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.
