The MLK holiday was reinstated. And, the Rodeo Day parade included a wagon flying the stars and bars of the Confederate battle flag.

Two different holidays. Two different ways to celebrate heritage. Or, as two documentary filmmakers who shot those scenes in Jasper put it: Two towns within one.

The filmmakers captured the mixed personality of Jasper in a powerful film making its national television debut this week: "Two Towns of Jasper." The film, or lengthy excerpts, can be seen on TV three nights this week, and it will be the topic of discussion at Huston-Tillotson College in Austin, on the "Oprah" show and in a live town hall meeting in Jasper moderated by Ted Koppel.

Their film prevents an unvarnished, behind-the-scenes look at race relations in the Deep East Texas town that landed in the national spotlight in 1998 when three white men offered a ride to Byrd, a drunk local black man, drove into the woods and dragged him behind a pickup until he was decapitated.

"Two Towns" captures the pain, the mistrust and, in some cases, the personal conversions of the people of Jasper, black and white, as they learn to live in the aftermath of one of America's most haunting racial crimes. In the candid film, self-proclaimed "Bubbas" admit they don't understand the harm in the N-word. Blacks speak out against racial slights. The Byrd family suffers their loss with dignity.

Alternating scenes of Jasper locals in their everyday haunts - a coffee klatch of whites meeting every morning across the street from the courthouse, a black-owned beauty salon downtown filled with black patrons, a school assembly with students siting in a segregated pattern - show a racial divide that had not been explored until Byrd's death. But the film also shows a white sheriff and prosecutor demanding justice for a black man's murder, and white and black civic and religious leaders working to keep Jasper unified.

In Jasper, the filmmakers say, they found a microcosm of race relations in America.

Whitney Dow, who first visited Jasper the day of the Ku Klux Klan and the New Black Panthers demonstrated and taunted each other after Byrd's death, expected to find a throwback Southern town with stereotypical race divisions.

He found something more complex: "Here was a town with a black mayor. A half-black city council. Black people who really help govern the town and run some of the bigger institutions. On a civic level, very, very integrated. And, yet, on a private level, very segregated. And a kind of light went off, and I said, 'This is not East Texas. This is America. This is Buffalo. This is Cleveland. This is Boston, where I grew up.' We govern together, we have a lot of professional interaction, but on a personal level we're incredibly segregated."

To help make a film about Jasper and its people, Dow, a Columbia University graduate who is white, recruited a lifelong friend, Marco Williams, a black Harvard University graduate teaching filmmaking at New York University. The pair decided to split the duties, with Dow and his crew covering only whites and Williams' crew filming only blacks. And, they decided not to tell the people of Jasper they were working together.

Some grumble that Dow and Williams took a sneaky approach. But the filmmakers argue the segregated technique was necessary to gain the deep trust of their subjects.

"It allowed me to explore and consider the world, really, through my lens, a black person's lens, not really filtrated," Williams said. "It allowed me to go someplace without having to explain myself.

"My motivation on this journey was how this crime could have occurred in the last half of the decade of the 20th century," he said. "Furthermore, how could this crime have occurred when the town, at least in principle, would be a model for the New South? I was wanting to get a sense of what was going on in the black community. What did they do - or not do - that might have contributed to this crime occurring?"

Several scenes in the film focus on Trent Smith, a white supremacist ex-con who is covered from the wait up in white pride tattoos, and Ethel Parks, an outspoken, unemployed black woman who regularly mingled with the crowds on the courthouse lawn during the killer's trials.

The two are considered by some in Jasper to represent the racial extremes rather than the true soul of Jasper. But they are the ones whose hearts appear to soften the most during the year-and-a-half that Byrd's murder case made its way through the legal system to three separate convictions.

"Bottom line is that you've go to treat people, all people, the way you want to be treated. Know what I mean?" says Smith, the tattooed racist. "That's what I do now."

No one in Jasper was immune to the emotional fallout from the dragging death. Everyone was forced to re-examine their beliefs and decide whether they contributed to a racial divide.

The filmmakers - recipients of a new Ford Foundation grant to take the film around the country as part of an outreach program on race relations - hope no one who watches "Two Towns of Jasper" remains unchanged, either.