A Changemaker from the Start
Born in Oakland, California, Justin grew up in the East Bay where he attended public school and learned at an early age the importance of speaking up for equality for all. His mother, Christine, raised Justin and his sister while putting herself through nursing school. She’s now a registered nurse active in the California chapter of National Nurses United. He is the grandson of Black, working-class grandparents from the South Side of Chicago who moved from West Tennessee during the Great Migration, and Filipino immigrants who migrated to California during World War II and the Vietnam War.
Growing up, his family, especially his two grandmothers, taught him the importance of community involvement, care for the environment, and spirituality.
In high school, Justin served as his city’s Youth Commissioner and began organizing for the civil rights of students and policies that ensured racial equity, environmental protections, and inclusivity. Justin first saw the power of community organizing as part of a successful campaign to force a recall election of three city council members involved in financial mismanagement and corruption. It was there that his commitment to justice through direct action began to take shape.
In high school, he found himself on the front lines of organizing in Oakland following the murder of Trayvon Martin and during youth-led campaigns to repeal nationwide Stand Your Ground laws. Before that he had been active as President of his high school’s chapter of Amnesty International and early on took an interest in international human rights. Following the devastation of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti he organized and led a community wide “Change for Change” program by collecting leftover change at local businesses, organizations, and schools to raise funds for a school in Haiti that had been impacted.
Even from a young age, Justin was active in a transforming community through gun reform and environmental justice. He fondly remembers taking his grandma, who he calls “Lola” to her first protest against the Keystone XL pipeline to protect clean water and a sustainable environment for generations to come.
Student, Activist, and Joining the Fight in Nashville
Justin came to Fisk University in 2013, where he received the John R. Lewis Scholarship for Social Activism. Inspired by the school’s legacy of the student-led movement for civil rights, Justin became involved on campus and in community groups and spent his four years organizing student campaigns for the expansion of healthcare in Tennessee, the repeal of restrictive state voter ID laws, and community accountability in cases of police brutality against unarmed black victims.
He served on the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Healthcare Campaign and has led actions at the Legislature, and across the South, for the expansion of Medicaid.
In 2015, Justin helped file a federal lawsuit against the State of Tennessee for its restrictive voter ID laws that targeted students.
He has chaired the Nashville Student Organizing Committee and is a recipient of awards from the Tennessee Human Rights Commission, ACLU of Tennessee, Tennessee Alliance for Progress, Fisk University Alumni Association, the Vanderbilt Organization of Black Graduate Students, and the Nashville NAACP. In 2015, Justin also walked 278 miles from a small town in North Carolina that had lost its hospital to Washington D.C. to raise awareness about health care access and rural hospital closures. His activism has brought him from the streets of Oakland to Ferguson, Missouri; from ceremonies of resistance in Standing Rock to the Office of the Governor in the Tennessee State House. Justin is committed to a multiracial, multigenerational, multifaith movement, and a solidarity of consistency, built by continually showing-up and staying connected.
The People’s Plaza and the Black Lives Matter Movement
In 2020, after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Justin and a group of Nashville activists began organizing marches and protests against police brutality, and demanding a change to the system of policing that allowed racism and anti-Blackness. Lawmakers refused to meet with them, but undeterred, Justin and activists from around the state started the Ida B. Wells People’s Plaza. Situated in front of the state capitol, activists gathered, held rallies, built community, while continually occupying the space for 62 days.
