The state of Tennessee added another chapter to its sordid history of racism when Republican legislators voted to expel three duly elected colleagues charged with violating a laughable rule of acceptable “decorum.” Guilty only of joining protesters demanding gun control, following the killing of six people at a nearby school, two male Black legislators were ousted from office, while a white woman survived expulsion by a single vote.
These Republican legislators ignored the gun deaths, which included three 9-year-old children, and instead focused on the phony decorum charge.
As the 1865 birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski, and of its first grand wizard, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Tennessee has had an insensitive-at-best racial history. Statues of the former Confederate general Forrest were erected. They and a bust of Forrest’s likeness were only recently removed from prominent places in the state. It’s worth noting Klan members served in the state’s lawmaking branch. None were ever expelled.
The 1968 assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis is but another example.
Republicans will argue the vote to expel only the Black legislators wasn’t racially motivated. But they can’t deny their leaders have refused to enact widely supported gun restrictions in Tennessee and elsewhere.
The ugly face of racism is too often seen in America. Enacting commonsense gun laws is too rare.
Glenn R. Plummer
Unity