Virginia is scheduled to play its football season opener in Tennessee, where the House of Representatives just voted to expel two Black members for protesting gun violence in the wake of the murders of six in a Nashville school last month.
It’s time for Virginia Athletics to start doing whatever needs to be done to get as far away from having to play a football game in that racist backwater.
And before you @me, the vote to expel the two Black politicians – Justin Jones and Justin Pearson – carried obvious racist connotations, because the third member of the Tennessee Three who had faced expulsion, Gloria Johnson, who is White, was spared.
“Well, I think it’s pretty clear. I’m a 60-year-old white woman, and they are two young Black men,” Johnson acknowledged in an interview with CNN.
“A state in which the Ku Klux Klan was founded is now attempting another power grab by silencing the two youngest Black representatives,” Jones said.
“You cannot ignore the racial dynamic of what happened today — two young Black lawmakers get expelled, and the one white woman does not,” Pearson said.
To point out more from the obvious, Virginia’s athletics director, Carla Williams, is Black, head coach Tony Elliott is Black, seven members of the coaching staff are Black, a majority of the players are Black.
And all involved are still reeling from the tragic gun violence on Nov. 13 that took the lives of three football players – Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr. and D’Sean Perry – all Black kids.
The kids don’t need to be playing a football game against a backdrop of state-sponsored racism aimed at silencing the views of those who think lawmakers need to do more than pay lip service to the gun violence that is racking our country.
That’s where this political row started, with Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton silencing Democrats from being able to speak on gun violence in the wake of the March 27 shooting at The Covenant School, in which three students and three adults were killed by a woman armed with an AR-15 assault rifle, a 9 mm Kel-Tec SUB2000 pistol caliber carbine, and a 9 mm Smith and Wesson M&P Shield EZ 2.0 handgun.
“The three of us were tired of our voice not being heard in the morning for Welcome and Honoring,” Johnson said. “We didn’t get called on for the voucher bill that happened, and we decided between bills we were going to walk up, we were going to acknowledge the people outside surrounding this building, in the rotunda, and we’re going to speak to their issue and tell them that we are with them, because they needed to hear that.”
“Our mics were cut off throughout the week whenever we tried to bring up the issue of gun violence,” Jones said. “When I went outside to support those protesting, the Speaker cut off my voting machine —the first time I’ve ever seen that happen. The Speaker refused to let us talk during Welcome and Honoring to welcome our constituents — the thousands gathered outside the Capitol building.”
Sexton, for his part, ridiculously likened the lawmakers’ March 30 protest, aimed at just being heard on the floor of the Tennessee House, to the Jan. 6 insurrection, an overt effort by pro-Trump supporters, spurred on by Donald Trump himself, to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Republican Reps. Bud Hulsey, Gino Bulso and Andrew Farmer took the bait, sponsoring legislation to remove Johnson, Jones and Pearson as punishment.
Until yesterday’s votes, the Tennessee House had voted to expel a total of eight members dating back to Reconstruction – six of those in the 19th century, involving former Confederates who had refused to affirm the citizenship of former slaves.
The most recent expulsion came in 2016, when the Tennessee House voted 70-2 to expel Republican Jeremy Durham after an investigation detailed allegations of improper sexual contact with at least 22 women during his four years in office.
In 2019, another Republican, David Byrd, faced accusations of sexual misconduct dating to when he was a high school basketball coach more than 30 years ago, but at the time, Sexton said it was up to Byrd to decide whether he should continue in the state legislature.
“You have to balance the will of the voters and overturning the will of the voters,” Sexton said back in 2019.
What Sexton and his Republican colleagues did on Thursday was more than overturn the will of the voters in Nashville and Memphis who sent Justin Jones and Justin Pearson to represent their interests.
“What we saw in Tennessee yesterday was an attack on democracy and very overt racism, as you can see that the two youngest Black lawmakers were kicked out, but our colleague, my dear sister, Gloria Johnson, a white woman, was not. And we see clearly, the nation has seen clearly, what is going on in Tennessee,” Jones told CNN on Friday.
A football game isn’t that important in the context of everything else going on down there.
Don’t even buy out the contract; just forfeit the damn game.
None of our dollars should go to doing anything to benefit the racists who run that godforsaken state.
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Chris Graham
