Squint a little as you take in the scene, or just close your eyes and listen to the voice, and 2023 stumbles back into another era. Another Memphis.
“You can’t expel hope!” the young man cries in his powerful voice, his message aimed at the Tennessee state legislators who had expelled him and another Black lawmaker a week earlier. “You can’t expel justice! You can’t expel our voice.”
But in barely two weeks, Pearson, 28, and Justin Jones, 27, have gone from neophyte politicians to national prominence, heralded as living echoes of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, when leaders like King and John Lewis organized protests across the American South. His life has taken him from protest to protest: leading a campaign against the bust prominently displayed at the state Capitol of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, which GOP leaders refused to remove; blocking Nashville traffic after the election of former President Donald Trump; and spending more than 60 days at the Capitol plaza in 2020 to protest police violence after the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
The protest unfolded in the aftermath of a shooting at a Nashville Christian school where six people, including three young students, were slain. While the protest also angered some Democrats - video captured some older Black, Democratic legislators berating the trio at the podium - the symbolism of expelling the two Black lawmakers while sparing their white colleague shifted the attention from guns to race.
He sees himself in the young protesters who flooded the capital to call for gun control, even though he calls himself “an elder now in the movement.” His activism reaches back at least to high school, when he complained to the school board about a lack of textbooks. Later, he attended Bowdoin College in Maine, where he was class president and recipient of the President’s Award, given for “exceptional personal achievements and uncommon contributions to the college.”
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