MEMPHIS, Tenn.—On the 61st anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, Tennessee State Rep. Justin Pearson won the Democratic primary for a congressional seat Republican lawmakers had specifically redrawn to erase the political power of Memphis’s Black majority.
“Exactly 61 years from the signing of the Voting Rights Act, we won our primary despite a redistricting blow that cracked Memphis’ representation in Congress,” Pearson said Thursday night.
Speaking to supporters, he issued a strong condemnation of the GOP’s attacks on voters: “The political dilution and degradation of our rights is happening, but we’re one step closer to Washington, D.C.”
Pearson’s win in the newly carved 9th District follows a special legislative session Tennessee Republicans called in May, at Trump’s urging, after the Supreme Court gutted key protections of the Voting Rights Act. Lawmakers seized the opening to dismantle District 9, which had included all of Memphis and most of Shelby County for 50 years, giving its Black-majority electorate the power to elect a representative of its choosing.
The mid-decade redistricting, rushed through in 48 hours with minimal public input, has been widely denounced by civil rights groups as election interference by design. One of the South’s few remaining majority-Black districts was chopped up into three pieces that now stretch into rural, white, Republican-leaning territory.
Long-time Rep. Steve Cohen, who was Tennessee’s first Jewish member of Congress and has held the seat since 2007, opted not to seek re-election when his district disappeared.
National NAACP President Derrick Johnson called the redrawn map “a deliberate choice to silence Black voters by dismantling a district that has long ensured representation for one of the state’s largest Black populations.” Johnson said in May when his group announced a federal lawsuit against the map.
“We are at the dawn of a new Jim Crow era,” Johnson said. “People fought and died for the representation that lawmakers across the South are so casually eroding.” The suit, which was joined by the ACLU, is still pending, but a three-judge panel denied the plaintiffs’ request for an injunction against the new district lines in July.
The fight against the Republicans’ efforts to silence diverse voices is one Pearson has lived personally. In 2023, he and Rep. Justin Jones were expelled from the Tennessee State House after speaking up for their constituents.
They were part of the “Tennessee Three,” alongside Rep. Gloria Johnson, who joined student protesters demanding gun control after the Covenant School shooting killed three children and three staff in Nashville
As People’s World reported at the time, Republican legislators subjected the two Black lawmakers to open racism during the hearings, with one GOP member telling Pearson twice that he “didn’t understand why he was here.” Johnson, who is white, survived expulsion by a single vote and said the difference was “the color of my skin.”
The AFL-CIO’s Liz Shuler and Fred Redmond called the expulsions “an affront to democracy,” noting they came just days after the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in Memphis, where he’d gone to support striking Black sanitation workers. Both lawmakers were swiftly and unanimously reinstated to their positions by local officials and then re-elected outright.
That fighting record helped fuel Pearson’s congressional primary run, which drew endorsements from SEIU and AFSCME along with Sen. Bernie Sanders, who said Pearson would stand up to “the rich and power-hungry elites.”
As for Tennessee Republicans, they didn’t get everything they wanted Thursday. Although they got to go ahead with using their vote-suppressing map for the elections, GOP primary voters rejected Trump-endorsed Rep. Andy Ogles, handing his redrawn 5th District nomination to former Agriculture Commissioner Charlie Hatcher, who was backed by Gov. Bill Lee.
It’s a rare defeat for a Trump favorite but no rebuke of the gerrymander itself. Republicans still expect to sweep all nine of Tennessee’s congressional seats in November.
That’s the uphill climb facing Pearson. His new district, carried by Kamala Harris by 43 points in 2024, now leans Republican, with 71% of voters saying they’re unfamiliar with him. He’ll face Trump-backed state Sen. Brent Taylor, who branded Pearson “the face of the extreme left.”
Memphis voters see clearly what’s been done to them. “We only had one district in the whole state of Tennessee, and you don’t even want that to be fair? It’s just terrible,” said Lonzo Taylor, a 72-year-old retired postal worker.
Thursday’s win for Pearson shows that the people who live in the city are not done fighting, but overcoming the Republicans’ racist map in November will be a difficult climb.
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