In 2002, two trans teenagers named Ukea Davis and Stephanie Thomas were shot to death one night in Southeast DC. The Washington Post identified them by their birth names, not their chosen names. In the aftermath, I attended a meeting in the basement of a church on East Capitol Street. Many issues were discussed, from public safety to development.
Also attending the meeting was a savvy older black woman who served on the advisory neighborhood commission. Afterward, she paused to look at a framed picture of Dr. King on the wall. Standing beside her, I said, “Look at that handsome man.” She said, “Oh, yes, he was very good looking.” I then realized she had been a young woman in King’s heyday.
Thus we connected despite being separated by more than the 70 blocks between our homes. Our differences of race, gender, and orientation were bridged by a tragedy. On the evening after the shootings, I and other activists had stood at the crime scene across from Nalle Elementary with the mayor, police chief, reporters, and neighborhood residents. A toddler standing near me held a soccer ball almost as large as himself. He started wandering toward a boarded-up apartment building before his mother stopped him.
That child, blissfully unaware of the particular darkness that brought us together, is by now just a few years younger than the two Tennessee Justins, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, who are about the age Dr. King was during the Montgomery bus boycott. Members of Gen Z, they grew up with greater expectations for LGBTQ people than their parents did. At the same time, the MAGA backlash threatens to turn back the clock and run our democracy into a ditch.
DC Emancipation Day is April 16, marking the day in 1862 when slavery was abolished in the District of Columbia. In 2023, there are still people in need of emancipation from racial, gender-based, and other forms of intolerance.
Missouri Republicans recently voted to defund all public libraries. That is like putting a loaded gun to your own head and saying, “Vote for me or the idiot gets it.”
Luckily, teens denied access to books on black or LGBTQ themes can access them electronically through Brooklyn Public Library’s Books Unbanned initiative.
Regarding the Tennessee legislature, Radley Balko writes on Substack: “Fresh off mandating that professors teach ‘both sides’ of slavery … our idiot legislature is now encouraging students to snitch on teachers who are too ‘divisive,’ and in a particularly Orwellian twist, claiming this is all in the name of ‘promoting free expression.’”
Teaching children a non-airbrushed version of our history is essential to bringing the “liberty and justice for all” promised in the Pledge of Allegiance yet denied by Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton and his confederates.
It was not until 2021 that a bust of Confederate general and early Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest was removed from the Tennessee state capitol. He led a massacre at Fort Pillow on April 12, 1864, in which 300 Union soldiers, most of them black, were gunned down after surrendering.
A leaked audio of Tennessee Republicans includes Rep. Jason Zachary objecting to being called racist. If they allowed non-white voters to have their representatives heard in the legislature and desisted from celebrating a racist heritage, it would signal their readiness to help build a new South. Instead, they continue to re-litigate the Civil War.
Michael Harriot of The Grio notes that a majority of Tennesseans support universal background checks, red flag laws, Medicaid expansion, and abortion rights. Their Republican representatives do not care.
Rep. Pearson’s former writing and rhetoric teacher at Bowdoin College, Meredith McCarroll, writes in Salon about him and the other members of the Tennessee Three: “Their voices are disruptive not because they know of no other way to speak, but because the situation called for disruption.”
Republicans provided a reminder of the continuing threat by targeting the Tennessee Three with a robocall falsely accusing them of being violent radicals. It is truly depraved for politicians who defend the January 6 insurrectionists at the US Capitol to demonize peaceful protesters for gun safety in Nashville.
Pearson knows that he and his fellow change agents cannot succeed simply by sitting politely in the legislature while a corrupt Speaker stands smirking with his finger poised on the mute button. The continuing demands by the diverse young people who protested outside the chamber and beyond are charting the course and providing the fuel to make our country live up to its creed.