Fired Jasper Police Chief at the Center of a Divide

JASPER, Texas — Three weeks after Rodney Pearson became Jasper County’s first black state highway patrolman, he responded to a call from the Jasper Country Club. As he pulled up to the clubhouse, his partner told him to wait.

“‘You can’t go in here,’” Pearson said his partner told him. “‘Just sit in the car.’”

Only whites were allowed inside. It was 1992.

Despite that jarring first impression, Pearson said there was not a pattern of racism in the town where he would raise his children. That changed nearly two decades later, he said, when he became the first black police chief in the city of Jasper.

Last week, after 16 months in office, Pearson was fired by a newly elected city council that said he was never qualified to hold the job. His dismissal has touched off a feud that has dredged up bitter memories of the town’s not-so-distant past. Pearson is also connected to that chapter in Jasper’s history.

On a Sunday morning in June 1998, Pearson said, he responded to a call about a body found outside a black church on Huff Creek Road. When he arrived, he found a man’s mangled limbs and torso. What he did not know as he and the sheriff followed drag marks nearly two miles down the asphalt road was that a crime scene was unfolding before him that would bring the world’s attention to Jasper.

The trail he followed was made of human flesh and blood, and it led to James Byrd Jr.’s severed head and shoulder. Suddenly the town was no longer known as the “Jewel of the Forest” but for the black man who was dragged through the piney woods in its backyard.

Three men were prosecuted for Byrd’s murder. Three East Texas juries — two made up of Jasper citizens — delivered the death penalty to two of the men and a life sentence to the third.

In the years that followed, residents worked to heal the racial divide that the crime created. Pearson said he was invited to join the country club that he once could not enter. Town leaders ceremoniously pulled down a fence that divided whites and blacks in the town cemetery.

Despite his role in the unraveling of the Byrd case, Pearson said he did not get involved in the reconciliation efforts. He said he felt it was not his battle to fight at the time.

“I didn’t grow up here,” Pearson said. “A lot of the history that I’m learning about Jasper, I’m learning about now.”

That is because, for many blacks in the community,  Pearson has become a reluctant symbol of how little race relations have changed since Byrd’s death.

The cemetery fence has come down, said Rodney Norsworthy, a pastor at Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church, but the racial divide it represented has not gone away.

“It was there on Monday night at city hall,” Norsworthy said, referring to how white City Council members publicly interrogated Pearson before they fired him.

In 2006, Pearson left the Texas Department of Public Safety to go into the private sector, to work for a company that sold fire trucks and equipment. He remained active in Jasper’s civic life, becoming the town’s volunteer fire chief in 2009.

He and his wife, Sandy, enjoyed the small town where, even as an interracial couple, they encountered “zero trouble” with racial tensions. Pearson, who is white, said she would defend the town when outsiders brought up the stigma it has faced since Byrd’s killing.

Pearson said she now feels different. “I never realized in my life that people could have so much hate,” she said, “People are just eat up with hate.”

As residents organized to recall the City Council members who had appointed Pearson, the rhetoric took a nasty turn. One image that made the rounds online was a Photoshopped Trojan condom advertisement. Pearson’s headshot appeared between pictures of President Obama and Michelle Obama and two black Jasper City Council members. Underneath it said: “Could things have turned out better ... had their parents listened ????”