In late September, the Tennessee state representative Justin J. Pearson took his campaign for a seat in the U.S. Congress to a tiny town called Bolivar, about seventy miles east of Memphis. Pearson spoke to about forty mostly Black residents in the wood-panelled sanctuary of the Campbell Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, where he castigated the “billionaire class,” the costs of health care, and what he described as the growing danger of data centers across Tennessee. This would have been standard fare for the race he had been planning to run, but the boundaries of Tennessee’s District Nine changed abruptly in early May. Once largely confined to Shelby County, the home of Memphis, the district now extends nearly two hundred miles east before it makes a sharp turn north, taking it to the outskirts of Nashville. The fourteen other counties that constitute the new district are largely made up of small towns like Bolivar. Most of them are majority white. For Pearson, a thirty-one-year-old Black activist who was born and raised in Memphis, the challenge has been taking a campaign geared for urban enclaves to the countryside.
This is exactly the conundrum that Tennessee Republicans envisioned when they were the first to take advantage of the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Louisiana v. Callais last spring, which hollowed out the remnants of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. For decades, plaintiffs had been permitted to contest electoral districts that had discriminatory effects, without needing to prove discriminatory intent. A 1986 Supreme Court case had created the modern test for those claims: a minority group needed to be large, geographically compact, politically cohesive, and most often thwarted by a white majority. The current Court eliminated those protections, in yet another riff on its insistence that racism is present only when it is forthrightly declared. The Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn urged her state’s lawmakers to quickly remake its one majority-minority district, imploring, “Let’s get it done.” On May 7th, a mere eight days after the Supreme Court decision, the lone Tennessee district with a Democratic representative vanished from the map. District Nine, which had been sixty per cent Black and twenty-three per cent white, was now thirty-two per cent Black and fifty-eight per cent white.
At the time, Pearson was challenging Representative Steve Cohen, who had held the seat for two decades, for the Democratic nomination. One poll last spring had the two candidates in a dead heat. But, when the redistricting was announced, Cohen, who is seventy-seven, announced his retirement. Pearson easily won the Democratic Party primary in early August, with sixty-five per cent of the vote. He would now have to face the Republican candidate, a state senator and a MAGA acolyte named Brent Taylor. I rode with Pearson on his way to Bolivar, and I asked him how he decided to stay in the race. “There was maybe a two-minute opportunity to grieve what we had lost. It felt very quick,” he said. “They can try to rig the maps, but maps do not vote. People do. My job is to run a campaign that actually appeals to people all across the state, all across this country even.”
Pearson is a young man, the fourth of five boys, raised in a Black working-class community in South Memphis. Pearson’s parents were poor, but they were strivers. When he was eleven, his family moved to Washington, D.C., while his father attended divinity school at Howard University, before eventually returning to Memphis. In 2013, Pearson graduated as valedictorian of Mitchell High School, after leading protests at the school to demand textbooks for students. He went to Bowdoin College and worked a couple of nonprofit jobs in Boston before returning to Memphis during the pandemic.
Pearson’s young political career has been shaped by his activism. Soon after he returned home, he helped lead a campaign against a pipeline that would have carried crude oil from southwest Memphis across the Tennessee-Mississippi state line. The path of the pipeline, owned by Valero and Plains All American Pipeline, was intended to snake through Boxtown, a working-class Black community in South Memphis. When representatives of the companies met with a neighborhood association in an attempt to answer questions and possibly ease fears, they did the opposite. In explaining why these companies chose Boxtown, a Plains representative said, “We took, basically, a point of least resistance.” The companies furthermore threatened to invoke eminent domain to simply take land if the community resisted.
Pearson co-founded an organization called Memphis Community Against the Pipeline, in October, 2020. He recalled, “We started campaigning that day, for nine months straight, every single day. I worked eight, nine, ten hours a night, losing my voice, explaining to people what was going on and demanding that they listen. We built a legal strategy, a communications strategy, and a political strategy because nobody wanted to touch it. Democrats and Republicans, nobody wanted to fight for Boxtown, Westwood, and the other communities along the route.” The organization’s efforts ultimately gained the support of local Democrats—and attracted attention from national figures such as the Reverend William Barber, the leader of the Poor People’s Movement; and Al Gore, the former Vice-President and Tennessee senator. In March, 2021, Gore attended a Memphis march against the pipeline and declared it a “reckless, racist ripoff.” By July, the two companies had cancelled their plans for the project, describing their retreat as “primarily due to lower US oil production resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.” The scrappy locals had won.
