John,
Justin J. Pearson isn’t even in Congress yet, and he’s already taking on Elon Musk:
This JD-endorsed state representative is on the ballot for Tennessee’s 9th congressional district in this Thursday’s primary election, giving us just four more days to get out the vote and move him one step closer to fighting for Memphis in Congress.
When he was just 25, Justin led his community in organizing against the Byhalia oil pipeline. He helped lead a coalition that successfully forced two billion-dollar corporations to back down and abandon their projects that would have further polluted a community plagued by environmental racism for decades.
South Memphis is a poor, predominantly Black community with a long history of industrial pollution and resulting health issues like asthma and cancer. Now, it’s being treated as a sacrifice zone for Big Tech, including Elon Musk’s xAI.
But Justin and the people of Memphis are fighting back with everything they’ve got.
As Justin told folks at his rally last week, “Elon came into our community without the consent of our community to build toxic data centers. So we fought back against the largest hyperscale data center in the world. We forced them to get permits they didn’t want to get."
Memphis is serving as a role model for other cities and towns across the country that are rising up to block these projects, pass moratoriums, and ban the building of toxic data centers that put profits before public health — and Justin is a major reason for that.
Now, we have the chance to send him to Washington to join the rest of our progressive bloc in holding Big Tech accountable while raising wages, passing Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and ending U.S. funding for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Despite facing racist gerrymandering from the Tennessee GOP designed to eliminate this blue district, Justin has built a people-powered movement uniting working-class folks from different backgrounds to fight back against a system designed against us.
In solidarity,
Justice Democrats
