Three Democratic lawmakers demonstrated against gun violence, after another killing spree hit a Nashville school, killing 6. Two of them, black, were then excluded from the assembly.
A decision that reacted to the top of the state. United States President Joe Biden, but also his Vice President Kamala Harris, support the three Tennessee parliamentarians, including two African Americans, who were expelled from the local parliament for protesting against gun violence , the White House said.
Joe Biden spoke by telephone with the three elected Democrats on Friday and “thanked” them for their calls to ban assault rifles and for “defending (the) democratic values”, before inviting them to come “soon ” to the White House.
Vice-President Kamala Harris, for her part, went to meet them in Nashville, capital of this southern state. She will also call, once again, on the US Congress to ban assault rifles – a call that was doomed to failure, due to fierce Republican opposition to such a move.
Parliamentary exclusion, a very rare measure
Kamala Harris first went to a rally organized at a Nashville university in support of the three elected Democrats targeted Thursday by a vote of their conservative colleagues for not having respected the decorum of the assembly.
Two of them, African-Americans Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, were expelled, an extremely rare measure that the state House of Representatives did not ultimately apply to a third white elected official, Gloria Johnson. . Accusations of racism multiplied after this decision.
“The silencing of two black elected officials for peacefully protesting gun violence is not only racist, it is also a radical departure from the democratic rules and traditions upon which our nation was founded,” he said. tweeted the elected democrat Yvette Clarke.
Three elected officials mobilized after a new killing in a school
On March 30, a few days after a massacre in a Christian school in Nashville (six dead including three children), Justin Jones, Justin Pearson and Gloria Johnson had joined hundreds of demonstrators in the precincts of parliament to demand stricter regulation of fire arms.
The protesters had entered the Capitol of Tennessee to challenge the elected officials gathered in session.
Justin Jones and Justin Pearson had notably used a megaphone to invite demonstrators to shout slogans such as “Power to the people” and “No peace without action”, according to several media.
The two black elected officials alone to be excluded
Thursday, the day of the vote, “we had the impression of being in the middle of a trial of the Jim Crow era”, launched at a press conference Friday Jesse Chism, the vice-president of the black parliamentary group. in the Tennessee Assembly, in reference to the segregationist laws in force for some until the middle of the 20th century.
Gloria Johnson, who narrowly escaped disqualification, said her motives were clear.
“I’m a 60-year-old white woman and they are two young black men,” she said.
“Unraveled democracy” according to an elected official
Justin Jones and Justin Pearson delivered impassioned pleas against their exclusion, which earned them praise on social media where a photo of them raising their fists went viral.
It’s “a dangerous precedent for the nation,” Justin Jones told MSNBC.
“If you hadn’t told me this was happening to me, I would have thought it was 1963, not 2023. Because what we’re seeing is a super- predominantly white majority that is unraveling democracy,” he added, saying the Justice Department needed to look at the terms of the exclusion.
