Nashville expulsions: ‘Two steps forward, one back’ for Black residents

In Nashville, voters see expulsions of Black Democrats echoing history - The Washington Post

NASHVILLE — Tajuana Nation, the owner of a hair salon catering to Black customers, has always felt that something here is holding her and other minorities back.

But last week’s decision by the Tennessee House of Representatives to kick out the Black man who represents this area reinforced to her that this is still a state where White men wield the true power, a persistent legacy ingrained here for centuries.

“It’s always like we go two steps forward, and one step back,” said Nation, as she finished braiding a customer’s hair. “It’s never like, just keep going forward.”

Across southeastern Nashville and surrounding Davidson County, the expulsion of former state representative Justin Jones (D), who represented this area until Republicans booted him and a Memphis-based legislator on Thursday, has roiled the emotions of residents who are trying to make sense of what it means for their own futures here.

Most residents in this majority-minority district were outraged that Jones, who was expelled for taking part in a protest against gun violence at the state capitol, was removed from office and their votes dismissed, at least for now. The state constitution says expelled lawmakers can run again for their seats in a special election or be reappointed on an interim basis by a vote of their city or county commissions.

“We are just going to vote them right back into office,” said George Oboh, 64, who settled in Nashville after emigrating from Nigeria in 2007 and lives in the district Jones had represented. “These guys are coming back. We will vote them back.”

Derrick Coleman, 41, who settled in Nashville after growing up in Alabama and Mississippi, said it felt as if Jones and Pearson had been slapped around by a system that he believes has never fully represented the needs of Black residents like him.

“It’s the system, and laws we have no control over changing, so what they say goes,” Coleman said of the legislature. “I hate to say it, but I am not surprised at all.”

Some residents of the majority-minority district said they supported GOP legislators’ decision, which they said rested on the arcane rules of legislative decorum. But that view divided largely along racial lines, and even those supporting the expulsion said they worry the decision could set back race relations in a city that continually struggles to move beyond its past. The two forced out — Jones and former representative Justin Pearson (D), are both Black men; a White woman, Rep. Gloria Johnson (D), escaped expulsion by one vote.

“If they broke the rules, they should be suspended,” said Mark Jones, 55, a local minister who is White and said Johnson should have been expelled as well. “It is very concerning to me that this is going to look like a race issue.”

Nashville’s history: Freedom, for those subservient

For historians and civil rights leaders, the drama and political tension that has engulfed this city is anchored in the state’s tumultuous history of racial injustice. Tennessee has exemplified a place where minorities are at least on the surface accepted, and can thrive economically, but often face a sharp response if they too forcefully challenge the White, governing establishment, said Learotha Williams Jr., a scholar of African American, Civil War and Reconstruction at Tennessee State University.

Williams, who is Black, noted that African Americans have been in Nashville “since day one” when the city was founded in the late 1700s; Nashville was the state’s second-largest enslaved person port in Tennessee, trailing Memphis, which Pearson represented.

But unlike other places in the Deep South, enslaved people who had won their freedom in the early 19th century had the right to vote until a backlash after Nat Turner led a rebellion against White enslavers in 1831 in Virginia, Williams said.

“Then … it became increasingly difficult to even be free in this city,” Williams said. “In the 1840s and 1850s, if an enslaver was to free his enslaved population, he would immediately have to send them out of state, so freedom was equated to expulsion from the state.”

During the Civil War, Nashville, which fell to Union army forces relatively early, became a hub for freed formerly enslaved people in the Deep South to travel to “first taste freedom,” Williams said. But Black Americans’ sense of security in Nashville was relatively short-lived.

On Christmas Eve in 1865, several former Confederate soldiers formed the Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski, Tenn., about 70 miles south of Nashville. Five years later, Tennessee elected a governor, John Brown, who was reportedly a member of the organization.

“This speaks to the duality here,” Williams said. “Nashville was a site of freedom, but at the same time, a site that is very much representative of the design to keep African Americans in a subservient position and treat them as second-class citizens.”

By the early 1960s, Nashville became an center of the nationwide civil rights movement. Local students Diane Nash, C.T. Vivian, Bernard Lafayette and John Lewis jumped into the movement, forming and becoming leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

An image from that era shows Lewis, later a congressman, covering his mouth at a downtown Nashville restaurant when the White business owner turned on the fumigation machine during a student-led sit-in.

“There is a direct connection, between those students of the 1960s, and what we are witnessing today,” Williams said. “There is a certain expectation of our young people, that they are supposed to behave a certain way, but when they push, we have a problem.” Thursday’s action, he said, “is even more striking because it happened in the State House.”

