TRENTON -- People here don't like to talk about the time when the television cameras came to town.
That was in 1999, when then-Mayor Joffree Leggett said aloud what some blacks said they suspected for years: Trenton didn't want to annex the black neighborhoods that border the town because it didn't want blacks on the town board.

"That's settled," Town Commissioner Charles Jones says. "People have forgotten it. We don't need to get back into that."

Five years ago, under the glare of a national spotlight, it looked as if this fading town of 200, in one of Eastern North Carolina's poorest counties, would never be the same.

For decades, whites had outnumbered blacks in this Jones County town -- but only because about 50 black households sat just outside the town borders in neighborhoods known as Haiti, Monktown and Spicey Quinn lands.

Even though the neighborhoods were laid out on an urban grid and sat nestled up against the town limits, they had never been part of Trenton proper. People there couldn't vote in town elections, and no black had ever served in town government.

When people heard the mayor's comments, the blacks at town's edge came together and vowed to fight for a voice. Town leaders promised that the town and the neighborhoods would finally be united.

A black mayor was appointed, and the blacks outside town limits got an opportunity they had never had: Anyone who asked would be annexed and get the right to vote in town elections.

Then, the television cameras left

Of an estimated 50 properties, only 17 homeowners and two churches asked to be annexed. They joined the town in 2001.

The limited annexation kept whites in the majority in Trenton, which had 144 whites and 55 blacks in the 2000 census.

The black mayor, Sylvia Willis, has been re-elected twice, but she hardly speaks above a whisper in town meetings. No blacks have run for the town board.

Whether in town or out, blacks live in segregated neighborhoods distinguished by poverty. And many say they still feel powerless.

"They only want a certain number of blacks to be eligible to vote around here," says Della Ancrum, who recently moved back to her family home that sits just outside the town limits. "They have all the power. They make the laws. How can you fight that?"

The old wound

Trenton pops up amid the farm fields of rural Jones County, about 100 miles east of Raleigh, like a mirage from the past. Its main street is lined with moss-draped oaks, and an old-fashioned hardware store and pharmacy are its anchor businesses. People smile and wave when they pass on the street.

But under the surface, there is a residue of bitterness that divides races, fractures neighborhoods and simmers within families.

Daniel Johnson Willis, the mayor's husband, is the person credited, or blamed, for starting it all.

Willis, 70, a retired television repairman, has led a one-man crusade against the town's white leadership for nearly two decades. He and his wife live in town, but it irks him that so many other blacks don't have a voice in Trenton.

It was his lawsuit in 1999 -- claiming that the town was racist in its refusal to annex the black neighborhoods -- that prompted Leggett to utter the words that set off the whole fight: "They're not leaders. A black man would rather work for a white person."

Leggett has since died.

Willis says he believed in 1999 that Trenton would finally change.

Now, he says, nothing is different. He blames the reporters who didn't come back. He blames the state branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for promising to fight alongside him and then leaving town. He blames his wife.

"They keep her as mayor because they're trying to show people that we're integrated," he says. "The mayor has no voice. She never asks for anything for us."

Sylvia Willis, 64, sitting in the next room, says she has no response to her husband's criticisms. But she admits to feeling sometimes like an outsider in town government.

She says the town clerk padlocked the door to the room that holds the town records before giving her a key to town hall. Board members say it has always been locked.

The mayor says she doesn't want to open "old wounds" by talking about the events of 1999. She refuses to say that the town has made no progress on race relations since then.

"The few little people that were annexed, that's progress," Sylvia Willis says. "Things don't happen overnight. I know that there will be change, because it's written in the book, in the Bible. It might not be in my day, but it will come."

After the cameras left

A full annexation of the neighborhoods would have cost Trenton almost nothing, and it would have boosted a sagging tax base.

But the town board chose to make the annexation voluntary. Only people who signed forms requesting it were taken in.

"The town does not force annexation on anyone," town clerk Glenn Spivey says.

Spivey points out that for most blacks, annexation means nothing but extra taxes. The town, which has no employees, provides only one service: sewer. And thanks to state and federal grants, most black neighborhoods outside town already have it.

For a few residents, most friends of Willis, that argument wasn't enough to keep them out.

"I did it because I knew they didn't want to annex me," says Edna Lee Hobbs, 68, whose home was annexed. "I know they was hoping nobody would want to be annexed, and that'd be their excuse not to do it."

After she signed her petition, Hobbs said a sheriff's deputy came to her house. She said he demanded her name and asked to come into her house, wanting to know whether she had signed the petition. She thought he was trying to intimidate her.

Town board member Charles Jones said the town clerk and another town representative did go into neighborhoods to verify petitions. He said no sheriff's deputies were used.

Now, Hobbs lives in town. But she says the homes all around her are outside town limits.

"Who ever heard of getting put in town like that?" Hobbs asks.

She says she has seen two changes since becoming an official Trenton resident: She now has a town street light, and the town puts up Christmas decorations in her neighborhood each winter.

A buried past

Several others who were annexed refused to talk to a reporter, saying it would single them out for criticism. The pastors of the two annexed churches also didn't return repeated calls.

"People here, they are so afraid of the white folks," says Daniel Willis, who was born and raised in Trenton. "They have been brainwashed. They need somebody to come here and lift their heads out of the dirt."

Willis says that's the reason most who declined annexation also won't talk about it.

"It was just my choice," says Will Brock, a resident of Haiti who was not annexed. "There was no biggie about it."

Brock, who is chairman of the Jones County Board of Elections, said the right to vote in town elections wasn't important to him. He said he feels he has more privacy as he is.

Brock wouldn't comment on whether he thinks racism shapes Trenton's annexation policies.

Skip Alston, president of the state NAACP, says there is nothing more he can do in Trenton. People were given the choice to be annexed, and many said no.

"It's not for me to say whether it's OK," Alston says. "It's for the citizens to say whether it's OK, and they made their choice."

What most people in this town want is to keep the past buried.

Spivey, the town clerk, berated a reporter who came asking for information about how many people were annexed. He said Daniel Willis, whom he referred to as a "piece of -- nothing," is the cause of the town's problems.

"The people didn't ask for it; Mr. Willis asked for it," Spivey said. "Mr. Willis is the one that created the annexation issue."

Daniel Willis is discouraged, but he will not give up. Recently, he has started going back into the black neighborhoods, trying to persuade people who weren't annexed before to request it now. He has a stack of signed petitions that he says he will soon submit to the town board.

Sylvia Willis isn't helping.

"The mayor," Daniel Willis says, laughing bitterly. "Mayor in name only."

Staff writer Kristin Collins can be reached at 829-4881 or kcollins@newsobserver.com.