How Tennessee’s Justin J. Pearson emerged as a leading voice for voting rights and racial justice
TheGrio...
Despite winning the Democratic nomination, Pearson faces an uphill battle in Tennessee’s newly redrawn 9th Congressional District. The vocal lawmaker says he’s “not giving up” on Black and brown voters.
While delivering a speech on Thursday night after winning the Democratic nomination for Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District, Justin J. Pearson reminded the room of supporters that his victory happened to come on the 61st anniversary of the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The irony was not lost on the 31-year-old Memphis state lawmaker, who has emerged as a national leader in the fight for voting rights.
“Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Reverend Ralph Abernathy, SNCC activist John Lewis, an activist who would later become a U.S. congressman, and Rosa Parks stood behind President Lyndon Baines Johnson as he signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965…here we are, 61 years later, and that same Voting Rights Act has been surgically undermined by the Supreme Court of the United States,” said Pearson.
Only a week after the U.S. Supreme Court’s April 29 ruling in Callais v. Louisiana, which gutted a key provision of the VRA that protected Black Americans from racial discrimination in voting, Republican state lawmakers redrew its congressional maps, dismantling Pearson’s district, which had been majority Black since the 1980s. A wave of southern states followed suit, taking advantage of the Supreme Court’s green light to target Black and brown communities without the risk of violating what was once seen as a vital civil right protection under the law.
Pearson, who declared his candidacy for TN-9 when the U.S. House seat was still majority-Black and leaned Democratic, emerged as a leading voice in the statewide resistance to the “racist” map.
“The attempt to remove Black representation and our ability to elect representatives of our choice is one of the most significant attacks on Black voter participation and Black voter representation since the end of Reconstruction,” Pearson previously told theGrio.
The Democratic congressional nominee now faces what he acknowledges will be an uphill battle, as the new district lines now favor his Republican opponent, State Senator Brent Taylor. The young lawmaker, considered a “rising star” in the Democratic Party, still believes there is a pathway to victory — not just for him and his district, but for the entire U.S. South, where Black voting rights have become a central fight.
“We can never lose hope. This is a moment, particularly in the South, where we have to start investing in our infrastructure for the short term, the medium term, and the long term,” Pearson told theGrio. “We are entering into the new era of the South’s retribution, and that’s where we’re going to have to fight tooth and nail…I’m not giving up on us.”
The political rise of Justin J. Pearson
Tennessee State Rep. Justin J. Pearson, who represents Memphis’ 86th District, isn’t new to taking on political battles in Tennessee, specifically around voting rights and racial justice. The son of a preacher father and a mother who is an educator, Pearson first emerged on the national scene in 2023, after he and two other Democratic lawmakers were threatened with expulsion from the Tennessee State House for joining gun violence protesters on the House floor following a mass school shooting. The lawmakers quickly became known in national headlines as the “Tennessee Three.“
Republicans voted to expel Pearson and another young Black state representative, Justin Jones, but not the other white lawmaker, Gloria Johnson. The expulsions of two newly elected young, Black lawmakers by a majority of white, old men in the South quickly garnered national attention and outcry. So much so that then-U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris took an impromptu trip to Tennessee to support Pearson and Jones. She, among many Democrats and activists, decried the expulsions as a deliberate attack on voting rights and racial justice.
Ultimately, the voters had the last word when they re-elected Pearson and Jones in special elections soon after their expulsion. However, they have continued to clash with their white Republican colleagues in the state House.
Following the expulsion ordeal, Pearson continued to use his legislative seat and national voice to speak out against Elon Musk’s xAI data center in his Memphis district, fighting to have it shut down, citing illegal, unpermitted operation and pollution risks to the predominantly Black community.
“Our communities shouldn’t be suffering and dying so that [tech companies’] computer, or a large language model, LLM, operates,” Pearson told theGrio in April. “If AI is so necessary for the good of humankind, why can’t it be across other communities, not just the poorest, not the Blackest, not the most Latino or indigenous communities?”
If elected in November, Pearson will add to the growing number of progressive Democrats in Congress, taking on income inequality and racial justice issues. He has been endorsed by the likes of U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Summer Lee, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, and the Working Families Party.
“While Republicans and billionaires try to drag Tennessee and the South back into the past with regressive policies, wrongful power grabs, and inaction in the face of mass suffering, the Working Families Party is proud to fight forward alongside Justin J. Pearson to build a future that centers America’s growing multiracial working class,” Britney Whaley, Southeast Regional Director of the Working Families Party, said in a statement.
“A future where the needs of the people are prioritized over the interests of greedy corporations. A future where the promise of a fair democracy is finally fulfilled. With Justin J. Pearson in Congress, that future is possible.”
During his victory speech on Thursday night, Pearson evoked ancestors of the Civil Rights Movement–from Medgar Evers and John Lewis–who bled and died for the passage of the Voting Rights Act, thereby transforming America into a multi-racial democracy.
“That’s the blood of patriots,” he said to thunderous applause. “It was the blood of patriots on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, who refused to be turned around in the face of white supremacy, who refused to be turned around in the face of injustice, who refused to be turned around despite the billy clubs, despite the horses, despite the canines, despite the beatings.”
The Tennessee lawmaker urged voters in TN-9 to “refuse to be turned around,” adding, “We’ve got to march with all that we’ve got. We’ve got to fight with all that we’ve got.”
Acknowledging Thursday’s 61st anniversary of the VRA, he continued, “We’ve got to keep going forward because our election is about a vision for 61 years from today. On August 6, 2087, I’ll be 93 by then. It will be 122 years since the Voting Rights Act was passed. We must ask the question: What kind of America will we have built?”