Editor’s notebook: “Tough on crime” measures place Tennessee GOP on the wrong side of history

"Raise Up," a bronze and cement sculpture by Hank Willis Thomas the grounds of the of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.(Photo: Holly McCall)

I took a few days off recently to enjoy the last gasp of summer before the crunch of election season, taking a short trip to Alabama to visit civil rights sites I’ve long wanted to experience.

After a stop in Selma and a walk over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, site of the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” assault on civil rights activists attempting to march to the state capital in pursuit of voting rights, I headed to Montgomery to The Legacy Museum.

The museum is one of several sites developed by Bryan Stevenson, a human rights attorney and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. Stevenson’s work focuses on unfair sentencing, exoneration of death row prisoners falsely convicted, children prosecuted as adults and abuse of the incarcerated.

I hadn’t been in the museum long before I found myself in front of a display about the use of incarceration as a tool to control African Americans. In particular, phrases on two placards caught my attention.

“Southern politicians denounced (civil rights) activists as ‘criminals’ and ‘lawbreakers’ and used the criminal legal systems as a weapon to resist racial equality,” read the first one, illuminating the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.

The second, which followed sequentially, described Richard Nixon’s “war on drugs,” which he rooted in his 1968 presidential campaign’s “law and order” message.

“Once in office, Nixon declared a ‘war on drugs’ and beginning in 1971, the number of people incarcerated in American jails and prisons escalated from 300,000 to 2.3 million.”

All this sounded mighty familiar to me and not from reading history books: Those same words could be used to describe efforts by Tennessee Republican lawmakers enacting “tough on crime” measures and targeting the state’s only majority minority city.

In April, the Tennessee Legislature passed a “blended sentencing” law that will automatically transfer youth 16-years-old and up charged with murder or attempted murder to adult court. The law also allows for offenders as young as 14 who commit serious crimes to get an additional five years of incarceration in adult prisons once their juvenile sentence ends.

House Speaker Cameron Sexton, a Republican, pushed the measure despite concerns raised by Republican lawmakers, as well as Democratic ones.

“So where will all these individuals be housed?” asked Springfield Republican Sen. Kerry Roberts at the time of the vote. “These individuals … would not be housed in the general population of the Tennessee Department of Correction.

Note Sexton’s response the prior year, when Gov. Bill Lee expressed hesitation about a legislative measure to mandate lengthier minimum sentences for a host of offenses: the law could result in higher recidivism and overcrowded prisons, wrote Lee to Sexton and Lt. Gov. Randy McNally. Sexton responded by saying, “If we need to build more prisons, we can.”

More recently, Sexton and Memphis Sen. Brent Taylor, a Republican, have been on fire about Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy. They say he’s “soft on crime,” despite a report from the Memphis Crime Commission showing crime was worse during the tenure of Mulroy’s Republican predecessor and an analysis by MLK50, a Memphis media outlet, finding his dismissal record is on a par with that of the prior DA.

That’s not to say Memphis is without serious crime. The Memphis Crime Commission reported in May that assaults, rapes, car thefts and robberies are down, but the city’s murder rate rose in 2023.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the legislature passed permitless gun carry in 2021 over the protestations of the Tennessee Sheriffs Association and Tennessee Chiefs of Police Association.

But even as Republican leaders decry Memphis as a Mad Max post-apocalyptic hellhole of gun violence, they work to prevent city leaders from taking steps to potentially decrease gun crime.

In an Aug. 26 press release, Sexton and McNally threatened the Memphis City Council, which approved ballot measures that would ban possession of AR-15 style rifles, require handgun permits to implement extreme orders of protection in the city. Even if citizens approve the measures, they are nonbinding and would require action from the legislature to take effect.

The pair said they would act to withhold state shared sales tax to the tune of $75 million should Memphis proceed with the referendums — “to go rogue and perform political sideshows,” in their words. But no matter because the Shelby County Election Commission refused to place the three measures on the ballot after state Election Coordinator Mark Goins warned them not to.

Memphis sues Shelby County Election Commission over gun-restriction referendums

A judge recently ruled in favor of city council, allowing the measures to go on the ballot, but nonetheless one wonders why the same state leaders who rail about gun violence in Memphis would strip the authority from city leaders to take steps aimed at managing it?

Which brings us back to my readings in Montgomery.

Demonizing activists, particularly Black activists, for attempting to change the conditions around them has been a timeworn Republican strategy for decades. State House Reps. Justin J. Pearson and Justin Jones were called troublemakers and expelled for taking to the House floor in 2023 in support of teenage gun safety advocates.

And this is to say nothing of the racial disparities in the U.S. prison system. According to 2021 statistics from the Prison Policy Initiative , Black Tennesseans were incarcerated at a rate 3.4 times higher than white people, while making up only 16.1% of the state’s population. In local jails , Black Tennesseans make up 32% of the incarcerated population.

The language used by Tennessee’s leading GOP lawmakers in describing predominantly Black Memphis echoes Nixonian tactics, even as the same lawmakers chain the city to reckless gun laws, depriving city leaders and voters of the self-determination to improve their conditions.

While in Selma, I talked to a resident whose grandfather participated in the “Bloody Sunday” march.

“Alabama has always been on the wrong side of history,” he said. “Always.”

I understood what he meant. Too often, Tennessee also finds itself on the wrong side of history, and recent “tough on crime” measures represent one more instance.

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