The Jasper City Council on Monday night dismissed Chief Rodney Pearson.

Jasper, Texas is known for troubled history when it comes to race. In 1999, the town’s first black highway patrolman, Rodney Pearson, was on the scene when a black man James Byrd Jr., was dragged to death by three white supremacists. A little more than a decade later Pearson was elected as Jasper’s first black police chief. The racism he witnessed more than 10 years earlier in Jasper, Texas is still very much alive today. AOL has the rest of the story.

On a June morning in 1998, Rodney Pearson, the first black highway patrolman in Jasper, Texas, got a call. He walked along a mile and half of drag marks, skin and blood, and found the spot in the woods where three white supremacists had wrapped a logging chain around James Byrd Jr.’s ankles, hooked it to a pickup truck and dragged the 49-year-old black man to death along an asphalt road.

Thirteen years later, Jasper’s city council named Pearson (pictured at left) as its first black police chief. The town has changed a lot since Byrd’s murder, and Pearson’s election could have symbolized the Texas town finally overcoming its ugly past. But instead it’s ripped the city apart, right down the color line.

“East Texas is really a part of the country that the civil rights movement missed,” said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, referring to racial tensions there. He notes that in a triumphant moment in 1999, the city tore down the cast iron fence that had long separated the black and white parts of the cemetery. “But you can’t cure 200 years of terrible race relations, with one symbolic act.”

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