Back in January, Justin J. Pearson, a lean, intense young Memphian with a throwback Afro, had easily beaten several opponents in a special primary election for state House District 86, earning thereby an appointment to the legislature from the Shelby County Commission. He would later be sworn in as a formally elected member of the Tennessee legislature after the Shelby County General Election of March 14th made him official.
For the March swearing-in ceremony, he wore a dashiki under a suit coat — surely a clue to the custodians of the Republican supermajority that, as the successor to the late venerable Democratic populist Barbara Cooper in House District 86, here was a sparkling new wine in an unfamiliar bottle.
At the age of 28, Pearson was already the winner of a David-vs.-Goliath struggle, having led a successful yearlong effort — with allies like former Vice President Al Gore, no less — against a proposed oil pipeline in South Memphis.
Now, his arena was the hidebound oligarchy of the state House of Representatives, managed monolithically by Republicans. He would be a member of that body for only a few more days, during which he continued to endure the rookie syndrome of being routinely denied speaking time and of having his mic turned off on the rare occasions when he happened to get the floor.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Nashville, a troubled young assassin with an assault rifle entered a local school one morning and, before being felled by police, methodically shot to death six people, including three 9-year-olds.
Motivated by a sense of horror that pervaded all of Tennessee, Pearson insisted on addressing this issue and demanded that the House consider genuine, effective gun-safety legislation to quell what had become a national epidemic of firearms crimes.
He was joined by the entire Democratic caucus in this effort and, in particular, by two caucus colleagues — schoolteacher Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, a liberal’s liberal, and 27-year-old Justin Jones of Nashville, a silver-tongued exponent of justice and direct action like Pearson himself.
The Tennessee Three
What happened next became a worldwide cause célèbre. Denied speaking time once again, the three took to the well of the House out of order, rousing the people in the filled-up gallery, who were spillovers from the thousands-strong crowds outside who had come to the Capitol from all over Tennessee to demand action on guns, including among their shouted slogans “Fuck Bill Lee!” — a rebuke to the GOP governor who, the year before, had steered the passage of “open-carry” legislation.
The three legislators in the well chanted their message in solidarity, and, after House Speaker Cameron Sexton turned off their microphones, Pearson and Jones employed megaphones to address the galleries.
That session of the House would dissolve into a recess called by an enraged Sexton, who would shortly let it be known that the two Justins and Johnson would face an expulsion vote.
The three pathfinders, driven by their own inner sense of decorum, had found themselves in a circumstance that the great civil rights icon John Lewis at Selma had called “good trouble” — that of having to face a difficult test in the name of a good cause. In Lewis’ case in 1965, that had meant exposing oneself to police truncheons and being trampled by stallions in the pursuit of the right to vote.
Exalting in the iconic phrase, Justin Jones gave that name, “good trouble,” to the gathering predicament of the Tennessee Three, as the outside world was beginning to call them.
A vote on their survival as members of the legislative body was scheduled to take place last Thursday before a greatly amplified worldwide audience attuned to various electronic media sources.
The outcome, which saw youthful firebrands Pearson and Jones convicted via the lockstep power of the GOP supermajority, became an instant scandal, made more so by the reprieve from expulsion of Johnson by a single vote. Fairly or not, a consensus emerged that quite possibly the jurors’ racism accounted for the narrow escape of Johnson, a self-described “60-year-old white schoolteacher.”
One participant in the expulsion drama, former state Representative John Mark Windle of Livingston, was a bridge of sorts between last week’s events and another era of tumult at the Capitol in 2001. That was the time of an anti-income-tax riot, and the crowds then were fully as numerous — and as furious — as last week’s but motivated more by naked self-interest than by righteous civic indignation.
Then a young House member, Windle had been sitting in the first-floor office of then-Governor Don Sundquist, who had proposed the soon-to-be-doomed state income tax, when a brick Windle described as football-sized came smashing through one of the glass panels of the governor’s window. By contrast, the crowds last week were animated but conspicuously nonviolent.
Windle, a moderate and former Democrat, had been defeated by a conservative Republican in 2022, when he ran for reelection as an Independent. Last week, he returned to the Capitol as one of two permitted legal advisors on the floor for Johnson. The other was former House minority leader Mike Stewart of Nashville.
Perhaps their advice was useful and somewhat exculpatory. While keeping the faith with fellow crusaders Jones and Pearson, Johnson noted that she had not wielded a megaphone nor raised her voice unduly in speaking for gun-safety legislation. “What is my crime?” she demanded.
Raising Their Voices
Who, indeed, were the actual malefactors? The Tennessee Three, whose highly public moment in defiance of the House rules followed days in which they were not allowed to speak their convictions? Or the GOP supermajority, whose legislative response to the shooting tragedy at Nashville’s Covenant School had been to turn a deaf ear to the pleading crowds and call instead for more guns, proposing to arm teachers and harden school security forces? Or, for that matter, Governor Lee, he of the open-carry law, whose concessions to the NRA and the Tennessee Firearms Association over the years had been numerous and notorious?
