91 Minutes With ...The Justins

Two Tennessee lawmakers are demonstrating a new way to do opposition politics in red-state America.

- By Zak Cheney-Rice

The first thing you notice about Justin Jones and Justin Pearson is their hair. The left balcony above the floor in the Tennessee House of Representatives in Nashville provides an unobstructed view of their desks, where they have been shunted into a back corner like misbehaving children, surrounded by a sea of hostile heads, almost all of them gray, white, or glistening pink. Pearson’s wiry frame is topped by a luxuriant Afro, while Jones sports a jet-black ponytail—visual emblems of the lonely island that both men occupy here.

Facing them at the front of the chamber is Cameron Sexton, the imperious house Speaker whose push to ostracize them even further backfired this spring. After Jones, Pearson, and their white Democratic colleague Gloria Johnson disrupted a session with calls for gun reform in response to a mass school shooting in March that killed three children, Sexton and his supermajority of Republican colleagues voted to expel the two Black lawmakers (but not Johnson), an unprecedented move that turned their plight into a national cause. They were eventually reinstated, but not before VicePresident Harris came to Nashville and declared the situation a crisis of democracy, while the media descended in a swarm that is still buzzing around the capital.