So, okay, Justin J. Pearson may be, in the words of state Senator Raumesh Akbari, who introduced him Tuesday before the Rotary Club of Memphis, the political figure “who’s next,” but Pearson speaks only of the task before him, which is to win re-election as state Representative of District 86 in the Tennessee House.
The first step will be to defeat someone named David Page in a special Democratic primary, which takes place next Thursday, June 15th. After that, he’ll be up against whatever Republican may be on the August 3rd special general election ballot, along with an independent candidate named Jeff Johnston.
Nobody doubts that Pearson will easily jump these hurdles, which became his lot as a consequence of his being expelled by the Republican supermajority of the House back in April along with Rep. Justin Jones of Nashville. Those two along with Rep. Gloria Johnson of Knoxville became known as the “Tennessee Three” for disputing the regular order of the House to engage in some passionate special pleading for gun safety legislation.
Pearson and Jones were immediately sent back to the House by votes of the Shelby County Commission and the Davidson County Metro Council, respectively, but to return to their full terms, they were required to win a new special election.
In Pearson’s case, that will be yet another special election to add to the one he won earlier this year to succeed the late Barbara Cooper in District 86. Counting his primary and general election wins back then (which included his first appointment by the Commission in between), and the primary and general election victories still to come, Pearson will, by next August, have been voted in for what he calls “a Guinness Book record” of five times.
In any case, Pearson, who came to prominence as the leader of the successful 2021 community effort to prevent installation of an oil pipeline that would cut through South Memphis and danger the Memphis aquifer, is, just as Akbari suggested, the person of the moment.
Pearson reminded the Rotarians: “The last time that I was fortunate to be in front of this group was talking about halting this pipeline. The call to action for us was whether or not a multibillion dollar corporation could come in to Memphis and build a crude oil pipeline that could threaten all of our drinking water.
“The corporation’s thought was if they were going to exploit Black people, white folks in Memphis would cave, rich folks in Memphis wouldn’t pay attention … But what they found was that we had power enough and sense enough to build what Heather McGhee calls the solidarity dividend, where white folks and Black folks and rich folks and poor folks work collaboratively to create just solutions where we all benefit.”
Pearson stated his belief that “the only way that we win is if we — every day, every month, every year, every election — choose the solidarity dividend over entrenched separations ….
“There is no two Memphises is allowed. There are no two Shelby counties allowed. We are all going to benefit from what happens in this place, or we will all suffer.”
The only looking down the line Pearson is doing right now is in anticipation of possible new gun safety legislation that could take place in the special legislative session scheduled for August, not long after the forthcoming special general election for his seat.
Pearson discusses such matters in terms of the generalized public effort he believes is necessary to accomplish any necessary step forward. He sees himself and the other members of the Tennessee Three as having acted, not in their own right, but in tandem with an emotional response by thousands of protesting fellow Tennesseans to the gun massacre of six people at a Nashville Christian school back in March.
It was the refusal to acknowledge that response by the GOP supermajority and House Speaker Cameron Sexton that prompted the Three to act as they did, Pearson said.
He declared: “There’s a group of folks in Nashville in the supermajority Republican Party, a group of folks that are in positions of power, who are wielding that power against us all, Black folks, white folks — that hits our entire community. And the choice is, are we going to be in solidarity to help solve the problem?”
Calls for collective action of this sort spill seamlessly from Pearson, who clearly is consumed by the idea that a “conscious civic community” can unite to resolve important issues — in addition to the gun matter, such other concerns as high cancer risk in impoverished areas like those in his district, the failure of school children to achieve third-grade levels in reading, and an intolerable homicide rate.
“I know for a fact,” he said, “if you carry that moral imagination, and you put your resources and your pedigree and your privilege next to that, the possibilities that we will have as a community will only grow exponentially …. You realize that love requires you to be proximate to the people who have been most unloved.”
The fight for democracy, he said, “is at the state house, and it’s down the street. It’s in our city halls and in our county, where the fight for what democracy is going to be and whether or not a pluralistic multiracial, multi socioeconomic, just democracy will live.”
He said, “I really do believe in this groundswell of support that we’re seeing with the Tennessee Three, with this fight for our democracy, with the fight for freedom and freedom of expression.”
He really does believe, it is obvious, and it is difficult not to be carried along by the stream of that belief and by the character of his convictions. The Rotarians he addressed Tuesday were manifestly moved, and it remains to be seen whether, and to what extent, the holders of power in state government will be, come the August special session and thereafter.
There is that shibboleth: “No power is so great as that of an idea whose time has come.”
Justin J. Pearson is, to an unusual extent, the embodiment of an idea.
