A First Amendment ‘crapshoot’: City rejects settlement with fire captain demoted for Facebook rant calling Black protesters ‘thugs,’ ‘animals’

Nashville Fire Department trucks (YouTube screengrab/WKRN).

Nashville Fire Department trucks (YouTube screengrab/WKRN).

A fight over free speech and public trust is unfurling in Tennessee after a city council resoundingly rejected a settlement offer of $105,000 for a white fire captain who sued on First Amendment grounds after he was temporarily demoted for posting messages online calling protesters in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in 2020 “thugs” and “animals.”

Tracy Turner, of Old Hickory, Tennessee, is fire captain at the Nashville Fire Department with 25 years experience and he was demoted to the rank of firefighter for just six months four years ago when his posts were brought to the attention of his supervisors. The messages were disparaging and as members of the Nashville Metropolitan Council would later argue as they fought off his $2.1 million lawsuit, they were improper and racially charged given that they were being made by a public servant in a predominantly Black community.

Among other posts, including references to protesters as “animals,” Turner wrote on his personal Facebook account that year: “These Protesters are the stupidest people on the planet, other than the arsonist and looters that hang out with them,” and “It’s not that the Anti-Fa and BLM thugs are so strong that they are able to take over part of a city…It’s that the Democrat Mayors are so weak as to let it happen. Shameful.”

According to local ABC affiliate WKRN, another post said: “If all white people can be guilty for slavery because of a few plantation owners … then black people get to share the same guilt. There were Black plantation owners as well. So if all whites are guilty so are blacks.”

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