After a grueling day in which she and two other Democratic state representatives faced trumped up expulsion votes, Rep. Gloria Johnson was asked why she was spared—while her fellow members of the ‘Tennessee Three’ were ultimately expelled from the state Assembly.
They had, after all, stood as one on the House floor in a call for meaningful gun reform in the aftermath of the Covenant School shooting in Nashville.
“It might have to do with the color of our skin,” Johnson told reporters outside the chamber.
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Johnson is white, whereas Rep. Justin Pearson and Rep. Justin Jones are black. But she had only been spared by one vote—and she almost certainly would have shared their fate were it not for two other significant differences between her and her comrades.
First, the formal complaint that was brought against the trio had several errors of facts regarding her. The charging document said she had shouted, used a megaphone, carried a political sign and pounded a barrel while standing in the well with Pearson and Jones. But a video screened at the start of Thursday’s proceedings by the state’s Republican cabal clearly showed she had none of those things.
Not that a few falsehoods would have necessarily made a critical difference. The supermajority had gone ahead and expelled Pearson despite Speaker of the House Cameron Sexton’s false claims that the trio’s six-minute, non-violent protest represented an insurrection that was “at least equivalent, maybe worse” than the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Pearson and Jones had only raised their voices above a conversational volume and used a megaphone after Sexton had turned off the microphone at the podium and announced the house was in recess.
What also distinguished Johnson from Pearson and Jones was her firsthand encounter with a shooting at Central High School in Knoxville in 2008, the same one that country singer Kelsea Ballerini tearfully recounted witnessing when she hosted the CMT awards on Sunday. Johnson had been a special education teacher there.
“I’m just gonna bet none of you have been in a classroom waiting for your class to come in when you see a door open up at the cafeteria, children running… screaming, crying in terror,” Johnson told her fellow legislators during the expulsion proceeding. “Kids I didn’t even know, who I didn’t have in class came to me for comfort. And I stood there trying to figure out what happened because they couldn’t even articulate it for quite a bit of time.”
Then she heard sirens.
That was when she “found out one of our students was shot and killed in the cafeteria while everyone was there—including the police, including the principals, including our other security.”
The supposed protection Republican legislators have been proposing as measures for school safety after the horror at Covenant School were present at Central High 15 years before, and made no difference.
“We lost one of our special ed students, Ryan McDonald, who was a cut-up,” she continued. ‘And I spent that day comforting those children waiting for their parents to come and pick them up. You’re just in shock. You’re moving in shock. The trauma on their faces you will never, ever forget. I don’t want to forget it.”
She added, “Now, if I’m in a school and I hear a siren, I jump every single time. Because you just never get that out of your head.”
As she arrived at the Capitol after the Covenant School shooting, parents with kids in other schools had come up to her with tears in their eyes, telling her how hard it had been to drop their kids off at school.
She continued on into the assembly chamber determined to do something, but the ruling majority had been enforcing a perpetual lockdown preventing anyone from addressing this issue. A moment of silence can be unbearable when you are being prevented from discussing the cause of the carnage. Parents and Jones shared her frustration.
“That is why I walked up into the well, to stand with my other colleagues who were tired of having their voices cut off when we are trying to speak about violence in our classrooms, violence in our churches, violence in our restaurants and our grocery stores,” she said. “It was in my heart. It was compelling me to come forward and address this issue. I stood with them because we all feel our voices are being silenced. And something had to be said.”
The ensuing expulsion effort generated so much media attention that the ruling cabal had to at least pretend it was not seeking to quash democracy. And when they got a chance to speak up in their own defense, the Tennessee Three were finally able to talk about gun violence.
“These cameras here across the country, we’re all getting allowed to speak and there’s a little more debate on the issues,” Johnson said. “And this is great. If this is how [the leadership] behaved every day, maybe my colleagues could have spoken from our desks on an issue.”
She had, in theory, been doing what a representative is supposed to do.
“My conduct was what I felt compelled to do for my constituents,” she said. “I may have broken a rule, but the words in this document are false—I spoke for the voters in my district.”
And she could now say what she had wanted to say since that shooting in 2008.
“We can do something about this,” she declared. “We are the only country in the world with this type of gun violence problem. We all know what some of the solutions are. We have seen, we have the data. There are things that we can do. And my voters sent me here to speak specifically to that issue because that was one of the things that I heard on thousands of doorsteps for a year.”
Johnson was as passionate and moving as Ballerini had been at the CMT Awards, but she was only saved from expulsion by a single vote. Jones was expelled by 7 votes, Pearson by 4, margins that may have had something to do with them actually using a megaphone and holding a political sign. But it is hard to believe that race was not a factor.
There also remains the question of why Jones and Pearson were only the second and third Tennessee legislators to be expelled in state history.
“Let’s talk about expulsion,” Jones said during his defense. “For years, one of your colleagues who was an admitted child molester sat in this chamber, no expulsion. One member sits in this chamber who was found guilty of domestic violence, no expulsion. We had a former speaker sit in this chamber who is now under federal investigation, no expulsion. We have a member still under federal investigation, no expulsion. We had a member pee in another member’s chair in this chamber, no expulsion.”
He went on, “Since you’re trying to put us on trial, I’ll say what you’re really putting on trial is the state of Tennessee.”
Pearson noted during his defense that they were facing expulsion “in a country that was built on a protest. You who celebrate July 4, 1776, pop fireworks and eat hotdogs, say protest is wrong. Because you spoke out of turn. Because you spoke up for people who are marginalized. You spoke up for children who won’t ever be able to speak again. You spoke up for parents who don’t wanna live in fear.”
He further noted that America is “a country built on people who speak out, turn, who spoke out turn, who fought out turn to build a nation.”
He added, “I come from a long line of people who have resisted.”
The vacancies left by the expulsions will be filled by the appropriate county commissions, and there is no legal reason those bodies cannot simply return Pearson and Jones to their seats in a kind of legislative post-Easter rising. Johnson will still be there, no doubt to Sexton’s consternation. He had already made his feelings towards her clear when she failed to support his election in 2019, his predecessor having stepped down as a result of sexist and racist texts.
“When I was the lone vote against the speaker I was put in a closet for a year during COVID,” she noted during her defense. “There was no room to social distance. I couldn’t even have people in my office.”
Sexton was so quick to get rid of Johnson that he twice called for a vote on her expulsion before she was done presenting her defense. He has now made heroes out of her and her two comrades in the Tennessee Three.
Justin Jones embraces Rep. Gloria Johnson after a vote at the Tennessee House of Representatives to expel him for his role in a gun control demonstration at the statehouse last week.
Cheney Orr/ReutersOne lasting image was of a tearful Johnson embracing Jones outside the chamber from which he had been expelled.
“You’re a rock star,” she told him.
The people around them began to chant.
“Justin, Justin, Gloria! Justin, Justin, Gloria!”
