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Repeat Offender to White House Guest: The Revealing Rise of Expelled Tennessee Lawmaker Justin Jones
Jones, who has been arrested 14 times, was invited to meet with Biden on Monday.
In 2020, as demonstrations and riots over the murder of George Floyd swept across the country, Justin Jones was arrested for allegedly assaulting a driver during a protest in Nashville.
Jones, now a Tennessee state representative, to hear the Associated Press tell it, is being “heralded” as one of two “living echoes of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, when leaders like King and John Lewis organized protests across the American South.”
Tennessee’s Republican-led House voted to expel Jones and state representative Justin Pearson earlier this month after the pair staged demonstrations on the House floor to call for gun control. A vote to oust a third lawmaker who was involved in the protests, state representative Gloria Johnson, failed by one vote.
The vote came after Jones got into a scuffle with a fellow lawmaker and all three encouraged raucous protesters in the House chambers during a demonstration in the wake of the shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville that killed six people, including three children. Protesters stood on a balcony within the chambers chanting, “Fascists! Fascists!” Demonstrators also blocked several entryways and exits, forcing state troopers to step in to assist members in moving throughout the building.
“What they did is they hijacked the House floor, which has never been done in our history,” House Speaker Cameron Sexton told National Review of the three lawmakers. “They pulled out a bullhorn. They weren’t recognized. They were ruled out of order and they led a protest from the House floor with a bullhorn to those in the balcony. They shut down the proceedings of the House. We had to go into recess due to their actions.”
“They disregarded the sergeant at arms asking them to leave the well at multiple occasions, and they really didn’t stop yelling in their bullhorn until I had to clear out the balcony because of behavior that was caused blatantly by those three members,” said Sexton. “Those actions that they did on the House floor deserve expulsion.”
But now, Jones and Pearson, recently dubbed “The Justins,” or two-thirds of the “Tennessee Three,” are being rewarded for turning the Capitol into a circus with a private sit-down with President Biden at the White House on Monday.
Jones, who was unanimously reappointed as an interim representative by the Metropolitan Council of Nashville and Davidson County after his expulsion, brought an infant-sized casket into the state Capitol building last week after protesters calling for gun reform outside the Capitol were stopped from bringing caskets symbolizing those killed by gun violence inside. He took the casket and walked with protesters but was stopped by the sergeant-at-arms when he reached the House chamber and was prevented from bringing the casket to the floor.
The rise to prominence through protest is no accident for Jones, who has spent years laying down roots in the local activist community, often in ways that crossed the line into lawlessness.
Jones’s campaign says he’s been arrested 14 times for “good trouble,” borrowing a phrase from the late Representative John Lewis, an American civil-rights leader.
Jones moved from Oakland, Calif., to Nashville to study political science at Fisk University, an HBCU, and quickly became a fixture — and ultimately a leader — at local protests.
He blocked traffic in Nashville after former President Donald Trump was elected. He made headlines in October 2018 when he and another woman were arrested at a rally for then-U.S. Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn. Jones, who is black and Filipino, said he only attended the rally to listen and claimed his arrest was because of his race. However, then-state GOP communications director Candice Dawkins, who is also black, said the party had him removed from the event because he was known for disruptive outbursts at campaign rallies. He was charged with trespassing, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct. The case was later dismissed in March 2019.
In February 2019, while protesting against the presence of a bust of Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest in the state Capitol, Jones was charged with two counts of misdemeanor assault and one count of disorderly conduct after he allegedly threw a cup of coffee at then-state house speaker Glen Casada and Republican state representative Debra Moody while the pair stood in an elevator. Jones was banned from the state Capitol — though a judge blocked the ban — and ordered to have no contact with Casada.
Jones “attempted to push his way past uniformed state troopers” as he walked toward the elevator shouting, “Casada is a racist.” Jones then allegedly threw a paper to-go cup “filled with an unknown liquid believed to be hot coffee” into the elevator. Neither lawmaker was injured in the incident.
“I pray that the violence of racism will produce similar outrage in the TN Capitol as a few drops of iced tea in a paper cup,” Jones said in a later tweet.
