Justin Pearson and Justin Jones evoke Civil Rights

Jun 07, 2023

MEMPHIS — Tennessee is a state of Civil Rights’ legends and ghosts, but there’s a new version of Black church and liberation politics here that’s becoming a sensation. It’s called the Justins.

Since their GOP colleagues voted them out of office this spring, state Reps. Justin J. Pearson (D-Memphis) and Justin Jones (D-Nashville) have quickly become 20-something icons whose style, faith and values ring some very familiar bells. They wear crisp suits, intone Jesus, see public protests as essential and define “biblical justice” as care for the poor and oppressed.

“He’s in the same vein as Martin Luther King [Jr.]; his inflections, how he talks,” Julian Liggins, 32, said of Pearson, who regularly preaches Sundays in Black churches and is the son of a pastor. Liggins was one of dozens of striking Memphis factory workers who, one rainy Wednesday late last month, heard the candidate address their rally. Pearson called their strike part of King’s legacy and “the vision God has for our lives.”

“Malcolm!” another striker interjected, prompting nods from Liggins and other young men standing under a roadside tent. They’d just ended the rally of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Union outside an International Flavors and Fragrances plant that makes products like baby formula.

Such weighty comparisons are frequent with Pearson and Jones, who are among Tennessee’s youngest lawmakers and are expected to win their special general election races Thursday.

And along with the comparisons come complex beliefs and feelings about them.

A flash point came earlier this year, in the days after the expulsions, when videos surfaced of Jones, 27, a Vanderbilt University Divinity School student, singing protest hymns with folk legend Joan Baez, whom he had run into in an airport.

“If you all are going to call them a new generation of leaders and y’all going to say they have new energy, then y’all have to find a new song. I don’t want to hear no young people singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’” Charlamagne Tha God, co-host of the massive NYC-based radio show “Breakfast Club,” said on air in mid-April, triggering laughs from other hosts. “Boy, he pissed me off when I saw him singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ with that White lady in that airport.” (Baez is of Mexican and Scottish heritage).

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To some Black Americans, images of peaceful resistance from the Civil Rights era don’t suit today’s realities, says Anthea Butler, a historian of African-American and American religion at the University of Pennsylvania.

“When you say ‘We Shall Overcome,’ this is not a generation [now] who will let you beat them in streets with hoses and dogs. They will fight back. That image is a passive image. No one likes that. It doesn’t feel like it works because look where we are,” she told The Washington Post.

Both men have had to run four times in the past year due to rules surrounding their April expulsion and reinstatements. The pair raised a combined $2 million during the second quarter of this year, the Associated Press reported, thanks to the national name recognition they gained since being booted out by their fellow lawmakers for protesting in the legislative chamber about gun violence.

But 2023 isn’t 1968, including when it comes to the relationship between religion and politics. The Justins are facing a much less religious country, including segments that are cynical and even repelled by candidates who thunder from pulpits about God being on their side. Experts say the Justins’ unusual campaigns, and the strong reaction to them, could both benefit and threaten the progressive movement of which the men are a part.

And the frequent references to people like King — who was assassinated in Memphis — and the late congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.), a Civil Rights-era icon who was educated at Christian universities in Tennessee, are stirring discussion and debate about the role of Black Christians in the 1950s and 1960s movement, and in 2023.

The Justins sit at the intersection of many social currents.

They offer a new model of politicians who are both really devout and really progressive. That can surface at town halls like two that Pearson had last week, which took place in churches and included prayers to Jesus by clergy and the lawmaker alike. They also included calls to protect abortion rights and LGBTQ people and to raise the state’s minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, one of the lowest in the nation.

Unlike in the Civil Rights era, nearly four in 10 American adults younger than 30 are religiously unaffiliated, and the Democratic Party has for decades taken a somewhat arm’s-length approach to religion. That’s partly a response to many Americans’ revulsion toward the mixing of religion and partisan politics that’s been widespread among White evangelicals in particular in recent decades. And partly an effort to emphasize the party’s respect for church-state separation and the rights of religious minorities and the nonreligious — groups that tend to vote Democrat.

While young African Americans are more religious than young White Americans, their religiosity is still declining. Forty-one percent of Gen Z Black adults — people younger than 25 — say religion is “very important” in their lives, compared with three-quarters of Black adults over 60.

But experts say it’s hard to know yet how younger Americans will respond to this style of religious, progressive politics. The fact that the Justins are African American is significant, said Besheer Mohamed, a Pew Research Center sociologist who co-wrote a major 2021 study about African Americans and religion.

“The Black church played a big role historically and that’s something that young Blacks, even atheists, say: ‘I have to admit the Black church mattered,’” Mohamed said.

But the Justins have sparked a new discussion about the role of Black churches in the Civil Rights movement, and speculation about how clergy in Tennessee and across the country will react to a call the legislators frame as deeply moral and Christian.

Mohamed’s report cited historians saying while Black churches’ organizing was crucial to the Civil Rights movement, African American Christians who were involved were always in the minority. King had to leave his Black Baptist denomination to found a new one that was fully supportive of the movement.

Mandisa Thomas, who leads an advocacy group for non religious African Americans and lives in Atlanta, said it gets buried that the Civil Rights movement leadership included atheist and humanistic African Americans including A. Philip Randolph, who was the director of the 1963 March on Washington, and Julian Bond, who co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and chaired the NAACP.

While nonbelievers do align with religious progressives on issues including racial injustice and over-policing, she said, they’re tired of “the talking points” about how devout this Civil Rights leader or that one was.

“The Black church hijacked the Civil Rights movement,” she said. “There are a number of people who inflate the role of the Black church.”

