On Monday, the Metropolitan Nashville Council voted unanimously to reinstate Jones, appointing him to his seat until the next election, and he went back to the legislature after being sworn in. He walked onto the House floor with his fist raised in defiance. It’s likely that Pearson will also be reinstated when the Shelby County Board of Commissioners votes in Memphis on Wednesday.
But long before the Tennessee Three, there were the “Original 33” from Georgia. In 1868, one of the first elections after the Civil War, more than a dozen Black men were elected to the Georgia legislature, becoming some of the first Black state legislators in the country. When the General Assembly convened, the white majority quickly expelled the Black members for no offense other than their race. There was national outrage over the move; Congress refused to seat Georgia’s representatives because of the expulsions. And as in Tennessee now, the state was eventually forced to reseat the expelled Black members.
The fact that Black state legislators now face the same threat as Black state legislators more than 150 years ago is as clear a portrait as can be painted of where our country is right now and the degree of regression that many Republican politicians are trying to inflict.
Republican lawmakers’ unwillingness to confront the problem of gun violence may have been the spark, but the broader problem that the Justins and their Democratic colleagues are challenging is Tennessee’s anti-democratic turn — a turn that’s emblematic of the broader Republican Party, now energized by election denialism, fears of racial “replacement” and resistance to a fast-changing cultural landscape.
There’s also an issue at play that doesn’t receive enough attention: the efforts of Republican legislators to disempower big — and Democratic — cities in their states.
While Southern states may be majority white and, for the most part, Republican-controlled, the citizenry of the South’s major municipalities is disproportionately Black. Pearson represents Memphis, which is majority Black, and Jones represents Nashville, where the percentage of the population that is Black is considerably higher than that of the state overall.
Tennessee’s Republican-dominated legislature, apparently chafed by this reality, has sought to politically neuter these constituencies.
Charles M. Blow
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