Speaking on ABC’s This Week program this past Sunday, Justin Pearson took pains to characterize the parties to last week’s events right, starting with the protesters: “It is young people; it’s children and teenagers by the thousands, who continue to protest, who continue to march, who continue to raise their voices to say we need to do something to end gun violence, we need to make sure that we’re banning assault weapons, we need red flag laws, we need gun storage safety laws in our state that are going to help to propel this movement.
“And I pray to God to be able to use my voice as a member of the state legislature to represent Memphis and Shelby County and Millington to continue to fight to pass reasonable, sensible legislation that the majority of people in Tennessee want. The reality is we have a supermajority Republican legislature that doesn’t want to see progress, that prefers to listen to the NRA, rather than the constituents.
“And in fact, the speaker had the audacity to call some of those children and some of those parents and grandparents insurrectionists, likening them to January 6th, because they’re demanding that their voices be heard in a democracy, which is what we have a responsibility to ensure [so that] every person feels that they have a voice in democracy and will not be silenced.”
In the aftermath of it all, the world is about to change. Locally, there are complications. Rumors abound that a promised $350 million state outlay to Memphis for infrastructure improvements could be in jeopardy if the Shelby County Commission votes to reappoint Justin Pearson to the vacated District 86 House seat. A similar amount to benefit the Regional One medical center may also be on the line.
Interviewed on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Pearson acknowledged his willingness to return to the legislature via a Commission vote and warned, “I’ve already heard that people in the state legislature and in Nashville are actually threatening our Shelby County commissioners to not reappoint me or they’re going to take away funding that’s in the governor’s budget for projects that the mayor and others have asked for.”
The 13-member Commission, dominated by nine confident and assertive activist Democrats, will hold a special called meeting this week and is expected to reappoint Pearson anyhow, the torpedoes be damned. Nashville’s Metro Council will have already acted on Monday on Jones’ behalf. By some reckonings, the two could be reinstated as early as this week — though it is possible the GOP supermajority might find a way not to seat them.
“We will continue to resist.”
Meanwhile, the Tennessee House has been effectively disgraced by its action in expelling Pearson and Jones when lesser sanctions, like censure, were available for the infraction of being out of parliamentary order.
It has been ceaselessly and correctly pointed out that previous House expellees had committed actual offenses — like Republican state Representative Jeremy Durham in 2016, who was adjudged by a Speaker-appointed investigating committee to have been guilty of more than 20 separate acts of sexual harassment. (Sam Whitson of Franklin, Durham’s successor in District 65, would coincidentally — and perhaps ironically — be the only Republican who voted against expulsion for every one of the Tennessee Three last week.)
And there was the case of the House member — never quite precisely identified but widely assumed to be a certain flamboyant arch-conservative from rural West Tennessee — who, a few seasons back, urinated on the chair of fellow Republican Rick Tillis, a moderate who had been critical of the House leadership. No investigation, no calls for ouster, or even censure.
Meanwhile, each of the two Justins has become a media star and an incipient leader of a re-galvanized — and expanded — movement for justice and civil rights.
It is even possible that serious efforts to ban assault weapons and provide other remedies like red flag laws can be accelerated — though not likely in Tennessee, once known as a moderate bellwether state and now entombed in Trumpian, Deep South mediocrity.
This is a legislature — “the most mean-spirited and vindictive I can remember,” says state Representative Dwayne Thompson of Shelby’s suburban District 96 — whose idea of progress is to pass bans on drag shows, to humble and block the state’s LGBTQ community at every turn, and to make sure that transgender youths receive no medical support, nor is it any kinder to the state’s straight population — conspiring to keep labor unions out of Tennessee’s new car plants and to reject the federal government’s proffered billion-dollar bounties to expand Medicaid in an age of increased need, with the state’s hospitals desperate and failing.
Numerous liberation movements now abound, like those involving gender identity. Others simply seek the age-old chimera of economic justice.
And it passes strange that common-sense legislative efforts to protect human beings from assault by gun-wielding murderers should be controversial at all and unworthy even of discussion by a state legislature.
Pearson and Jones are at a crossroads. They stand ready to return to the place of their expulsion and use their momentum, their zeal, their eloquence, and, let us face it, their celebrity, to move the entrenched mountains of indifference and privilege there to make room for new ideas, to meet new needs, and, by their example, to summon others to the cause.
Young Pearson’s celebrity, in particular, seems to have no bounds. In addition to his multiple national talk-show appearances on Sunday, he was a cynosure that day at First Unitarian Church of Memphis, where he preached from the pulpit.
The Old Order in the legislature may attempt once more to ostracize its two outcasts upon their return and to ignore their social gospel, a mix of up-to-the-minute secularism and old-fashioned spirituality. It will doubtless try to deny the two their seats on some technicality, and a new battle could commence.
But the Republican supermajority is now on notice. As Justin Jones told NBC’s Chuck Todd on Sunday, “We are in the midst of a third Reconstruction, beginning here in Nashville. And the message is that we will continue to resist.”