Nashville now: more diverse, more politically isolated

Over the past 50 years, Nashville has rapidly expanded its tourism-driven economy into medicine, technology and finance. The skyline of the city, known as the “country music capital of the world,” is being transformed by more than a dozen new office skyscrapers and luxury apartment buildings.

Nashville draws immigrants from every corner of the world. Tens of thousands of Kurdish immigrants settled here after the Gulf War in 1991, and today about a dozen mosques have been focal points for a rapidly expanding immigrant population from Africa and the Middle East.

Jones had represented one of the state’s most diverse legislative districts, with Black and Hispanic residents accounting for about 55 percent of its population. The district stretches from urban South Nashville, to the fast food restaurants and budget motels that line Murfreesboro Pike near the airport, to 1970s-era suburban-style housing developments and goat farms near the city’s main reservoir.

To many residents here, the expulsions showed that growth and diversity has not erased centuries of racial stratification. They also fear that Nashville is becoming more politically isolated from much of the rest of the state, where rural communities now form a solid bloc of conservative views.

As she braced herself with her walking stick, 80-year-old Patsy Apple said the passionate speeches that Jones and Pearson gave on the floor before they were expelled demonstrated “a lot of truth” about how it was hard for young Black men to speak up in Tennessee.

Apple, who is White and remains a Democrat even as her adult children and many of her White neighbors have become staunch Republicans, said she felt awful after hearing Jones and Pearson were expelled while Johnson was not. She said it reminded her of growing up in West Nashville during the Civil Rights era, a time when she said much of the city was under a 7 p.m. curfew because of concerns about race-related disturbances.

“It was a bad time, and a scary time, and it had gotten better and now it seems like it’s coming to the forefront all over again,” said Apple, a retired jeweler who hopes Jones and Pearson keep fighting for gun control measures.

“Something has got to be done,” Apple said. “Our babies are being killed.”

But as he changed the battery of his 1996 Mercury Cougar, Mike Scrubbs said he supported the expulsions, saying Jones and Pearson should have to “follow the rules if they make the rules.” Scrubbs, 73, added that he doesn’t believe they would have been expelled if they had apologized for disrupting legislative decorum.

“They should have kept their mouth shut,” said Scrubbs, who is White. “If they had been a Republican, they would have been all over them saying, ‘He’s inciting a riot at the capitol.’”

‘I am mortified’

Many Black and minority residents in Southeast Nashville said the expulsions had reminded them of the past — when either lawmakers, or in some cases their neighbors, tried to hold them back from truly thriving.

As he walked his miniature pinscher at J Percy Priest Reservoir, music by Old Soul blaring from his cellphone, Troy Williams accused the GOP of “pure racism.”

Williams, who settled in Nashville in 2005 after he retired from the Navy, said he is grateful that Tennessee has become a state where a Black man can have “10 friends who are White.”

The 62-year-old is bothered, however, that he knows “seven of them are going to vote some way against” him at election time. He’s been dismayed that more of his friends and neighbors were not outraged that GOP lawmakers and Gov. Bill Lee (R) carved Davidson County into three separate congressional districts last year, diluting the political strength of minority voters.

“This has been going on forever in the country, especially around here,” Williams said. “So there is no expectation that anything is going to get to where we are an equal society, in this state.”

At the Islamic Center of Tennessee, where hundreds have been gathering each evening to pray and break their Ramadan fast, Dina Sirois said she worries Tennessee lawmakers are trying to pit different sections of the state against one another. The mosque is near the border of Jones’s former legislative district, in a neighborhood where a “Baghdad Market” falafel shop is located directly beside a “Memphis Wings” restaurant.

Sirois, a native of Bosnia and the former executive director of the city’s oldest mosque, the Islamic Center of Nashville, said she has decided to move out of Tennessee because of the legislature’s actions. She said she was shocked to see “big, old White dudes” were “basically speaking to” Jones and Pearson “like they were children.”

“I couldn’t believe what I was watching,” Sirois said. “I thought I was back in the 1800s … I am mortified, and I don’t want to expose my children to it anymore.”

But as he entered the mosque, 30-year-old Hassan Abbi said Nashville — and Tennessee — has been good to his family. After his family fled Somalia, they settled in Kenya, and then Atlanta. His family relocated to Nashville in 2005 after finding it more affordable and an easier place to find stable employment.

In November, Abbi said, he felt inspired to see Jones, “another young person of color, being elected a representative in this part of the country.” And despite the expulsions, Abbi said he’s more convinced than ever that young politicians such as Jones represent the future.

“I think this is just a start because Nashville is not like it used to be,” Abbi added. “A lot more people are moving here, and it’s a lot more vibrant, so there are definitely going to be more changes on the way.”

Whitney Leaming contributed to this report.