Why I Fight for Environmental Justice and Democracy in Tennessee
In this Dispatch, Justin J. Pearson draws the link between the environmental justice movement he led that propelled his election to the Tennessee State Legislature; the gun violence movement that got him expelled in April; and the pro-democracy solidarity movement that followed.
Credit: Karen Pulfer Focht
On Thursday, April 6th this year, I was illegally expelled from the Tennessee House of Representatives along with my colleague, Justin Jones. We are both Black men and the House’s two youngest legislators. Our “crime?” The previous week we had taken to the well in Tennessee's State Capitol to join peaceful protestors calling for gun reform after the Covenant School shooting in Nashville that had left seven dead. Our fellow Democrat Gloria Johnson, a sixty-year-old white woman, was with us in the well; she was not expelled.
It was a political lynching.
And yet when, at the moment of my expulsion, I looked up to the thousand-strong crowd gathered at the Capitol in solidarity, I saw our country. Justin Jones’ Black and immigrant constituents from Nashville were there, alongside the white urban and suburban kids and moms, who had formed the backbone of the gun reform protests at the Capitol every day since the shooting ten days previously. They represented the best of our country.
The following day, Good Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris came down to show her support; The New York Times expressed its outrage at the expulsions in an Editorial Board statement; and we went to the White House to meet President Joe Biden. But support did not just come from the so-called liberal elites. Millions of people across the political spectrum watched online, and understood the expulsions as an erosion of our democracy, which must concern us all.
A month later, Tennessee’s Republican governor Bill Lee called a House special session on gun reform and made it clear he wanted the “red flag” legislation we had been calling for. This was a small victory for the movement of ordinary people who have said “enough” to the special-interest gun lobbies that have commandeered the Republican Party at the expense of children who no longer feel safe to go to school and who are worried about being victims of gun violence in their communities.
When the Shelby County Commission sent me back to serve in Nashville in mid-April, it was another victory: this time for democracy itself. Still, I am forced to run again for this seat on August 3, only three months after I was elected.
Credit: JON CHERRY/The New York Times/Redux
Once more, I hope to represent District 86, my home district of Southwest Memphis, which I love. When I returned to Memphis after college, I became a community organizer and environmental justice activist. The catalyst for this was reading that the Byhalia Pipeline—funded by Valero Energy Corporation and Plains All American—had plotted its route to cut through the Black neighborhoods my family and I lived in and my grandmothers had raised us in. These corporations thought this would be, as one official put it, “a point of least resistance.”
If this pipeline had been built, it would have doubled the productivity of the Valero Oil Refinery, which already poisons the air of Southwest Memphis’ Black families to such a degree that the cancer rate in southwest Memphis is four times the national average. On top of this, Black landowners were being dispossessed of land they had bought after emancipation, forced to sell it for a pittance under threat of “eminent domain” expropriations.
Our community fought back and proved we were not “the path of least resistance,” but rather the path of resilience. Southwest Memphis became the Ground Zero not just of environmental racism, but of a new environmental justice movement. I founded Memphis Community Against Pollution (MCAP): we stopped the pipeline and, in 2021, won legislation tightening environmental regulations. These people-powered victories, inspired by the spirit of the community, led me into politics when my mentor Dr. Barbara Cooper passed away last year, after representing District 86 for 27 years.
In my few eventful months as a State legislator, I have already learned the same lesson that MCAP and the environmental justice movement taught me. Black, Indigenous, communities of color, and poor folk from all backgrounds are usually the ones on the frontlines: of environmental racism, of gun violence, of the kind of anti-democratic behavior that saw me expelled from the Tennessee House. We are the ones who are going to fight the hardest because we are most proximate to these problems. But the truth is that these struggles affect us all, and it is only by building large and diverse movements that we can win.
This is how we won the fight against Byhalia: we formed coalitions across the young and elderly, Black and white, rich and poor, north and south Memphis divide. It wasn’t just that wealthier Memphians wanted their water to stay clean just as much as we wanted our air to be less polluted. It’s that we all came to understand the greater context: we are all in this together. I said it at our rallies: “We share the same sky, and pollution doesn’t have a point where it just ends. We share the same water, and it’s not as if there’s a point where it suddenly gets clean.”
