A Tennessee judge went on a recent tirade about black-on-black crime, essentially saying that black men were more dangerous to each other than the Ku Klux Klan.Judge Wayne Shelton made his comments during a preliminary hearing with Vincent Bryan Merriweather, who is facing a murder charge in Tenessee’s Montgomery County from an incident that left 22-year-old Antrius Gallion fatally shot in November.According to the Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle, Shelton said he was “sick and disheartened by what he sees as a lack of respect for human life, especially among young black men willing to shoot at one another for little or no reason.”“I grew up in a time where people wore white robes and they shot at black people,” Shelton said. “And now we see young black men wearing black hoodies shooting at black men — and doing much more effective job than the Klan ever thought about doing.”The Leaf-Chronicle says that Shelton is known to spout such sentiments from the bench. He gave a similar lecture on black-on-black crime in 2015 after a young man was gunned down following a high school graduation. “That life mattered,” Shelton said as the victim’s family sobbed at a hearing in June 2015. “That black life mattered to them, and it matters to me.”“The Klan doesn’t exist anymore,” he continued. “Who doesn’t care about black lives now? I’ll let you answer that. I’m tired of black men killing black men. If I offended anyone … I can’t help it.”After the hearing on Thursday, Shelton told the Leaf-Chronicle that he “might look like the whitest man in the room,” but he isn’t. He pointed to a family history in which one of his ancestors was a free man of color in the 1960s. But his point is that he is disheartened for the lack of respect for human life overall in society.“Black lives really do matter,” he said. “The total disregard of that fact by any in our society is totally reprehensible.”