Wade Munday, a member of the Democratic National Committee based in Tennessee, said the “fearless” and religious ways Pearson and Jones act and speak has state Democrats more energized than they have been in almost two decades. He sees the lawmakers as inclusive and “non-cancelling” and believes even some White evangelicals, who lean Republican, might be open to them.

“The Justins speak to a religion that is open and welcoming to all people and I think that’s refreshing,” he said.

A topic that has inspired Democrats — and some others — is gun reform, the issue that catapulted the Justins to national names. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) has called a special session for Aug. 21. Pearson’s office said they are planning a candlelight vigil and rally, and that he has about 14 pieces of legislation planned. The advocacy group Faith for Black Lives is planning a march that morning that will include Black pastors who favor gun control reform.

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Both men have won their recent races either by wide margins or ran unopposed. On Thursday, Pearson is running against Jeff Johnston, an Independent. Jones is facing Laura Nelson, a Republican.

The Justins’ platforms highlight negative environmental impacts on poor communities, gun reform, expanding health care and living wages, among other goals In the weeks before the special general election, Pearson emphasized quality of life issues like getting trash picked up more quickly and creating more social opportunities for senior citizens.

Jones declined to be interviewed, but Pearson doesn’t seem worried about turning anyone off with his religious talk. His words went viral this spring after the men were removed and then reinstated around Easter and he invoked Jesus’ crucifixion and death.

“I think younger people have left the church en masse because it’s become more of a place of social groups fraternizing and othering people instead of a place of healing,” he told The Post. “Religion, Christianity, faith are supposed to push forward a world that is more just and equitable and everyone is loved. But if the church instead becomes a place that pontificates how to get money from people and, instead of being a place of hope, it’s a place of bludgeoning people because they want to police people’s bodies and thoughts and identity, who wants to be there? That’s a dead church.”

Generally the vibe of Pearson, 28, and his team — which includes his aunt, brother and fiancée — is incredibly upbeat, with lots of we-can-do-this energy.

Occasionally Pearson can sound defensive on the topic of religion, though. At a nighttime town hall in late July in Millington, a suburb north of Memphis, he said “They may not like me because I’m Black, I’m beautiful, I talk about God and I mean it, because I’ve got this Afro and because we refuse to bow down and be broken. But that’s who we are. We don’t bow down to people who want to hurt us.”

Pastor Russell Pointer, a friend and divinity school classmate of Jones, said Jones has a polite, respect-your-elders ethos. He said that may be behind the white suits Jones usually wears when protesting or working in the legislature.

“It’s about his respect for the Civil Rights movement, which was a bit more concerned, [compared to] the modern Black Lives Matter movement, with the respectability of things,” Pointer said. “I do think he embodies the Civil Rights essence, when you want, even in a mug shot, to maintain a certain amount of agency."

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Gauging enthusiasm isn’t easy in a state with one of the lowest voter turnouts. Of the approximately 45,000 registered voters in Pearson’s district, he won his first primary with 1,235 votes and his second with 2,210. Jones, whose district has about 38,700 voters, won his first primary with 1,956 votes and the second with 1,515 votes, according to the secretary of state’s office. Most of their donations come from out of state, according to Tennessee campaign finance records.

John Geer, a Vanderbilt University political scientist who founded a longtime poll that surveys Tennessee voters twice a year, said the men face a heavily gerrymandered state where the legislature is much more Republican and conservative than state voters.

Vanderbilt’s May poll asked Tennesseans’ views on the Justins’ expulsions. Forty-four percent of people younger than 45 strongly or somewhat agreed with the move, and 50 percent of those 45 and older did.

“Some say it sparked a fire that will lead to movement to the center. I think that’s premature,” said Geer. “But it woke up people who were not paying attention.”

Liggins, one of the striking workers, said part of the allure of Pearson and Jones is just that they seem different. “They’re outside the norm. Pearson has the Afro. In Memphis, there aren’t many people we can look up to in politics.”

Pearson preaches in Black churches from the more Afro-centric, such as Abyssinian Missionary Baptist Church, to churches within the Church of God in Christ denomination, where women are not ordained to the highest level of the clergy.

The Rev. Jason Pearson, the lawmaker’s father, said Justin and his four brothers were significantly shaped by the five years they spent as children in the D.C. region while Jason was attending Howard Divinity School. The school and the city have long included many prominent preachers and students of Black Liberation Theology, a school of thought from the 1960s that sees God embodied in humanity’s liberation from political and social oppression.

“Sunday after Sunday, Justin was fed a continuous diet of Black Liberation Theology,” Jason Pearson said of his son.

The theology initially was homophobic and sexist, he said. It’s become more progressive, and he thinks its newer iteration is intriguing to young people seeking higher meaning in social justice causes.

“Prosperity Gospel has for the last 25 years dominated the theological landscape within the Black church and it’s just now dying,” he said of the theology long popular in Black Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity that tells people they can get rich through prayer. “It merged with the bling-bling culture of hip-hop to create a synergy within our community and I think now liberation theology is on the rise.”

It’s hard to tell how widely the Justins’ blend of confrontational politics, devout Christianity and progressive values will fly with older Black Christians, who vote Democrat but are socially conservative. In one video in which Pearson is exuberantly preaching, elders surrounding him are straight-faced.

The Rev. Earle Fisher, a teacher and activist who leads Abyssinian, thinks many Black churches are far too apolitical. He calls them “White evangelicals in blackface.” He thinks Pearson and Jones represent an opportunity for Black churches in particular to rekindle their flame related to social justice and liberation.

“I’ve heard Black pastors who 10 or 15 years ago would call me a radical, … and now they wear dashikis and say ‘White supremacy.’ I think they are trying to be more socially conscious.”