Photo courtesy of Justin J. Pearson
Some of us might live on the frontline—like the folks in Virginia and North Carolina who have just been thrown under the bus by the debt ceiling deal that fast-tracks the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP). A pipeline that is already billions of dollars over budget and many years behind schedule. But the truth is: when it comes to climate and environmental justice, none of us can afford more fossil fuel projects. We are all on the frontline.
Similarly with gun violence, just before my election earlier this year, my classmate Larry Thorn—a gentle and beloved high school coach—was shot dead. As I write these words, I’m thinking about a family in my constituency whose baby died from an accidental shooting last week. For Black voters, crime and gun violence have always been part of life, requiring urgent action. But something happened here in Tennessee after the Covenant School shooting. Gun violence is no longer an ‘inner-city’ problem; a ‘they’ problem. It was an ‘us’ problem for white voters too. Even if you lived in Green Hills, Nashville, power and privilege did not protect you from someone buying an AR-15 and shattering your community.
And so, when I saw who was showing up at the State Capitol in Nashville to demand gun reform, mainly white high school students and moms, I applied the lesson I had learned with the Byhalia Pipeline fight in Memphis. I connected with Moms Demand Action and an organization led by the Covenant School moms, mainly middle class and conservative. These are the folks, and their children, who were protesting the day we went down to support them, in early April; the action that got us expelled.
And these are the folks who were so outraged by our expulsion—never mind that they might be conservative, or wealthy—they came to express their solidarity on April 6. In this way, a grassroots gun reform movement has become part of the pro-democracy movement that Black folk have been fighting all their lives, from civil rights to anti-voter suppression laws. And it is through this movement that Tennessee will see some success, on August 21, around red flag and gun storage safety laws.
When these laws get passed in whatever form—as I believe they will—this will not be because of a change of heart among the Republican legislators previously so opposed to them. It will be because of a change of perspective. The perspective is that the majority of Tennessee voters want to see something being done about gun violence, and legislators are thus compelled to respond. A generation of young Tennesseans, who are expressing their vitriol against legislators for their inaction on gun violence, will become voters very soon, and they are being heard. People in power are being forced to realize the power of people.
There is a lesson in this change of perspective that we can carry back to the environmental justice movement. Representative democracy is people power at its purest, and as campaigners for environmental justice, our most important challenge is to mobilize Americans—voters and non-voters and not-yet-voters—in the interests of their own, and their childrens’ future.
Institutions don’t change in and of themselves, as is evident in the sordid compromises currently being wrought between Democrats and Republicans in Washington overriding the courts to approve the MVP. It’s people who make change happen, when they assert their power and persistence to insist that those with institutional power do what is right.
I felt this power on the streets of Southwest Memphis, campaigning against Byhalia. I felt it in the well of the State Capitol, listening to the anguish and anger of those calling for gun reform. And I felt it on a visit I took recently to the communities threatened by the MVP. I know these folks will keep fighting for the land they so fiercely love, even though they have been dealt a blow by this dirty Debt Ceiling deal.
Popular democracy listens to the people, as it must. Mobocracy, on the other hand, follows the dollar rather than the people who put them in power in the first place. It plays to special interests and their profiteering, from the rifle associations who have held gun reform at bay for too long, and to the corporations who are getting “critical infrastructure” laws passed in Republican-run states such as Tennessee, to make it harder for the frontlines to fight the expansion of the fossil-fuel industry.
Against this anti-democratic trend stand us, the people. When Representative Justin Jones was reinstated to the legislature, he said the following: "Today we are sending a resounding message that democracy will not be killed in the comfort of silence.” My friends who live along the MVP are not going to let our democracy be killed in the comfort of silence, and neither are the rest of us, in the environmental justice movement. This is why we gathered in Washington DC this month to rally against including the MVP in the debt ceiling bailout deal – just as we did, on September 8 last year, to protest Joe Manchin’s first “Dirty Deal.”
Even if we lose this battle to the DC mobocrats, we will win. I am convinced that environmental justice is the movement for our time, because of the way it brings together a multiplicity and diversity of people, opinions, ideas, cultures, ethnicities, and socioeconomic classes under one really large tent. This is the tent of climate justice, the tent of our very atmosphere itself. It is our shared home, this planet. It is the air we breathe and the water we drink. It is the future, and I am confident we will prevail.
Want to learn more from people on the frontlines?
Sign up
Receive Dispatches from the Frontlines
Hear directly from the leaders who are fighting – and winning – the battle for a fossil-free future through our monthly publication.