The arrest came amid weeks of protest from Jones; two weeks earlier he led a sit-in in Casada’s office with other students. The next week he disrupted a House Republican news conference on health care while trying to get Casada’s attention.
The protests against the bust were ultimately successful, and the statue was removed from the state Capitol and sent to the State Museum in July 2021 after a 5-2 vote by the State Building Commission.
In November 2019, at the age of 24, Jones announced his first foray into politics: a bid to unseat U.S. Representative Jim Cooper, who represented Tennessee’s 5th congressional district from 2003 until earlier this year.
Jones ultimately failed to collect enough valid signatures to make the ballot, however. Only 24 of his 30 signatures were certified by local election officials, leaving him one signature short of the 25 required to make the ballot. Jones faulted a tornado one month before the deadline as well as the Covid-19 pandemic for his campaign’s failure to collect enough signatures, according to the Nashville Post.
“Our candidate petitions were still due amidst this pandemic,” Jones tweeted in April 2020. “We had to go out and do this in-person.”
“Some signatures were thrown out — one purged bc of felony disenfranchisement, another 50+ year voter bc address change. By 1 signature technicality we’re not allowed on ballot.”
Nonetheless, his early campaigning offered a glimpse into his political ambitions. Jones essentially portrayed himself as a would-be member of the ultra-progressive Squad in Congress.
“We’re going to the places that they have refused to touch,” Jones said while speaking at Fisk University soon after filing to run for Congress. “We’re going to campaign at the bus station. We’re going to campaign in communities where they will not go. We’re not going down to the chamber, because that’s not our people. We’re not going down to these dinners where you have to pay $200. We’re going to where people are and that is in communities like this, North Nashville.”
Civil-rights leader Rip Patton, Medicare for All activist Carol Paris, and Fisk student organizer Jonelle Christopher appeared alongside Jones at the event to show support.
His campaign platform included support for Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, eliminating student debt, offering higher wages, and ending mass incarceration.
Yet with his hopes of becoming a member of Congress stymied, Jones went on to serve as a “strategist and direct-action organizer” for the 62-day sit-in outside the Tennessee Capitol in the summer of 2020 to call for policies of racial justice. Jones and other protesters attempted to establish a Nashville Autonomous Zone, as left-wing rioters did in Seattle, Wash., at the time with the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. The Nashville effort never gained the same traction, however.
Organizers circulated flyers at the time calling to “Fire Chief Anderson. Defund the Police. Demilitarize the Police. Remove Racist Statues.”
It was during this protest that the now-infamous traffic-cone incident took place. Video published by Scoop Nashville appears to show Jones repeatedly hitting the driver of a car with a traffic cone. Jones and other activists stop and surround the car before the driver escapes.
Jones, who would later claim that was he was being “peaceful,” was charged with assault, assault on an officer, and reckless endangerment. All of the charges were eventually dropped.
Jones has claimed video of the incident is missing the context that the man in the car “was yelling racial slurs and pushing his car into protesters.”
“They will try to push a false narrative portraying me as ‘violent’ as a way to deflect from their own actions. They will suggest that I am out of order. That is their strategy. However, I’m hopeful for the chance to present our evidence in a transparent manner,” he tweeted in his own defense.
Jones claimed police colluded with prosecutors to “weaponize the law as a form of punishment for the mere fact that we chose to stand up.”
During the 62-day sit-in, Jones at one point instructed protesters to jump over the Capitol wall with him, telling the crowd, “We are about to engage in an act of civil disobedience.” Forty-two people were arrested for criminal trespassing. Jones was arrested again in August 2020 as protesters blocked the Capitol parking garage, preventing lawmakers from leaving the building at the conclusion of the first day of the legislative session. Jones was charged with criminal littering.
Judicial Commissioner just confirmed warrant for “aggravated littering” and now walking to MNPD Criminal Warrants Division to be arrested and booked in the jail. #FreeCapitolHillTN
— Rep. Justin Jones (@brotherjones_) August 12, 2020
The young activist ultimately attempted to cash in on the protest, authoring a book published in August 2022 titled, “The People’s Plaza Sixty-Two Days of Nonviolent Resistance.”
