Tennessee Cop Celebrates Black History Month: I Have A Strip of Skin From a Man My Family Lynched

Not in shame. Not in sorrow. But in pride. And threat.

The only surprise here is that the state of Tennessee actually fired him.

Crooks and Liars:

The state of Tennessee has fired a veteran investigator because officials believed that he attempted to use violent stories about how his relatives participated in a lynching to intimidate African-Americans who were trying to file claims against emergency responders.

WTVF reported that William Sewell, a medical service investigator who had been with the state for more than 40 years, told the graphic story to Shun Mullins last summer.

Mullins had filed a complaint claiming that his mother had died when the Algood's deputy fire chief refused to perform CPR because she was black. The complaint stated that the fire chief covered it up by falsifying medical reports.

Sewell had started the meeting by asking Mullins if he had ever been to prison.

"His very first question was, 'Mr. Mullins have you ever been to the penitentiary?" Mullins recalled. "That was more than insulting to me."

Before concluding the meeting, Sewell decided to tell a shocking personal story about his family's history with racism.

"Mr. Sewell goes into a story about a hanging, that he had been told, about the hanging of a black man," Mullins explained.

Nashville NAACP member Sheryl Allen and an acquaintance, Judy Mainord, were also present in the room. Mullins, Allen and Mainord all remembered the story the same way in affidavits.

Sewell said that a black man had been lynched in Baxter, Mullins' hometown.

"They hung him, and they started carving his skin out of his back," Allen said. "It was like he got excited telling this story."

"They lowered the body, and all the white men standing around took turns removing the skin from the black man's back," Mainord recalled Sewell saying.

In conclusion, Sewell said that he still owned a "strap" of the black man's skin that had been given to him by his grandfather.

"They made a strap out of his skin, and they used that strap as a knife sharpener," Allen remarked.