Tennessee is a state of rolling hills and deep valleys, of little towns tucked into landscapes where people greet each other with hello’s and everyone is ‘honey.’ It is a place where communities gather in times of celebration and wrap arms around each other in times of mourning. The state holds many virtues and a complex blend of histories and cultures that make it what it is today. Its people are raised to extend kindness, care for their neighbours, and move through life with patience and grace. However, like many Southern states, Tennessee also holds a dark past of racism and white supremacy that has evolved through the diferent faces of time. In the 1770s, white Europeans of primarily British descent began to settle Tennessee’s thickly forested land, given relatively free reign over the uncolonised territory. The ability to venture forth into the ‘American frontier’ reinforced a culture of calcifed toughness and individualism that difered from both the northern states as well as from the rest of the slaveholding South. The land these white settlers migrated to had been the home of the indigenous Cherokee and Chickasaw tribes for hundreds of years. With the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, these groups were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands and displaced to reservations in the American Midwest.

Thirty years later, when the Confederacy announced its secession on the eve of the Civil War, Tennessee joined the rest of the South in fghting to maintain the enslavement of Black people. After the war, the state remained under the control of the Democratic Party, which, until the 20th century, was politically conservative, thus making conservatism and traditionalism the state’s dominant ideology. The integration and propagation of these values has allowed for the retention of antebellum beliefs regarding racial inequality and widespread support for a system that has favoured white men over people of colour, women, and other marginalised groups.

Like other American states, Tennessee’s government comprises tripartite executive, legislative, and judiciary branches. The legislative branch is composed of the House of Representatives and the Senate. House lawmakers each serve two-year terms representing districts of 78,000 people. Unlike most other states, however, the current political spread of Tennessee’s ninety-nine-member House is a Republican ‘supermajority;’ seventyfve members are Republican and twentyfour are Democrat. The Republican majority is entirely white aside from one member, while the Democratic minority is composed of ffteen Black and nine white representatives. This clear political and racial divide, therefore, transforms the House, a space meant to be one of healthy debate and representation, into one of white, Republican dominance.

Who is Justin Jones?

Tennessee has witnessed the exposure of its unilateral House by a fgure who threatens its status quo. When he was elected in 2022, Democrat Justin Jones of the 52nd District (D-52) was Tennessee’s youngest lawmaker in ofce. Raised in Oakland, California by immigrant, Filipino grandparents and Black, workingclass grandparents from the South Side of Chicago, Jones was taught to value community involvement from a young age. As a teenager, Jones became involved in activism following the death of Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old Black male who was murdered by a police ofcer for walking on the sidewalk in a hooded jacket. His governmental involvement began at this age as well, when he served as Oakland’s Youth Commissioner, organising demonstrations for civil rights, racial equity, environmental protection, and inclusivity. Jones moved to Nashville in 2013 to attend Fisk, a historically Black university, where he received the John R. Lewis Scholarship for Social Activism. His website proudly proclaims: ‘[Jones] has been arrested over a dozen times for nonviolent protests.’ Jones is an activist who repeatedly and intentionally gets himself into what he describes as ‘good trouble,’ discovering that bold displays of activism attract the attention Jones seeks for his causes.

‘The Justins’ and a New Age of Tennessee’s Politics

Soon after his election to the Tennessee State House of Representatives, Justin Jones was joined by Democratic Representative Justin Pearson (D-86), another twenty-eight-year-old Black representative. Jones represents District 52 in southeast Nashville, composed of 70,000 people who desire the basic tenets of social care: higher wages, afordable health care and education, public safety, and environmentalism. Pearson, representing Memphis’s District 86, similarly calls for equal treatment of those living in his district, with a specifc emphasis on environmentalism. Together, Jones and Pearson, who have come to be known across the U.S. as ‘The Justins,’ represent a new era of Southern politics – one that welcomes in younger generations and uplifts diverse perspectives and identities.

Covenant Shooting and Following Demonstrations

On March 27th, 2023, Nashville experienced its second mass shooting in fve years. Just after 10 a.m., a shooter entered Covenant Elementary School, a private Christian school for children ages four to twelve located in one of the city’s most afuent suburbs. Six people were killed: three nine-year-old children and three school faculty members. In the wake of this tragedy, Nashville’s citizens gathered in protest outside the capitol building while the Tennessee House of Representatives was in session. On March 30th, three House representatives brought the protests to the House foor. During a recess, Representatives Jones, Pearson, and Gloria Johnson (D-90), all Democrats, met at the central podium called the Well. Jones and Pearson used a megaphone to speak to the House, demanding that the topic of gun control be discussed during the session as Johnson stood by in solidarity. The group, who have come to be referred to as the ‘Tennessee 3,’ were not demonstrating unprovokedly. Earlier that day, Jones and Pearson had repeatedly been silenced by Republican House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R25), who turned of their microphones and refused to allow their pleas for gun control legislation to be voiced. Despite the demonstration taking place during a recess, Jones, Pearson, and Johnson faced the gravest of consequences: expulsion.

