NASHVILLE, Tennessee -- A congressional candidate in Tennessee is refusing to back down after he caused outrage after putting up a billboard with the slogan "Make America White Again."

The billboard was taken down late Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, but candidate Rick Tyler, 58, said it was removed without his authorization, timesfreepress.com reports.

"I'm doing something that in modern political history no one has ever done. I'm laying out the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth," Tyler tells timesfreepress.com. "There are certain issues that are verboten in modern politics, race obviously being one of them."

The sign was posted on Highway 411 near Benton, Tenn., according to USA Today. Tyler is running as an independent for Tennessee's 3rd congressional district seat. Timesfreepress.com says he has another billboard that features Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" quote, with the White House surrounded by Confederate flags. That sign also has been taken down, wrcbtv.com reports.

He tells USA Today the sign isn't meant to be racist. Instead, he says its intent is to show that the United States needs to return to the days of "Leave It to Beaver", "Ozzie and Harriet" and Mayberry from "The Andy Griffith Show".

"It was an America where doors were left unlocked, violent crime was a mere fraction of today's rate of occurrence, there were no car jackings, home invasions, Islamic Mosques or radical Jihadist sleeper cells," Tyler wrote on his Facebook page, according to the Washington Post.

The page had been taken down as of Thursday night. His campaign website also was not functioning Thursday night.

Tyler told timesfreepress.com he believes a majority of white people agree with him. This is not the first time he's run for Congress, though: newschannel9.com reports he ran in 2014 and received 0.4 percent of the votes cast.

The district's current congressman, Republican Chuck Fleischmann, and other Republican officials condemned Tyler's message, NBC News reports.

"There's no room for this type of hateful display in our political discourse," local Republican Party official Ryan Haynes says. "Racism should be rejected in all its heinous forms in the Third Congressional District and around the country."