Tennessee State Rep. Justin J. Pearson became a progressive star during “the Tennessee Three” controversy this spring, when Republicans in the Volunteer State voted to remove him and another black legislator, Justin Jones, from elected office. They were accused of violating decorum to join demonstrators in the statehouse demanding common sense gun control laws in the wake of the mass shooting at Nashville’s Covenant School on March 27. The power play backfired however, as Pearson and Jones were thrust into the national spotlight, amplifying their voices as the hashtag #NoJustinsNoPeace trended on Twitter.
Pearson was already attracting national attention after co-founding the environmental justice group Memphis Community Against the Pipeline in 2020. Now known as Memphis Community Against Pollution, MCAP (an Anthropocene Alliance member), succeeded in stopping oil giant Valero Energy and partners from running the Byhalia Connection Pipeline through South Memphis. The good will Pearson earned in the community during MCAP’s fight against the pipeline then propelled him to the Tennessee State House.
I caught up with Justin on May 24 to talk about his work in Tennessee and the struggle for environmental justice across the country and the world. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation.
GS: I gotta ask – is the Tennessee Republican delegation racist or just stupid? Didn’t they know that trying to unseat young Black state representatives wasn’t a good look?
JP: The Tennessee Republican Party is operating as a mobocracy. Instead of a democracy where people rule, the mob mentality rules, which is venomous and evil at its roots. And we have a system of people who abuse their power and authority for their own gain and the gain of their corporate lobbyists. They perpetuate the harm of white supremacy, racism, bigotry, and patriarchy, as part of [bringing] their own demise.
GS: Were there hints they wanted to get rid of you guys even before the gun control protest, and were just looking for a pretext?
JP: They have taken issue substantially with things Rep. Jones and I have said and done in our committees, and on the House floor when we were demanding that laws be more just. There’s always ire when we stand up and talk about poor people, or queer people, or looted communities. It’s never well received there.
GS: Alright, let’s go back to how you wound up in the Tennessee State House, through your work with MCAP. One of the pipeline developers you fought admitted that South Memphis was chosen for the location because it was deemed a “point of least resistance”, since it’s a lower income community of color. Was there a pivotal moment or two in the fight against the Byhalia pipeline you could identify that helped turn the tide?
JP: Well thanks for asking. The Byhalia Connection Pipeline was one of the most racist and environmentally unsound projects I’ve ever heard of, though a lot of the projects that these fossil fuel companies are promoting fall in line with that. They hunt communities that have been historically hurt, disadvantaged, and oppressed and they exploit them before the community has true information about what the ramifications are — their land stolen, their water at risk, and their air polluted.
We were fortunate in so many ways, blessed in so many ways in the Byhalia Connection Pipeline fight, not just by the people power portion of it but really by God’s timing. Because there was a delay in their ability to construct the pipeline and move it forward because of Covid-19. There was also a meeting in the community they were forced to have — after calling our community the path of least resistance — by Dr. Barbara Cooper, our state representative.
One pivotal moment happened at our first rally. I was pretty intentional about making sure that people in the community were able to speak and have their grievances heard by whoever was listening in the community, or elected officials. And at the end of that meeting, Marie Odum spoke. She was the daughter of Clyde Robinson, who had become one of our key plaintiffs in the fight against the pipeline, a landowner we worked closely with on the eminent domain cases.
She got up and she told how they were taking her father to court to try to take his land. That was a really big moment for us. Because finally after a lot of searching, we found somebody who was directly impacted. All of us were being indirectly impacted by the building of a pipeline, breaches in the clay layer, all these [technical] things. But we hadn’t had somebody who had paperwork associated with the pipeline companies taking their land. So that was a really big moment…and then Mrs. Scottie Fitzgerald was also really important; she was the second landowner. So having people proximate in the fight… was a big deal… and that helped us obviously to start to build our case against these pipeline companies’ eminent domain claims.
Another big moment was when we learned that the pipeline company needed the county government to give them land to build the project. This is why it’s just so important to find out where these things are being routed, so that communities can resist appropriately. They had to get the county government to sell them land. We learned about that on a Thursday, and the vote was going to happen on a Monday. We had to organize and galvanize our entire coalition and so many more people to prevent the sale of the land. And so, a very critical moment for us was when we were ultimately successful in preventing the land from being sold to the pipeline developers, which disrupted their ability to choose any route they wanted.
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