Byrd Jr., 49, were found strewn along a 1 1/2-mile stretch of blacktop.

When Rodney Pearson, then a 32-year-old state trooper, first heard a report of body parts on Huff Creek Road, he figured somebody must have dug up a grave. Pearson recalls walking the road with Jasper County's sheriff, following a trail of blood to a discarded tool etched with the name of a local man, Shawn Berry.

Pearson, the first black highway patrolman in Jasper, got a cold, cold feeling.

A local reporter was also on the scene that day. Mike Lout, then 42, covered the story for KJAS, the radio station he ran out of his house. He was the first to report that Byrd had been alive when he was chained to the truck and dragged, and that the killing was racially motivated.

"That set the world on fire," Lout said.

Reporters flocked to the town of 8,000, followed by the KKK and the Black Panthers.

It didn't seem to matter that Jasperites, even James Byrd's mother, Stella "Mama" Byrd, insisted their town was a loving, peaceful place. It didn't seem to matter when the town buried Byrd and tore down the cemetery wall that had separated black and white graves.

Jasper, which bills itself as "the jewel of the forest," became fixed in the collective imagination as a bastion of racism.

In time, Berry, Lawrence Brewer and John King were convicted of Byrd's murder. Brewer was executed, King sent to death row and Berry sentenced to life.

Source: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-jasper-20120709,0,250716.story?track=rss

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