On April 6, 2023, the Tennessee
House of Representatives expelled two Black
freshman lawmakers, Justin Jones and Justin
Pearson, for exercising their First Amendment
rights, protesting gun violence with a
bullhorn and demanding state legislative
action on gun control. Their expulsion
occurred after a shooter killed six people,
including three children, at
a Nashville Christian school, resulting in a nationwide
student walkout and massive
student protests at the state Capitol.
The racial optics of removing
two young Black men from office were glaring,
in a legislature whose White Republican
supermajority has thrived on voter
suppression, disenfranchisement and gerrymandering, and which employed arbitrary
rules to silence these lawmakers on the
statehouse floor. Gloria Johnson, a third
lawmaker who faced removal but is White, was
spared expulsion - in her opinion because of
her skin
color.
As shocking as these expulsions
were to many, America has a long history of
removing Black lawmakers from office, quelling
dissent and subverting the will of the voters
- all for the sake of raw power, resisting
demographic change and maintaining White
dominance through antidemocratic and
dictatorial means.
During the Reconstruction era
following the Civil War, 2,000
Black public officials served throughout the
country, with 600 elected officials in state
legislatures and 16 in Congress. The 1868 South
Carolina legislature was the first in the
nation with a Black majority. In Mississippi, a state where the formerly
enslaved outnumbered White people, the 1868
state constitution was one of the first to
establish free public education for children
without regard to race.
Ultimately, across the South,
Black political power was erased by White
pro-Confederate mob violence - with 35
Black officials murdered by the Ku Klux Klan and
others - and White constitutional conventions
designed to eviscerate Black rights, eliminate
Black political leadership and uphold the
segregationist power structure.
In Georgia, 33
Black lawmakers were expelled from the
General Assembly for being Black. White
Democrats in control of the Assembly declared
that the 1868 election won by Republican Gov.
Rufus Bullock was fraudulent and illegitimate, and that
the new state constitution did not grant the
Black legislators the right
to hold office. They further argued that
formerly enslaved Black people had no right to
vote. Known as the “Original 33,” 24 of the
expelled lawmakers were ministers.
“Never, in the history of the
world, has a man been arraigned before a body
clothed with legislative, judicial or
executive functions, charged with the offense
of being a darker hue than his fellow men,”
said one of the expelled, Rep.
Henry McNeal Turner, on the floor of the
legislature. An ordained minister in the
African Methodist Episcopal Church, Turner
questioned if this was an exclusively White
man’s legislature.
“I hold that I am a member of
this body. Therefore, sir, I shall neither
fawn nor cringe before any party, nor stoop to
beg them for my rights,” Turner said. “You may
expel us, gentlemen, but I firmly believe that
you will some day repent it,” he declared,
adding that Black men should not protect a
country that failed to protect them. “Never
lift a finger nor raise a hand in defense of
Georgia, until Georgia acknowledges that you
are men and invests you with the rights
pertaining to manhood,” Turner added.
Ultimately, the Georgia
legislators successfully lobbied the federal
government for reinstatement. Nonetheless, one-quarter of these men faced
blowback ranging from threats and imprisonment
to beatings and assassination. White
supremacists reclaimed Georgia through a
regime of KKK terror. Ultimately, the campaign
of intimidation and Democratic victories in
the 1870 election eroded Black representation
and power.
Across many states, white
supremacists ushered in the end of Black
elected representation through Jim Crow
authoritarianism. In majority-Black
Mississippi, the 1890
constitutional convention - of which 133
of 134 delegates were White - adopted a new
state constitution with a poll tax and
literacy test, designed to disenfranchise
Black voters. Black people have not held elected
statewide office in Mississippi since 1890.
The last remaining Black
congressman who had been elected during
Reconstruction was George H. White of North
Carolina. White chose not to run for
reelection, as voter suppression and the
disenfranchisement of Black voters undermined
his chances of victory. The only Black member
of the body, he gave his farewell
address on Jan. 29, 1901: “This is
perhaps the Negroes’ temporary farewell to the
American Congress, but let me say, Phoenixlike
he will rise up some day and come again. These
parting words are in behalf of an outraged,
heartbroken, bruised and bleeding, but
God-fearing people; faithful, industrious,
loyal, rising people - full of potential
force.” Congress would not have another Black
member until 1929 with the election of Rep.
Oscar S. De Priest of Illinois.
The troubling practice of
targeting democratically elected officials
continued into the 20th century, even after
the passage of federal legislation such as the
1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights acts.
In January 1966 - a century after the Original
33 were expelled in Georgia - the Georgia
House of Representatives refused to seat civil
rights activist Julian Bond* because he
opposed the Vietnam War. Bond, who was the
public relations director of the Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, had endorsed a committee
statement condemning the war and spoken out in
support of other forms of resistance to the
war. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led a demonstration at the state Capitol in
Atlanta to protest the refusal to seat Bond.
The U.S.
Supreme Court ruled that December that
Georgia unconstitutionally excluded Bond for
exercising his First Amendment rights, and
Bond was seated the following month. “The
manifest function of the First Amendment in a
representative government requires that
legislators be given the widest latitude to
express their views on issues of policy
…debate on public issues should be
uninhibited, robust, and wide-open,” wrote
Chief Justice Earl Warren for the court.
Tennessee, in particular, has a
long-unaddressed history of racial violence.
After all, it was the state that gave birth to
the KKK. An angry White mob forced journalist
Ida B. Wells-Barnett to flee the state and
burned down her newspaper’s office for writing
about the lynching of Black men. King was
assassinated in Memphis while fighting for
sanitation workers.
And while Jones and Pearson have
been reappointed, Tennessee and other
Republican-controlled states are neutralizing
the power of Black elected officials and
enacting policies that aren’t responsive to
the public. Using their states as laboratories
for neo-Jim Crow policies, White reactionaries
are cementing power through gerrymandering and
voter suppression.
For example, the very blue city
of Nashville has no Democratic representation
in Congress because Republicans have carved up
the city and apportioned the pieces to
Republican districts.
The majority-White GOP
Mississippi legislature - in a state where
people of color are 44 percent of the
population - is creating a state-controlled
court system and police force in the
majority-Black capital of Jackson, amounting to a White takeover
of a Black municipality. Texas state officials
announced the takeover of the predominantly
Latino and Black Houston
Independent School District, the largest in the state,
without explanation and amid protesting
parents. Georgia’s GOP-dominated legislature
is following the lead of states such as
Florida, Indiana, Missouri and Pennsylvania
and pushing a bill to remove “woke prosecutors” such as Fulton County
District Attorney Fani Willis, who considered
indicting former president Donald Trump for
crimes related to the 2020 election.
In contrast to their
predecessors, however, today’s white
supremacist politicians must contend with
dwindling support for policies that are deeply
unpopular and barbaric to the majority of
people. And this time, the majority of
Americans, rather than solely Black people,
are being targeted for punishment - through
abortion bans, voter suppression measures,
anti-LGBT legislation, book bans, history bans
and refusals to pass gun-control legislation.
These do not even reflect the will of much of
the White
public.
An interracial coalition of
Americans can turn this around by working to
overturn White minority rule. “They tried to
kill democracy. They tried to expel the
people’s choice and the people’s vote. And
they awakened a sleeping giant,” Justin
Pearson said after he returned to the
Tennessee House.
This
commentary is also posted on WashingtonPost.com
