When Johnson was asked why they, and not she, had been kicked out, she was blunt, saying, “It might have to do with the color of our skin.” (A representative who voted to expel Jones and Pearson but not Johnson said that he did so because she “did not participate to the extent that Jones and Pearson did”—she did not use the megaphone.) Van Turner, the president of the Memphis chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., called the expulsion, which happened in a statehouse located on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard, two days after the fifty-fifth anniversary of King’s assassination, a “political lynching.” Together, Pearson and Jones represent more than a hundred and thirty thousand constituents.

After the vote, Johnson, a former special-education teacher who, in 2008, lived through a school shooting in Knoxville, said, “To the nation, keep watching. We are losing our democracy. We need to make sure we stamp out this march to fascism. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Though she was quoting the nineteenth-century British historian and politician Lord Acton, the absolute power she was referring to is the Republican super-majority that controls the Tennessee legislature. Republicans also control both the executive and judicial branches of the state government. This has created a formidable bulwark against sensible gun reform in Tennessee.

In a crucial way, the outcome of the April 6^th expulsion vote was preordained in 2010. That year, Republican lawmakers used the redistricting provision that follows every census to gerrymander the state in such a way that it packed Democrats into a smaller number of districts. Not surprisingly, the election of 2012 delivered the Republicans their super-majority in both houses of the legislature.

This essentially gives them the power to do as they please, such as expelling duly elected legislators and, in 2020, passing a criminal-justice-reform bill that, among other things, makes it a felony to pitch a tent outside the capitol overnight, punishable by up to six years in prison. (That bill was passed in response to weeks-long demonstrations by racial-justice activists, who were protesting police overreach and advocating the removal from the capitol of a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and an early member of the Ku Klux Klan. Justin Jones was an organizer of those protests.)

Less than twenty-four hours after the expulsions, the Tennessee Republican Party was using the event as a fundraising opportunity. “Actions have consequences, and we applaud House Republicans for having the conviction to protect the rules, the laws, and the prestige of the State of Tennessee,” an appeal read.

Meanwhile, Democrats, led by Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, raised nearly half a million dollars for reëlection campaigns for Jones and Pearson in a special election, which can take place anytime within the next hundred days or so, at the discretion of the governor. Both Jones and Pearson are expected to be reinstated this week for the interim—Jones was voted back in on Monday, by the Nashville Metropolitan Council, and Pearson is due to be voted back in on Wednesday, by the Democrats who control the Shelby County Board of Commissioners—but G.O.P. leaders have threatened to withhold funds for projects in the Memphis area if Pearson is reinstated, according to a Shelby County commissioner.

The assault on democracy in Tennessee is also a reminder of how quickly the swirl of politics can overtake grief. I asked a friend, David Dark, a progressive evangelical and an assistant professor of religion and the arts at Belmont University, a private Christian institution in Nashville, what was not being reported.

He told me that Dick Koonce—the husband of Katherine Koonce, the head of the Covenant School, who was killed in the shooting—who is the executive director of Charis Ministries, a social-services agency, “is grieving and challenging his own friends, family, and co-congregants” to think of the shooter’s family, too; as Koonce wrote in a statement, “honoring Katherine compels us to remember a seventh family, equally wounded in the loss of someone dear to them.”

Dark himself is concerned about what he termed “for-profit transphobia,” adding, “That story needs to surface, but I fear it’s already sunk to the bottom of the Internet.” (The Nashville police said that the shooter, Audrey Hale, apparently identified as transgender, a detail that has led much right-wing coverage of the tragedy.)

Dark also told me, in an e-mail, “The prophetic task is to dramatize the moral contradictions we are otherwise compelled to abide as normal. During Holy Week, they tried to deny the Tennessee Three, but they ended up magnifying them. Our local beloved community is now international news, just as it was when Rev. James Lawson, Diane Nash, John Lewis & others staged the lunch-counter sit-ins. A friend messaged me to say that Tennessee is going off the rails. No, I say a select number of white people in Tennessee are going off the rails loudly and publicly. Millions of others are waking up. Just watch. We live in hope.” ♦