From [HERE] 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,’ ” Mr. Pearson said his partner told him. “ ‘Just sit in the car.’ ” Only whites were allowed inside. It was 1992.

Despite that jarring first impression, Mr. 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, Mr. Pearson was fired by a newly elected City Council that said he had never been qualified for the job. His dismissal has touched off a feud that has dredged up bitter memories of the town’s not-so-distant past. Mr. Pearson is also connected to that chapter in Jasper’s history.

In 1998, on a Sunday morning in June, Mr. Pearson, then a trooper, 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 along 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 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 as the place where a black man was dragged through the piney woods in its backyard.