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.

In 2009, Lout, an affable guy who favors Hawaiian shirts, was elected mayor. That same year Pearson, who has the clean-cut good lucks of a politician, became the first black chief of the town’s volunteer fire department. He had retired as a trooper three years earlier.

When the chief of the 26-member police department announced he was leaving last year, Pearson asked Lout for his support. With 21 years of experience as a trooper, Pearson considered himself qualified. Lout did not, favoring the department’s second-in-command, a captain who is white.

“All we can do is choose people based on their qualifications,” Lout said.

The mayor proposed that the city evaluate more than 20 candidates using standards developed by the Texas Police Chiefs Assn., including education and experience. Pearson scored below some others, in part because he didn’t have a bachelor’s degree. But neither did some past chiefs. Nor does the mayor.

In a town that is about 46% white, 44% black, the selection process soon took on racial overtones.

On April 21, 2011, the five-member City Council appointed Pearson chief over Lout’s objections — four black members in favor, one white against. (Lout did not vote — under city rules, the mayor can only vote to break a tie.)

Lance Caraway, a local gun shop owner, hopped on the KJAS Facebook page and hurled the N-word at Pearson’s supporters.

Efforts began to oust Pearson and the council members who backed him.

The wife of the police captain passed over for chief posted something on the KJAS Facebook page too:

“I think there is about to be a stink here in Jasper bigger than the Byrd ordeal.”

***

A recall, the first since Jasper incorporated in 1926, targeted three council members who voted for Pearson (the fourth retired before the election).

Recall organizers, including Caraway, claimed support from African Americans as well as whites, although it appeared that most people signing their petitions were white.

“Some blacks may have been reluctant to sign the petitions because they didn’t want their names exposed,” said Vickie Stewart, a recall organizer.

People started digging up uncomfortable facts about the mayor and chief: How Lout was arrested in 2010 for public intoxication at a local drive-in. (He paid a fine.) How Pearson had been arrested years earlier for writing bad checks. (He made restitution.)

The recall targets sued, alleging the effort violated the Voting Rights Act, but a federal judge allowed the balloting to proceed Nov. 7. Two council members were recalled. The one who survived was forced out by term limits in May.

The black community struck back, mounting a campaign to recall Lout. He survived the May 12 election, garnering 66% of 1,568 votes. The seats once held by the three black councilmen were won by whites, including the uncle of Shawn Berry, the man serving life for killing Byrd.

Meanwhile, Pearson, charging he was being undercut by city leaders and opponents within the department, filed a federal discrimination complaint. So did five white candidates for the chief’s position who said they were passed over unfairly (two later settled with the city) and white officers who argued Pearson had demoted them unfairly.

The 14th anniversary of Byrd’s murder arrived June 7 without mention in the Jasper Newsboy. Some readers wrote to thank the newspaper for not bringing it up.

Four days later the City Council considered Pearson’s fate and a bitter exchange unfolded between the police chief and mayor.

Lout, wearing one of his Hawaiian shirts, grilled the chief about not showing up at crime scenes, exceeding his budget, demoting opponents, taking too much vacation too soon and not knowing what was going on in his own department. Other council members chimed in, quizzing Pearson about allegedly working too few hours, failing to fix broken police equipment and other problems.

A stunned Pearson denied some allegations, while attempting to address others. He later said that he was surprised by the attacks and was not prepared to defend himself.

The council went into executive session, then emerged hours later to fire the chief.

Alton Scott, the lone black council member, cast the dissenting vote. Then he leaned into his microphone and said, “This is racism at its finest.”

After the meeting, Pearson drove up Main Street to the police station. By then, it was nearly 10 p.m. The mayor showed up to watch the chief pack up his office and turn in his badge.

***

Weeks later, black ministers organized a town hall at Light House Church of God in Christ, onetime headquarters of the failed campaign to recall Lout.

Pearson was advised by his lawyer not to go.

But the mayor did.

About 70 people, mostly black, sat on folding chairs surrounded by historic images of civil rights: Frederick Douglass, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaiming, “I have a dream.”

Hardin, who had pleaded for peace the night Pearson was fired, was among the first to speak.

“I’m still saying somebody’s going to get hurt before we’re through,” he said. “I hope today we’re through.”

Interim Police Chief Harlan Alexander, a former chief who emerged from retirement to run the department until a replacement is found, talked longingly about things returning to the way they used to be in Jasper. That prompted some of the black residents to ask what era that was — when they had to use the back door at restaurants?

The crowd began grilling the mayor. Why had he allowed people to post hateful messages on his radio station’s website? Why had he held Pearson to a different standard than white predecessors?

Lout, who said his father taught him that a man is remembered by the way he treats others, tried to address each concern calmly.

“You may say I disagreed with you,” he said, “But have I disrespected you?”

Tempers flared. One black pastor started shouting. Lout tried to respond, raising his voice to be heard.

Finally, the moderator announced the day’s final speaker, and the crowd fell silent as James Byrd Jr.’s sister came to the lectern wearing a bright pink T-shirt saying, “God has been good to me.”

Mama Byrd had been in the ground for two years, and it was up to her daughter to take up the mantle of peacemaker.

“It grieves me, y’all, we’re still stuck,” Betty Byrd Boatner said.

Boatner said she felt years of progress slipping away.

“What have we done?” she said, pounding the lectern, her voice desperate. “What have we done?”

The meeting closed with the mayor, black pastors and others singing “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand).” They snapped pictures and prayed together.

molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com