Tennessee’s Justin Pearson takes on America’s most contentious issues

Justin Pearson made national headlines as one of the “Tennessee Three” – the state lawmakers expelled from the capitol protesting for gun control after a deadly school shooting. Three years later, the state representative won a Democratic congressional primary after boldly staking positions on some of America’s most contentious fault lines: voting rights, datacenters and the American war machine.

“Republicans are responding to elected officials who stand up to billion-dollar datacenters, and the billionaires who own them. Democrats are responding to a vision of Medicare for All, ending genocide,” said Pearson. “The confluence that is happening between those issues, is [that] who profits off of war are the same people who are profiting off of polluting our communities and stealing our drinking water for their datacenters that replace our jobs.”

That effort towards uniting disparate perspectives will be key in November’s midterm election, as Tennessee’s ninth district, once the state’s sole majority Black district, was split into pieces after the supreme court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act’s second provision. The redistricting was part of a larger Trump administration effort to retain control of Congress and dilute the Black vote, especially in the south.

At 31, Pearson has spent most of his life fighting for his community. In school, that meant fighting for new textbooks; then he launched a campaign to stop a crude oil pipeline from running through Black neighborhoods in his native Memphis. That was all before he was elected to represent the area in the state legislature – and then, a few months later, expelled over the protest.

In the years since, Pearson has been at the forefront of a local movement against Elon Musk’s xAI, which has built two data centers powered by soot-producing turbines concentrated in a Black neighborhood in south Memphis already suffering from environmental damage. That pollution was exposed in part through Memphis Community Against Pollution, an organization Pearson co-founded with his brother. Though the NAACP and environmental advocacy groups have fought in court to halt the usage of the turbines, the justice department got in the way, arguing the data center was needed during Operation Epic Fury.

The effects of the Trump administration in Memphis continue to be acute: last September, Trump started a Memphis “taskforce” including 13 federal agencies and sent hundreds of federal agents into the city, with agents killing four Black men in the last 10 months. Trump claimed in his announcement that the city is “suffering from tremendous levels of violent crime” – but the week before, local police celebrated overall crime hitting a “historic” 25-year low. In July, over 1,000 people attended a rally for Pearson in response to the killings, where he was joined by congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Summer Lee and Ayanna Pressley.

“I’ve been adamant about prioritizing proximity to people who are poor, communities that are disenfranchised, who have been pushed to the bottom by systems of injustice, for years. That’s how I got my start in community organizing, that’s what I believe now as an elected official, and that is part of the reason that we are seeing a momentous amount of energy in our campaign,” Pearson said.

“There’s also no denying of the zeitgeist of this moment: That people are thirsting for elected officials who are bold enough … willing, and strong enough to stand up to the status quo that has been rigged against everyday working-class people for a long time. And I think people are responding to that.”

With his win, Pearson has joined the ranks of Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed and New York’s Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez as young progressive-populist upstarts sweeping primaries across the country. These candidates are running robust organizing-first campaigns in a model largely credited to New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 win, built on small individual donations (Pearson’s average donation was $31). The strategy echoes the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign and the rise of “the Squad” to Congress in 2018; unsurprisingly, Pearson was endorsed by both Sanders and Justice Democrats, the group that propelled Squad members Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib to office.

“These primaries have shown voters of all ages are ready for next-generation leadership, and are more than willing to challenge the aging Democratic establishment,” said David Hogg, co-founder of progressive Pac Leaders We Deserve, which endorsed Pearson on day one. “From stopping a $2bn oil pipeline to taking on the richest man in the world before most Americans even knew what a data center was to his historic protest for gun safety, he’s consistently out-organized money, power, and corrupt politics.”

Pearson said the numbers he brings out – including 150 people at a rally in Pulaski, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan – and his longtime engagement with his local community could make the change he’s calling for a reality.

“It’s concerning to me that our party would try and put a box around who can be a Democrat when we are literally living in a moment in time where people are trying to put a box around what it means to be an American, what it means to be a citizen,” Pearson said. “It’s the politicos in Washington DC thinking they know what’s happening in the south or what’s happening in our communities better than we do – and they’re wrong.”