Protesters filled the Tennessee State Capitol on Wednesday with chants of ‘Hands off our vote!’ and ‘Shame, Shame!’ as Republican lawmakers entered the second day of a special session aimed at redistricting the state to eliminate the last majority Black district.
The primary target is Congressional District 9, which covers Memphis, and currently sends the sole Democrat from Tennessee, Steve Cohen, to the House of Representatives.
“The crowds decided to disrupt because they’re not feeling heard and even when we try to do it the right way and let the process play out, they’re not paying attention,” Jessica Miller, an organizer of Indivisible Memphis, told The Institute for Public Service Reporting.
The special session, called by Gov. Bill Lee to redistrict the state less than six months from the midterm elections, followed calls by President Donald Trump and Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn to turn the state wholly red. The effort followed a controversial Supreme Court decision last week that diluted the landmark 1965 civil rights law, the Voting Rights Act. The ruling removed protections for voting districts with majority Black populations. It now will be monumentally harder for electoral maps to be challenged as racially discriminatory under the 1965 law.
After the Supreme Court ruling on April 29th, Tennessee politicians moved quickly to start redistricting. There are currently nine congressional districts in Tennessee and Republicans control eight of them. The lone Democratic seat is in Memphis, a majority Black city. The proposed re-districting will split Memphis among three districts such that Republicans would control every seat if voting trends from previous elections continue.
“This transparent effort to create a seat for a member of Congress who will rubber stamp Trump’s increasingly bizarre and dangerous agenda will also dilute the Black vote in Tennessee to the point of irrelevance,” Cohen said in a press release.
The Tennessee legislature is expected to vote on the motion today.
“If Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, if we don’t fight together now, we will see the greatest dilution of Black political power since the end of Reconstruction,” said Justin Pearson, a state representative who is challenging Cohen in the Democratic primary for the district. “Today in this special session they’re talking about taking our district, District 9 back home in Memphis, but tomorrow they’re going to be talking about taking all of our representation.”
In 2008, Democrats had won five of the state’s nine House seats. Subsequent elections till 2020 saw Democrats reduced to two out of nine. Since 2022, there has only been one Democratic seat. With the state having consistently voted Republican in presidential elections through this entire period, partisan redistricting or gerrymandering of Tennessee’s congressional map, including in 2012 and 2022, has been among the key causes of the reduction in Democratic representatives.
Pearson has been leading a campaign titled ‘Defend District 9’, mobilizing Memphians to protest the proposed redistricting. The campaign website states, “This is a direct attack on Black political power and our community in Memphis — a community built by people who fought, bled, and sacrificed for the rights we have today. We’re not backing down!” On Wednesday evening, the state’s Democrats organized a People’s Hearing on Redistricting.
At 6 a.m. Tuesday morning, the first day of the special session, a group of around three dozen Memphians got on a bus outside Asbury Methodist Church in Memphis and headed on a 200-mile drive to the state Capitol in Nashville to join the protests later that day. The mobilization was organized by Indivisible Memphis, the Equity Alliance and other groups. Miller estimates at least 150 Memphians were at the Capitol building on Tuesday, and that even more had joined the demonstrations since then. On Tuesday, anti-redistricting protestors in Nashville also blocked the entryway to the parking garage where state legislators were arriving.
“One of the things that we identified that was really important was for when the legislative special session started, we wanted to make sure that they knew that the people were watching,” Miller said.
On the steps outside the Capitol building Tuesday, Memphians stood behind Democratic state politicians as they spoke to a crowd of protesters and reporters.
A crowd of hundreds from all over Tennessee gathered in Speaker Beth Harwell Plaza beneath the Capitol building. Speakers addressing them included Nashville mayor Freddie O’Connell and president of the Tennessee NAACP, Gloria Sweet-Love.
The demonstration ended with a speech from Pearson.
“Because if we keep marching, if we keep pressing, if we keep fighting, the future that our descendants will live into will be a better one than this one,” he said. “And our message to the Republican party, our message to that racist, white-supremacist president Donald Trump is that we will fight.” The crowd then marched to the state Capitol before the special session began.
Pearson paid tribute to a sculpture inside the Capitol depicting African Americans voting after the passing of the 14th and 15th amendments.
As the special session was about to begin, protestors filled the seats of the legislative hall. There were chants from protestors outside but inside, just nervous quiet. State Representative Justin Jones, D-Nashville, sat among people in the crowd and spoke with them while politicians took their seats on the floor.
The session quickly ended and the vote on redistricting was moved to later in the week. There were cheers from the crowd but things quickly got awry as legislators attempted to leave the room. Protestors surrounded a walkway, blocked off by Tennessee Highway Patrol troopers, and yelled and heckled at each politician as they passed.
“Don’t you dare let nobody tell you we don’t have hope because we are a red state,” said Tequila Johnson, co-founder of The Equity Alliance. “Tennessee is a movement state.”
