Sunday on MS NOW’s “Velshi,” Tennessee State Rep. Justin Jones (D) said white Republicans had spit on the graves of civil rights elders with redistricting.
Jones said, “I walked into the Capitol on Thursday in 2026, when I walked out at the end of session and was pre-1965. What I witnessed was a Capitol Klan rally where my majority, white Republican colleagues turn back the clock of history and are perfectly okay with majority white districts. But it seems they are very intent on this racial backlash, on breaking up, black political power and representation in our state.
He added, “And they’ve done it with surgical precision. And so I have grief. You know what I thought about where my grandparents, who left the South to go to Chicago, left, West Tennessee to move to Memphis during Jim Crow, leaving this type of terror, leaving this type of aggression, an attack on their humanity and on their existence in our democracy. And so, I had grief and anger and righteous indignation. But I also just I’m thinking of all of our civil rights elders and martyrs who basically these white Republicans spit on the graves of all those who paid with days in jail cells and nights of bomb threats, you know, paid with blood for the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement, which was the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”
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