Tennessee’s Justin Pearson takes on America’s most contentious issues

The progressive candidate won a Democratic congressional primary after boldly staking positions on voting rights, datacenters and the US war machine

Justin Pearson and Brent Taylor win primaries for key Tennessee House seat

J ustin Pearson made national headlines as one of the “Tennessee Three” – the state lawmakers expelled from the capitol protesting for gun control after a deadly school shooting. Three years later, the state representative won a Democratic congressional primary after boldly staking positions on some of America’s most contentious fault lines: voting rights, datacenters and the American war machine.

“Republicans are responding to elected officials who stand up to billion-dollar datacenters, and the billionaires who own them. Democrats are responding to a vision of Medicare for All, ending genocide,” said Pearson. “The confluence that is happening between those issues, is [that] who profits off of war are the same people who are profiting off of polluting our communities and stealing our drinking water for their datacenters that replace our jobs.”

That effort towards uniting disparate perspectives will be key in November’s midterm election, as Tennessee’s ninth district, once the state’s sole majority Black district, was split into pieces after the supreme court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act’s second provision. The redistricting was part of a larger Trump administration effort to retain control of Congress and dilute the Black vote , especially in the south.

At 31, Pearson has spent most of his life fighting for his community. In school, that meant fighting for new textbooks ; then he launched a campaign to stop a crude oil pipeline from running through Black neighborhoods in his native Memphis. That was all before he was elected to represent the area in the state legislature – and then, a few months later, expelled over the protest.

In the years since, Pearson has been at the forefront of a local movement against Elon Musk’s xAI , which has built two data centers powered by soot-producing turbines concentrated in a Black neighborhood in south Memphis already suffering from environmental damage. That pollution was exposed in part through Memphis Community Against Pollution , an organization Pearson co-founded with his brother. Though the NAACP and environmental advocacy groups have fought in court to halt the usage of the turbines, the justice department got in the way, arguing the data center was needed during Operation Epic Fury.

The effects of the Trump administration in Memphis continue to be acute: last September, Trump started a Memphis “taskforce” including 13 federal agencies and sent hundreds of federal agents into the city, with agents killing four Black men in the last 10 months. Trump claimed in his announcement that the city is “suffering from tremendous levels of violent crime” – but the week before, local police celebrated overall crime hitting a “historic” 25-year low .