THE HEART OF JUSTICE CAN NEVER BE KILLED (UPDATED)

“The heart of justice can never be killed.” Those were the final words of Tennessee State Representative Justin Pearson today in his refutation of the actions taken against him by the unreconstructed Southern Confederate Traitors that comprise the Tennessee Republican Party.

He’s right. “The heart of justice can never be killed.”

Justin Pearson and Justin Jones reminded me so sharply of those brave young black men and women I met sixty years ago in the civil rights movement. Fire breathers. Their words arrows to the hearts of the ignorant, mendacious, malicious, malevolent white Southern men who thought because they were accidentally born white and Southern and male they had the right to lecture any “uppity” young black man who disturbed their “decorum,” to expel them from the state legislature - a body that had only three times before expelled member when they expelled one for taking a bribe, one for being crediblu accused of child rape and the third credibly accused of sexual misconduct with underage women - for daring to say that the “legends in their own minds” had no clothes.

I first met Southern whites sixty years ago in the Navy. They were like a separate species from any other people I had ever met anywhere. Most prominent was their ignorance. There wasn’t one of them in my recruit company who scored over 35 on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, the test that determined how much intelligence the test-taker had and determined what kind of training and assignment he would get in the service. Most of them didn’t score above 20! I’d never seen people so stupid before in my life.

Not only were they stupid. They were ignorant in a way I had never seen before, and they reveled in that ignorance. They were proud of their ignorance. The representative who led the effort at expulsion rose to break into the speech by Justin Pearson and lecture him on why he was being expelled, and how he had harmed the decorum of the legislature by failing to “properly behave.” Pearson replied after he sat down, asking if there was anyone in the room who would like to be “spoken to like that.” There were no takers. He then went on to say that what had just happened demonstrated the problem, that the interruptor believed he had by nature of his position, the power to act as he did.

As Elie Mystal, the justice reporter for The Nation magazine put it, “people have learned more today about what Critical Race Theory is and what it describes than they will ever learn in any book banned by a Republican legislature.”

The Tennessee Republicans could act as they did because they have a 75-vote supermajority thanks to their redistricting of the state after the 2020 census, in which they turned Tennessee into the most-gerrymandered state in the United States. In creating that new map they cracked Democratic-leaning Nashville, dividing it among three districts in which they overwhelmed Democratic voters with Republicans from the suburbs. Representative Justin Jones, the first of the two expelled, was the only Democrat left representing any part of Nashville.

Once they took supermajority power following the 2022 election, the first piece of legislation passed required Nashville to cut its city council in half. They followed that with laws prohibiting people with a past felony conviction from voting, which cut more than 470,000 people from the voter rolls.

This lock on power has given Tennessee Republicans the ability to do as they please, and in so doing to demonstrate that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The Republican-dominated House began pushing for the expulsion of Justin Jones, of Nashville, Gloria Johnson of Knoxville and Justin Pearson of Memphis after the three legislators participated in a protest against lax gun laws from the floor of the chamber last week in the wake of the Nashville school shooting that left six people - three children and three school staff members - dead.

Since the Thursday protest, House leadership made bad faith and over-the-top comparisons, likening the trio’s behavior to the January 6 “insurrection” - thereby acting to define the assault on the nation’s capitol as nothing more than a “passionate protest.

Today it pleased them to expel two young Black legislators who were trying to force the Republicans to do something about the epidemic of gun violence killing their constituents.

As the young demonstrators in the hallways shouted, “You ban books, you ban drag, kids are still in body bags!”

And then they yelled “You fucking fascists!”

Johnson, a white woman, was not expelled, after some lawmakers cited her calmer demeanor during the protest. As she pointed out afterwards, she did everything the two legislators who were expelled had done. As to why they were expelled and she wasn’t, Johnson said “I think it has to do with the difference in our skin color.”

The White Racist South has never changed since the day the Barbadian Pirates arrived in Charleston harbor with their slaves and their philosophy of white supremacy 300 years ago. In the three centuries since, the White Racist South has never missed an opportunity to publicly celebrate their racist, white supremacist beliefs. Losing a war never made them examine their beliefs. The limited success of the civil rights movement only made them more committed to their white supremacy.

Confronted by anyone pointing out their mendacity, their maliciousness, their malevolence, their plain meanness, their ignorance, their murderous violence, the White South has always reacted by recommitting themselves to each and every one of those negative values, and the praising themselves for so doing. White Southerners always accuse Northerners of disrespecting them by saying they sound stupid, then they go publicly celebrate their moron stupidity.

Back in the 1970s, White Southerners tried to convince the rest of the country that they had “changed.” Anyone who went there found the change non-existent once outside any major southern city, and non-existent in most of those cities’ white suburbs. While that bullshit was being peddled, the Republican Party remade itself beginning with Nixon’s “southern strategy” in 1968, maintaining the party’s national power by welcoming the unreconstructed Confederacy into the party. Ronald Reagan chose to announce his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, site of the 1964 KKK murders of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Cheney, proclaiming his belief in and support of “states’ rights.” It wasn’t a “dog whistle” to the unreconstructed Confederacy. It was the Queen Mary’s foghorn.

Justin Pearson was right today when he said that “The heart of justice can never be killed.”

Democracy didn’t die in the well of the Tennessee State Assembly today. It was reborn there.

As Obi-Wan Kenobe says to Darth Vader in the good Star Wars Movie, “Now I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine,” as Vader delivers what he thinks is a killing blow.

The inbred ignoramuses, the unreconstructed Confederates, the mendacious, malignant, malicious, malevolent white supremacist scum in the Tennessee State Legislature are about to find out the truth of those words come Monday morning.

The speech below is 22 minutes well-spent:

Justin Pearson speech in legislature

“You are seeking to expel District 86’s representation from this house, in a country that was built on a protest. IN A COUNTRY THAT WAS BUILT ON A PROTEST. You who celebrate July 4, 1776, pop fireworks and eat hotdogs. You say to protest is wrong because you spoke out of turn, because you spoke up for people who are marginalized. You spoke up for children who won’t ever be able to speak again; you spoke up for parents who don’t want to live in fear; you spoke up for Larry Thorn, who was murdered by gun violence; you spoke up for people that we don’t want to care about. In a country built on people who speak out of turn, who spoke out of turn, who fought out of turn to build a nation. 

“I come from a long line of people who have resisted.” 

“Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all his laws.” - John Adams

Here is video of the Tennessee Republican exercising his White Privilege to lecture Justin Pearson about “keeping his place.” Everything you need to know about how White Supremacy works in one short video.

Tennessee lawmaker lectures Justin Pearson

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