77. Hope for the South with Representative Justin Pearson

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

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SPEAKER_3 (1:04)

I'm not giving up.

Justin J. Pearson (1:05)

I am selling the building.

SPEAKER_3 (1:08)

The final season of FX is the bear.

Justin J. Pearson (1:18)

Or not.

SPEAKER_3 (1:20)

We are outgunned and we are outmanned.

SPEAKER_6 (1:23)

We have each other.

SPEAKER_7 (1:26)

FX is the bear. The final season. All episodes now streaming on Disney+.

SPEAKER_8 (1:31)

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Monte Mader (2:28)

I want to start with three people and three small rooms. The first room is the law office in Pulaski, Tennessee, in the months right after the Civil War. Six board Confederate veterans are inventing a club to pass the time. They take their Greek word for circle, kouklos, and they bend it until it sounds spooky, kouklos klan. At this point, it's really a stupid social club. Give it 18 months and it will have a grand wizard, a paramilitary structure, and a body count. The second room is a railroad car outside Memphis in 1883 A 20-year-old school teacher named Ida B. Wells has brought a first-class ticket and taken a seat in the ladies' car. The conductor tells her to move to the smoking car with the rest of the black passengers and she refuses. He puts his hands on her and she bites his hand hard enough that it takes three men to drag her off that train and the white passengers stand up and applaud while they do it.

The third room is the Tennessee House Chamber in Nashville, August 1920 A 24-year-old named Harry Byrne has just cast the vote that gave every woman in America the right to vote, and the room has come apart around him. He runs, he hides in the Capitol attic until it's safe to come down. This is one state, 50 years, all three of them part of the story of the incredible change that has happened in Tennessee. I know that in our current climate, it can be easy to think the South is beyond redemption, but that's not what the story says. That's the thing about Tennessee. People file it under quote South and stop thinking, it's too red, it's too gerrymandered. But Tennessee has never agreed with itself about anything. Three stars on the flag, three parts of the state, and in 1861, when Tennessee voted to leave the Union, East Tennessee voted to stay and then tried to secede from the secession of the state. Around 30,000 Tennesseans fought for the Union while their neighbors marched the other way. That crack has never closed. It's why the state keeps producing the country's worst ideas and its best ones, sometimes in the same building, usually within a generation of each other. I chose to stay in Tennessee intentionally. I wanted to move back to New York City. I felt like it would just be easier on my mind, easier on my heart, but I truly believe that America is only as progressive as the South is, and I do not believe that the South is beyond saving. And today, I have a very special guest joining me today to talk about how that change happens here in Tennessee.