By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
PARIS, Tex. — The killing of Brandon McClelland, though horrible, never fit the classic description of a lynching. The police say two friends ran him over with a pickup truck after an argument during a night of drinking.

But Mr. McClelland was black and the men accused of killing him are white, and his gruesome death has reignited ugly feelings between races that have plagued this small town for generations, going back to the days 100 years ago when it was the scene of brutal public lynchings.

Blacks complain that the justice system is tilted against them; whites complain about the crime, teenage pregnancy and drug use ravaging black neighborhoods.
“I think we are probably stuck in 1930 right about now,” said Brenda Cherry, who is black and is the founder of Concerned Citizens for Racial Equality. “If you complain about anything, you are going to be punished.”

Paris is an agricultural town 100 miles northeast of Dallas that was built on cotton and grain in a part of Texas that shares more with the Deep South than with the West. In 1850, there were 4,000 residents, a quarter of them slaves. A large monument to the Confederate dead stands outside the courthouse, a bronze soldier standing guard, while at the Paris Fairgrounds, no plaques mark the spot where thousands of white spectators watched as black men were burned alive or hanged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Today, 26,000 people live here, about 5,700 of them black. They are concentrated in public housing projects and run-down neighborhoods near the center of town. They send their children to Paris High School, where nearly half the students are black and test scores are low. The best school, North Lamar High School, is 86 percent white, and some blacks complain that the district lines are drawn to keep it that way.

Lamar County’s highest elected official, Judge M. C. Superville, says Ms. Cherry and others who are unhappy with the justice system have exaggerated the role of race in recent events.
“There is a lot of misunderstanding in the community between blacks and whites,” he said. “I do not believe there is systematic racial discrimination in Lamar County. I do believe there is a misperception that that is going on.”
Still, the suspicions and ill will have grown so strong that the federal Department of Justice has dispatched a team of mediators to get residents to begin talking about the problem and to propose possible resolutions.

Last month, about 100 people of all races went to a building on the fairgrounds to vent their frustrations, while federal mediators took notes and tried to keep the peace. The speakers ran the gamut from young members of the New Black Panther Party in Dallas, who accused the local authorities of racism, to older black residents of Paris who chided younger blacks for comparing the problems of today with those of the Jim Crow era.

The few whites who spoke said they were sympathetic to the complaints of some black residents.
Mr. McClelland’s death, on Sept. 16, attracted attention beyond the confines of Lamar County, because, on the surface, it resembled the racially motivated murder in 1998 of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Tex. Three white supremacists hunted Mr. Byrd down and dragged him behind a truck until he died.
Mr. McClelland, 24, was run over and dragged 40 feet by the pickup truck. His mutilated body was found on the side of a road, his skull smashed.
There the similarities to the Byrd killing end, however. Mr. McClelland, an affable young man who worked as a garbage collector and wanted to become a long-haul trucker, had a longstanding friendship with the two men in the truck. They had spent the previous day hanging wallboard and then had gone out drinking after the job.
The men — Shannon Finley and Charles Ryan Crostley, both 27 — fled the scene of the killing, the police said. Later that night, they turned up at Mr. McClelland’s ramshackle home in Paris and told his mother that they had left him walking on the side of the road after they had argued about who should drive.

State troopers at first accepted the men’s story and considered the case a hit and run, but they changed their minds after discovering Mr. McClelland’s blood and tissue on the underside of the truck. Mr. Finley and Mr. Crostley are awaiting trial on murder charges; they have denied running Mr. McClelland down.
A special prosecutor from Dallas was appointed in November. The Lamar County district attorney, Gary Young, had declined to handle the case because as a private lawyer he represented Mr. Finley against a manslaughter charge in 2003.
In that case, Mr. Finley shot another friend, who was white, as they were sitting in a pickup. He claimed he had grabbed his friend’s gun and was trying to shoot two armed men who were trying to rob them. Instead, his friend was hit three times in the head by accident, he said.