Police conducted several rounds of arrests, but Justin and his fellow activists refused to be intimidated. Instead, they regrouped and stayed the course, refusing to leave until lawmakers met with them and heard their demands. The Republican supermajority, terrified of the protests youth-led coalition being built on the plaza passed an “Anti-Camping” law to prevent the demonstrations from continuing, and used their powers to violate the organizers right to dissent. This was just the beginning of their attacks on Justin, but regardless of their tactics, they could not suppress the power of the people. Justin faced over 18 charges for his role in leading the nonviolent protest. After multiple court dates and hearings showing the absurdity of the false charges, all his charges were dismissed or retired. As a direct result of the protests, the statue to Ku Klux Klan Grandwizard Nathan Bedford Forrest was also finally removed from a place of prominence in the Tennessee Capitol to the State museum after being put up in 1978. Justin also led the charge to stop a retaliatory bill in response to the protests that would grant criminal immunity to drivers who run over protesters. This is where he saw that something could and must be changed in the Tennessee Capitol.
Running for Office and Building a Grassroots Movement
When Justin ran for office he did so with the help of young people and grandmothers, a unique coalition of people who wanted to change the status quo and bring change to the state legislature. His campaign was set on a message of a politics of moral clarity, urgency, and progressive change, and he offered an unapologetic vision of tireless advocacy and resistance to a supermajority that had weaponized its power against the state’s most marginalized. His core issues included police reform, environmental justice, and expanded healthcare access, issues he had long been advocating for, and now from an elected position, could amplify and craft policy to address. Justin knocked thousands of doors and used his organizing background to challenge the status quo. Despite the long odds, Justin won the Democratic primary against a city councilmember, and went on to represent House District 52, the most diverse district in Tennessee. Stretching from East Nashville, to Donelson, to Antioch, Justin’s district is filled with working-class Nashvillians who keep the city running, and artists who continue to make Nashville “Music City.” He also became both the youngest Black and Democratic lawmaker in the state of Tennessee.
The Expulsions and the Downward Spiral of Tennessee Democracy
Justin was expelled from the Tennessee state legislature on April 6th, 2023 after leading a protest on the House floor for gun reform in the wake of the Covenant School shooting, which claimed the lives of three children and three adults. The protest came after the Speaker repeatedly cut-off Justin’s microphone, and refused to allow him to talk about gun reform, despite students from around the state chanting in the galleries and the rotunda of the state capitol building for change. The Republican supermajority and the Speaker of the House had grown so drunk with power that they were willing to erode democratic norms and engage in authoritarianism to achieve their unpopular, extreme agenda. The expulsion was unprecedented, but contrary to the Republican supermajority’s intention the Nashville City Council reappointed Justin to his seat on Monday April 10th, 2023. Justin marched with thousands of people back to the People’s House, and in the process showed both the dangerous trajectory of Tennessee’s authoritarianism and the way to resist it.
On the Journey to Higher Ground
Since he returned, Justin has faced continual Republican attacks, including censure, repeated silencing on the House floor, physical assault, and most recently, an effort to kick him off the ballot. All of this comes as Justin refuses to give in to Republican demands that he be silent, and “go along to get along.” Instead, Justin has stood as an unyielding progressive voice in the Tennessee legislature and has refused to allow the harmful status quo to operate in the comfort of silence. Never afraid to take on Republican extremism, Justin successfully pushed back against harmful legislation like Governor Bill Lee’s “Voucher Scam”, and Rep. Vaughan’s “Wetland Destruction” bill. He also stood with hundreds of activists against bills attacking the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants, and Black students, unwaveringly supporting those who continually show up to hold their government accountable.
After two years of relentless fighting, Justin is running in his fifth election in just two years, and doing so with a platform centered on rebuilding our democracy, protecting our environment, and taking on gun extremists who have made our state unsafe for children.
Justin’s path has been filled with tough fights and long odds, but that has never stopped him before and there is no stopping him now. We need new leaders who have the courage to step up and join the conversation to reimagine entire systems, and Justin is the disruptor we need. As he has said across the country, and even told President Biden when he went to the Oval Office, “If we can change a state like Tennessee, we can change this nation.”
Justin represents a new vision of Tennessee of representation can and should look like. In direct challenge to Southern segregationists’ declaration for “the South to rise again,” he continues to fight and organize in the halls of the legislature for the South to rise ANEW!