The removal of two Black lawmakers from the Tennessee legislature last week, for disrupting proceedings in the state House of Representatives during protests of inaction on gun violence, dispensed with racial symbolism and dog whistles. It was a raw racial drama, an overt and aggressive complement to the racial realities of the gun policies that spawned it.
Neither Justin Jones, of Nashville, nor Justin Pearson, of Memphis, had to convince anyone that racism fueled their expulsions. The Republican legislators who expelled them made that point forcefully enough. A legislature that had refused for years to remove a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, an especially vicious Confederate general and early Ku Klux Klan leader, moved with exceptional speed to remove lawmakers who had championed the cause of protesters — their constituents — seeking gun regulations in the wake of a mass shooting at a Nashville elementary school last month.
To make sure they were properly understood, the Republican majority permitted a white female legislator allied with the two Justins to stay: Only Black men were stripped of power. One sneering GOP legislator spoke to Pearson as if he were a neighborhood boy who had shoveled only half the driveway before wandering off to play.
