“The attempts to expel Reps. Jones, Johnson, and Pearson show a dark truth in the light of day: there’s a robust and racist connection between fighting against gun safety and dismantling our democracy….” (NBCNews.com & MSNBC)
The background for this quotation comes as a result of numerous tragic and troubling events in Tennessee in the past few weeks.
On March 29, 28-year-old Audrey Hale entered a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, where he had been a student, and murdered three-nine-year-old children and three staff using an AR-15. He fired a total of 152 rounds in a period of about 13-14 minutes before being killed by two police officers who risked their lives to stop the shooter. Hale was identified as transgender through his use of male pronouns on social media.
Ten days later three Democratic state representatives demonstrated against the legislature’s Republican super majority by holding a peaceful sit-in over gun violence in the well of the state House chamber. On April 6, two of the three representatives were expelled from their elected positions. The two who were expelled were Black men, while the third was a white woman.
Having taught about racism in the turbulent 1950s and 1960s during the Civil Rights era in my job as a high school social studies teacher, memories flooded back to me about the peaceful demonstrations where Black youths sat in chairs in the whites-only department store lunch counters. Food and epithets were poured on them from angry white youths who objected to any idea that Blacks had rights in a segregated Jim Crow South.
I was also reminded of the peaceful demonstration in 1965 in Selma, Alabama where demonstrators, dressed in suits and ties and Sunday church outfits, marched toward the Edmund Pettus Bridge on their route to the state capital in Montgomery. They encountered high-pressure water from fire hoses and the effects of tear gas. Police on horseback trampled on and beat peaceful demonstrators, others sicced vicious dogs on them or hit them with wooden batons, some, nearly to death. One minister died.
It seems the Tennessee state legislature doesn’t understand the intent of the First Amendment right to assemble and demonstrate. Breaking a House rule of decorum doesn’t seem to merit such extreme actions by Republicans, especially if we consider that the G.O.P. controlled U.S. House of Representatives has refused to expel George Santos, one who confessed he lied again and again on his resume when running for his congressional seat. That would seem to be a more serious breach of “decorum” that should not have been tolerated. Hypocrisy seems to be an operating principle of the Republican Party.
Deflection seems to be another operating principle. Republicans couldn’t defend an evil they are responsible to solve. Instead, they chose to turn attention from the issue of gun violence by expelling Black representatives for exercising their First Amendment right of free speech. It makes no sense.
The two expelled Tennessee representatives can run for reinstatement to their lost seats in an upcoming election. Let’s hope the voters of Tennessee are less racist than their state Republican legislators. Let’s hope voters will send a strong message to the nation that they will not abide such bigotry. We are no longer in the 1950s and 1960s. Jim Crow laws are no longer legal in the nation.
Let’s hope the words of former representative Justin Jones are taken to heart: “What is happening here today is a situation in which the jury has already publicly announced the verdict…. A lynch mob assembled to not lynch me but our democratic process.”
Let’s hope the words of the white female representative who was not expelled are taken to heart: “’America should be worried,’ according to the Tennessean newspaper of Nashville, that the failed vote to expel her ‘might have to do with the color of my skin.’”
Racism and bigotry are alive, well, and infectious in America today.
