The officer, Frank Savage, was subject to texts involving use of the N-word, a faux President Barack Obama-issued food stamp placed on his desk, and a bloody deer tail placed on his car. Sewell’s suit led to a $650,000 settlement with the city, and to a consent decree between the city and the Department of Justice to ensure the city implements a policy to address racism in the workplace. The suit contended Sewell was terminated after he refused to fire an officer who had filed an EEOC complaint alleging racist treatment by members of the Worcester County Drug Task Force. Sewell’s firing was the subject of a major civil rights lawsuit. They also confronted the council-not just about the secrecy of Sewell’s dismissal, but about the Black community’s lack of voice in the city’s main governing body, The group attended council meetings and even endorsed candidates for office. The film recounts in detail how The Citizens for a Better Pocomoke organized shortly after Sewell’s firing, and continued to push for change in a town resistant to it. The years-long battle for political parity was documented in The Real News film The Friendliest Town. Even the city’s majority-Black 4th District was represented by a white police officer, who had run uncontested after a Black councilperson resigned and the city failed to post a public notice of the impending vacancy as required by the city charter. Nock worked with a group called The Citizens for a Better Pocomoke to demand answers from a city council unaccustomed to pushback from Black residents.Īt the time, despite the evenly split racial demographics, the town’s governing body was predominantly white. Sewell’s termination became the focal point of Nock’s activism. But Sewell was ousted from his position under dubious circumstances. The former Baltimore homicide detective espoused community-style policing, ordering his officers to get out of their cars and walk.ĭuring his tenure, the city did not have a single homicide. Sewell had been widely praised for lowering crime in the small community of roughly 4,000, evenly divided between Black and white residents. It started in 2015, when the town fired its first Black police chief, Kelvin Sewell. Nock’s path to the mayor’s office was both winding and contentious. So there are things here that are going to take years to fix, years to repair,” he said.
“I said eight years ago, ‘We go along to get along,’ and, unfortunately, there were so many things we went along with. Which is why Nock said he was committed to one priority after he is sworn in on April 11: moving the town forward as quickly as possible.
I had just lost my jobs a couple weeks prior to that, I couldn’t afford to go back to school.”įor many people in the community, especially low-income and Black residents, prospects aren’t much better than they were for the young would-be mayor Nock years ago. “I had no idea At the time,” in 2015, “I was an unemployed college dropout. The former activist-turned-councilman, who was on the verge of assuming an office that had been held exclusively by white residents since the town’s inception, found it difficult to express the emotions prompted by the historic occasion.
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