In April 2023, moments after being reinstated to his office in the Tennessee legislature after Republicans booted him in retaliation for his gun control activism, Justin J. Pearson told reporters that despite their best efforts: “You can’t expel hope. You can’t expel our fight.”
Two years later, Pearson is looking to leave the Tennessee House on his own terms, announcing Wednesday that he’s challenging longtime Democratic incumbent Steve Cohen for his seat in the U.S. House, representing Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District.
“This is my home and I have always wanted to serve this community,” Pearson tells Rolling Stone. “Now is our moment in time to fight for the change that we want to see, and fight for the future that we know we deserve.”
“[Cohen] has been at it for 20 years, and still one in three children in this district are living below the poverty line,” he adds. “One in five people are living underneath the poverty line. I want to have the opportunity to fight for our families, for our community, for our values in Congress. It’s important to have voices that not only send press releases and letters, but organize a resistance against the authoritarianism that we’re seeing, and also elevate the voices of [their] people and communities.”
Pearson, only 30 years old, has spent half of his life in politics. At the age of 15 he appeared before the Memphis-Shelby County Schools Board to lobby for textbooks at his public high school. His university career was defined by a focus on education reform and public policy. After running a Memphis-area environmental advocacy group that successfully thwarted the construction of the Byhalia Pipeline — a planned crude oil pipeline that would have ripped through and displaced low-income black communities in the Memphis area — Pearson became one of the youngest lawmakers ever sworn into the Tennessee legislature at age 28.
In April 2023, he and fellow Democratic Reps. Justin Jones and Gloria Johnson were thrust into the national spotlight when Republicans attempted to expel the so-called “Tennessee Three” from the legislature. The push to remove Pearson, Jones, and Johnson from their seats was retaliation for the trio’s leadership of anti-gun violence protests at the state Capitol in the wake of a deadly mass shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville. Republicans claimed that the three lawmakers had violated Chamber rules — a transgression which typically provokes little more than a formal reprimand. Johnson managed to barely survive the vote to expel her from the chamber. Pearson and Jones did not, but were reinstated to their seats shortly after via votes by their respective city councils.
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Pearson says his experience in the legislature taught him a lot about “where power resides” and how it is “misused and abused” at the state level “to stymie and stifle any progress on economic justice and opportunity, criminal legal reforms, environmental and climate justice.”
In Pearson’s view, making a bid for an office in D.C. isn’t about having outgrown his local seat, but about strengthening the connection the underrepresented in his community have to the nation’s halls of power.
“I am still a resident of District Nine as much as I am the representative of it,” he says. “I’m going to be a community congressman who stays engaged in local politics, local decisions, and local efforts that are quite literally changing and impacting the trajectory of people’s lives and their health. I show up to city council, county commission, school board, [Memphis Light, Gas and Water] board meetings because I am a representative, but also a constituent, and I have a responsibility to serve this constituency in every way possible, not just from inside a building.”
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“A lot of people in Congress are pretending as though they’re not constituents of places that they’re supposedly representing, and that is harmful to the body politic,” he adds, pointing to Cohen, who is 76, as a longtime offender. “Cohen sent out a letter saying he held two town halls this year. I’ve held a dozen. What makes you think we should be celebrating mediocrity? We should be expecting more from the people who are leading us and leading this country. We have to expect more.”
Pearson will be entering the race as one of a slate of young, progressive candidates looking to primary long-term Democratic incumbents unaccustomed to having to work for reelection, and at a moment where voters are begging the party to break with its tired and ineffectual strategies. Polling this summer showed that Democrats in the U.S. House have a record-low approval rating as they struggle to counter the Trump administration.
“Democrats are the opposition party, and that’s a title we need to hold with a level of seriousness, because the opposition party has a responsibility of holding the people in power even more accountable for their actions or inaction,” Pearson says. “There’s not been any check and balance against this executive authoritarian regime of Donald Trump. Congress as a whole has failed to do his constitutional responsibility.”
“Things are not normal. They’re not returning to normal” he adds. “There is no playbook that we are using from the past that could work in the present, and so we’ve got to stand up. We have to fight back, and we have to speak up for our communities. And that’s what representation does, it organizes power in the places where congressional folks are from.”
The authoritarian tactics of Trump’s administration have made their way to Pearson’s own community. The president has been targeting prominent Democratic cities — and cities with large populations of Black and Latino residents — as staging grounds for his shock-and-awe, militarized crackdowns. The president has targeted Memphis as the next city to unleash federal forces into, following incursions in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Crime in Memphis recently hit a 25-year low, according to local authorities.
“We don’t want them here,” Pearson says. “We need federal investment into Memphis and into District Nine. We don’t need military occupation. If they really want to do something, they would work on poverty eradication.”
“That they are continuing to use [crime] as a reason for overreach into local government and taking over law enforcement in our communities, but there is no conversation about crime without a conversation about poverty,” he adds.
Pearson will enter the race with the backing of several prominent progressive groups, who are filling out their rosters of candidates with little over a year until the 2026 midterms. Usamah Andrabi, communications director at Justice Democrats — which has already endorsed Pearson — tells Rolling Stone that he “embodies the sort of leadership that we are looking to transform the Democratic Party with, and that Democratic voters are demanding to see more of in the halls of power.”
There is “often a gap between our current Democratic representatives and the people who vote for them. There is no connection. There is no rooted community for so many of these leaders, and they don’t bring the demands, voices and needs of the people to the halls of power. I think Justin has shown exactly how you can do that at all times.” Andrabi adds, noting that there are so many “base Democratic voters who are ready to see a new generation of leadership come into the Democratic Party.”
Other groups, including Leaders We Deserve, the progressive organization founded by Parkland survivor and gun control activist David Hogg, have also endorsed Pearson and pledged $1 million in spending on behalf of his campaign. “Justin J. Pearson has repeatedly shown the kind of backbone needed to confront powerful special interests, from big oil to the gun lobby,” Leaders We Deserve President and Co-Founder David Hogg said in a statement provided to Rolling Stone. “Memphis deserves a next-generation leader like Justin — a tested fighter who will deliver opportunity, affordability, safety, and justice to his constituents.”
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Pearson is, like any candidate with any modicum of self awareness, a little nervous — but he’s confident in his vision.
“We’re going to do what we’ve always done,” he says. “We’re going to have a people centered campaign. We’re going to hire folks locally to help us knock on doors and reach voters. We’re going to invest a significant amount of any of the money that we raise into people right here in district nine to help us to win this race. I believe in the people first. People power movements, and I think that’s how we win.”