‘No Justins, No Peace’

On April 6th, the ‘Tennessee 3’ were given an opportunity to speak to the House in their defence, after which a vote would be taken to expel or retain them. Outside the capitol, crowds once again gathered, this time chanting in protest ‘No Justins, No Peace’. This is a tribute to the popular ‘No Justice, No Peace,’ a protest call used at demonstrations regarding the treatment of Black Americans for decades. Jones’s defence speech to the House exposed the institution’s moral corruption to its core. Every sentence was a blow to the undeniable patriarchal, white supremacist power hold. Jones called the House ‘a farce of democracy’ and harkened back to the state’s history as the one in which the Ku Klux Klan was founded. In speaking to the Republican supermajority, most of whom are white males, he reminded his colleagues that the state government is neither the ‘fraternity house’ nor the ‘country club.’ Jones did not ask the House for forgiveness for his demonstrations, but rather entreated his colleagues to remember the 78,000 individuals they represent – many of whom were actively calling for gun reform. He defned democracy as a process of healthy disagreement and wrestling with each other’s opinions, not the ‘body, drunk with power,’ sitting before him.

Jones’s defence, and those of Pearson and Johnson, fell on deaf ears. A vote was taken, and Jones and Pearson were expelled from the Tennessee House of Representatives. Johnson was saved by one vote which she attributes to her skin colour being white. However, Jones and Pearson were allowed to run for reelection in August, and the summer was spent campaigning in their districts.

All in Vain?

Jones and Pearson were re-elected to their former positions by landslide votes. Upon their return, though, they remained stripped of their committee privileges and faced even more resistance from their Republican colleagues. Four days after ‘The Justins’ returned to the House, new rules of order were implemented by House Speaker Sexton. These allowed Sexton to silence representatives for a day if they were deemed ‘out of order’ twice, with the potential to silence members for the remainder of the legislative session if they continued to speak in violation of this new rule. The rule was exercised over Jones on August 28th, as he was ruled out of order twice, silenced for the remainder of the day, and threatened with silence for the rest of the multi-day special session – one conveniently devoted to public safety legislation.

The special session was expected to yield tangible change by ideally curbing Tennessee’s open-carry laws and increasing gun control. However, the session was adjourned after eight days, and gun control legislation was never discussed. This blatant ignorance of the state’s most demanded issue clearly connected back to Jones’s April 6th defence speech in which he asked Republican representatives, ‘to be a voice for those Tennessean constituents you choose not to listen to for those checks from the NRA that are so hefty in your campaign funds.’ Despite the demands from across the country and state for legislative action, Tennessee’s representatives were hindered by the hand of a higher power.

In early October, Jones fled a federal lawsuit against the state of Tennessee and House Speaker Sexton, claiming his expulsion was ‘rigged from the start.’ In the lawsuit, Jones cites a quotation from Republican Representative Johnny Garrett (R-45) on April 6th during a closed-door meeting after the expulsion. Garrett said, ‘We had the jury already. This obviously wasn’t a trial. But I knew every single one of your votes counts. I knew that we did not have to convince you all.’ In addition to the insurmountable opposition, Jones claims he was deprived of time, resources, and the opportunity to prepare an adequate defence on April 6th. The lawsuit also references the special session on August 28th and the new silencing rules that ‘were specifcally designed to give the Speaker nearly unchecked power to limit and to silence speech and debate.’

Jones’s lawsuit reflects the staunch opposition between Tennessee’s House Democrats and Republicans and the lack of change that has taken place since Jones, Pearson, and Johnson took to the Well on March 30th. However, it also signals Jones’s tenacity and his belief that, if one is loud and relentless enough, a call to action can no longer be ignored.

Will ‘The South Rise Anew’?

In running for re-election during the summer of 2023, Jones and Pearson shared their experiences of discrimination in the House with every major news network, and the two came to be included in Harper’s Bazaar’s ‘2023 Bazaar Icons’ list. In interviews, Jones repeatedly and mercilessly called the Tennessee state government ‘authoritarian,’ while demanding change be enacted to both its policies and its personal politics.

Jones specifcally spent a large part of the summer speaking to diferent groups across the South. His intention was to spread the truth of what was happening in the Tennessee House as far and wide as possible. Jones drew attention to his treatment and the actions of the Republican supermajority, creating a name for himself as a signifcant, newage social activist. In ending every speech, Jones encouraged the crowd to join him in a chant: ‘The South Will Rise Anew.’ This is a twist on the historic, ‘The South Will Rise Again’ chant that has been heard since its creation by Confederate sentimentalists in the wake of the Civil War. Jones’s version seeks to redefne the South as separate from its history of slaveholding and racial injustice. It represents the potential for the South to burst forth in its diversity, to share the perspectives of many and hear the voices of all.

Jones and Pearson represent a new South, one that takes the darkness of its past and learns from it, shares the pain of marginalised groups, and works towards a better, more inclusive, and empathetic standard. It seeks to combine the region’s culture of kindness and grace with its politics—no matter how loud one must be.

This article was published in the Autumn 2023 New Annales publication for the Roosevelt Group in St Andrews, Scotland.

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