The momentum from the pipeline win propelled Pearson to state office. After a longtime state representative, Barbara Cooper, died, at the age of ninety-three, he won a race against ten other candidates with fifty-three per cent of the vote. He took office in January, 2023. Two months later, a former student opened fire at the Covenant School, in Nashville, killing three third graders and three staff members. As the shooting sparked demonstrations for gun reform, Pearson joined two Democratic representatives—Justin Jones, also African American, and Gloria Johnson—to propose new gun-safety measures. The trio extended the protest to the floor of the state House, chanting through a megaphone and bearing handmade signs demanding that officials “protect kids, not guns.” In response, the Republican majority expelled Pearson and Jones. Local Party officials in Memphis and Nashville sent Pearson and Jones back to the state House as “substitutes” until special elections officially restored them to their seats.
Photograph by George Walker IV / AP
The hope for Pearson is that his name recognition can help him win votes beyond Memphis. But he is facing a considerable challenge. For the past decade, the other fourteen counties that make up District Nine—including Giles County, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, in 1865—have been Trump country. But Pearson said that he’s been surprised at times by his rural support. “We were in Lincoln County, and there were nearly two hundred people there. It shocked me because I had never been to a lot of these counties before,” he said. “These are places that have been overlooked for so long. Now we are able to give rise and give voice to them in a really meaningful way.”
This is where Pearson’s race has become part of the national referendum on the strategy and politics of the Democratic Party. Pearson is not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, but he is running a campaign that is shaped by the economic populism of the Democratic left. Pearson is also not among the Democrats who are trying to move beyond the anti-racist politics of the Black Lives Matter years; he is attempting to demonstrate that race and class politics across the South almost always overlap. When Pearson speaks about economic inequality, health care, and pollution, he believes that he is talking to voters beyond the usual racial and partisan alignments. This includes reaching disaffected Trump voters. “This MAGA-envisioned state and MAGA-envisioned country are not good for any of us, including MAGA people. Especially MAGA people,” he told me. “Life should not be this hard in the richest country in the history of the world. My thing is that, if you are not a billionaire, you are one of us.”
It’s not clear how much traction Pearson’s message has in the counties he’s running in. But the one poll that has appeared during the race shows him trailing Taylor, the Republican candidate, by only four points—remarkable considering that the newly configured district would have supported Trump over Harris by twenty-one points in the 2024 election. Early this month, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee added District Nine to its expanded list of targeted “red to blue” states.
The rising popular resistance to data centers appears to be adding to his support. Pearson and his brother KeShaun are the two most prominent local opponents of Elon Musk’s xAI, a subsidiary of which has developed a massive data-center complex, provocatively named Colossus, in and around South Memphis. The Pearsons’ group, Memphis Community Against Pollution, has questioned the legality of the company’s use of gas turbines at the data centers, alleging violations of the Clean Air Act and raising concerns about air quality. Last spring, the N.A.A.C.P. filed suit to stop the centers’ use of gas-powered turbines, citing air and noise pollution. Two months later, homeowners in northwest Mississippi filed a lawsuit to stop what they describe as the noise pollution generated by the Colossus data centers. (The xAI subsidiary has denied the claims against it.) The group has also been central to a campaign to pressure the Memphis City Council to implement a yearlong moratorium on the development of new data centers. Lately, as local opposition to the data centers has grown even more heated, the Pearson brothers were briefly banned from city-council meetings. (A local judge blocked the ban on Tuesday, allowing the them to return to the meetings.)
To Pearson, the movement to halt the data centers has demonstrated that his politics can resonate well beyond Memphis. One recent campaign ad features a white couple, named Stephanie and William, from Lincoln County, which is eighty-seven per cent white. They explain that they don’t agree with all of Pearson’s positions—Stephanie says she’s voted for Trump—but that they support him because of his anti-pipeline and data-center activism. At the church in Bolivar, Pearson related that, in one middle-class white community in Mississippi, “they have a data center even closer than the people in Boxtown do. They are getting the noise pollution. They can’t sleep, can’t sell their homes, and are getting sick because they can’t get rest. These are white folks, which is why I remind everybody, ‘Y’all, it is them at the top versus the rest of us. We can’t let them divide us, because that is how they have been winning.’ ”
One outcome of cynical Republican redistricting is that Black and white, urban and rural voters alike in Tennessee have the chance to consider an alternative to both mainstream Democratic and hard-right Trumpian politics. Pearson told me, “I do not know what is going to happen with this race.” But, he said, of his campaign, “We are coming for everywhere and everybody, including people who are disaffected, whether they are Democrats, Republicans, or unaffiliated. I think we are making a significant change in what people expect from those who want to represent them. I think we are done with the go-along-to-get-along politicians.” ♦