“The People’s Plaza is a rumination on the abuse of power, and a vision of a more just, equitable, anti-racist Nashville—a vision that kept Jones and those with him posted on the plaza through intense heat, unprovoked arrests, vandalism, theft, and violent suppression,” a summary of the book reads. “It is a first-person account of hope, a statement of intent, and a blueprint for nonviolent resistance in the American South and elsewhere.”
Among Jones’s other progressive bona fides are an internship in the district office of U.S. Representative Barbara Lee. Lee shared a photo with Jones in September 2022 and wrote, “I was delighted to see a former intern in my district office, Justin Jones, at a meeting for state legislators. After his internship Rep. Jones went home to Tennessee, ran for state house, & won! We are so proud of you, @brotherjones_. Once a member of Team Lee, always a member.”
I was delighted to see a former intern in my district office, Justin Jones, at a meeting for state legislators. After his internship Rep. Jones went home to Tennessee, ran for state house, & won!
We are so proud of you, @brotherjones_. Once a member of Team Lee, always a member! pic.twitter.com/vXYzLrikav
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) September 30, 2022
Jones also served on the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Healthcare Campaign, according to his campaign bio. The group is a statewide, volunteer led nonprofit. “Our vision has always been that ALL Tennesseans will have affordable, high quality, and equitable access to healthcare. While we are closer to that vision than we were in 1989, we all know there is much more work to be done here in Tennessee and at the federal level to realize that vision,” the group’s website says.
In 2022, Jones took another shot at running for office. He faced off against Delishia Porterfield, a Nashville and Davidson county council member and fellow progressive, in a race to replace retiring Democratic state representative Mike Stewart.
Jones won the primary for the seat representing the state’s most diverse district by just 238 votes — Jones won 1,956 votes to Porterfield’s 1,718. He then ran unopposed in the general election.
Jones won endorsements from two unions — the Tennessee State Employees Association and Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1235 — as well as Sunrise Movement Nashville and the Equity Alliance Fund. He was also endorsed by Ketch Secor, the front man for the popular Americana string band Old Crow Medicine Show.
Axios called Jones one of the city’s most consequential progressive activists at the time.
Jones always seemed to have an eye toward becoming a civil-rights leader in his own right. When he arrived at the state Capitol for the first time to get his office assignment, he brought a giant poster of Lewis and C. T. Vivian in tow. He has received several awards for his own activism, including from Nashville NAACP, the Tennessee Human Rights Commission, and ACLU of Tennessee.
JUST NOW: Rep. @brotherjones_ arrived at the legislature for the first time to get his pin, his parking space, and his temporary office assignment.
Justin was arrested 14 times fighting for good trouble. He arrived with a giant poster of John Lewis & C.T. Vivian under his arm. pic.twitter.com/ISJGMSwFL9
— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) November 9, 2022
He was named one of three inaugural fellows of the John Lewis Center for Social Justice at Fisk University last year.
Jones has called civil-rights leader Diane Nash a mentor and visited the White House with her in July when she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
He recently told the Associated Press he considers himself “an elder now in the movement.”
Asked in an interview with Teen Vogue last year what two things he would change about politics in the U.S., Jones said “picking just two is hard.”
He then gave a response that easily could’ve come from progressive darling Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.): “First, I would close the tax loopholes that protect the wealth of oligarchs like Jeff Bezos, who has built and hoarded an empire on the backs of poverty wages and worker exploitation. Most of his corporate success has been subsidized by public money and taxpayers, which is obscene.”
He went on to quote Martin Luther King Jr.: “This country has socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.”
“Taxes on Bezos’s wealth alone could fund solutions to the problems we face in housing, public education, and health care (all of which would be a better use of money than spaceships for billionaires to play astronaut),” he said.
His second idea was to issue reparations. “Many of the inequalities we face as a nation stem from America’s original sins of slavery and genocide. Until we recognize the enduring legacies of these systems, undergirded as they have always been by our national devotion to white supremacy, we will continue the cycle of plantation politics. These sins feed on and renew themselves through concentrated poverty, mass incarceration, and environmental racism.”