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.
