Key Things the Democratic Party Needs to Focus on in Madison County

Kal Reasons

August 23, 2023

Intersectionality is a term that many individuals lack awareness of, but when focusing on local activism, it is an integral part of making legitimate change in communities fighting staunch conservative values and religious extremism. Coined by renowned Civil Rights activist and law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, the term is being used to help people understand the layers of discrimination individuals face based on socioeconomic and cultural values, race, religion, etc., and how they meet when advocating for human rights. This can be applied to citizens’ daily lives in Madison County. It’s difficult to summarize the many issues politically, socially, and economically that we face as a community without acknowledging the impact of intersectionality and history on the matter.

We’ve seen police brutality and failures within our criminal justice system. Recently, we’ve seen underperforming and underfunded public schools being threatened by charter programs that will divert funds from impoverished children to families that can afford to send their children to private institutions. Failing healthcare systems overflowing with burned-out staff and a lack of enough resources to adequately provide for all patients are burdening everyone in the area. There’s been a marked increase and rise in violence and discrimination against POC and the LGBTQ+ communities alike. Numerous hate groups like We the People of West Tennessee, Moms for Liberty, Americans for Prosperity, BRAVE Books, and more are blatantly violating the separation of church and state within our community and using taxpayer dollars to fund conservative values in our schools. We have organizations like WRAP, Tennessee Homeless Solutions, West Tennessee Legal Services, and more always packed to the brim with individuals desperate to get assistance for domestic violence issues, homelessness, and discrimination.

We avoided Ray Condray, but politicians like AJ Massey, Chris Todd, Ed Jackson, and others locally to Bill Lee, Marsha Blackburn, and more heavy hitters statewide are aiming to put their white supremacist agenda on a pedestal within their offices. Everywhere I turn in Jackson, I can see the good and the bad. I see our history and how we have always been a divided state that has slowly turned to extremist values. We need leaders who continuously stand up for every single disenfranchised individual in our community. We need leaders who are loudly anti-racist, anti-fascist allies who take charge in making the changes we need to see. By working together to see how discrimination ties into poverty and corruption into extremist legislation, we can be the ones to unite against the dangerous state of Madison County we are currently in before it is too late.

There are 68,205 Jacksonians out of the 98,823 people that are a part of the Madison County Population, according to the 2020 Census. Jackson represents 69% of Madison County’s population, meaning about 7 out of 10 people living in Madison County live in Jackson. This doesn’t account for the other thousands of workers that commute from the 7 surrounding counties into the Hub City Area.

It is important to address any instances of police brutality in Madison County, both historic and modern. During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, Governor Lee sided against protestors fighting for the reformation of local, state, and federal justice systems along with the defunding of police departments into other social safety net systems such as childcare, rehabilitation facilities, healthcare programs, family assistance programs, and more.

A recent traffic stop in Madison County led to a Black man having shards of glass thrown in his eye after the officers escalated the situation, and the Madison County Sheriff’s Department has been investigated multiple times by the TBI. According to Police Scorecard, 70% of people arrested by the Jackson Police Department are Black, while only 45% of the population is Black. This is an obvious disparagement in arrest rates that the Black Lives Matter movement has been trying to bring attention to, and it is on par with national standards. Jackson also has an incredibly high rate of gun violence and crime overall, with it being in the bottom 6% of safest cities in the United States.

Unions have been a hot-button topic, with Governor Lee’s recent “Tennessee Paycheck Protection Act,” which prevents school districts from collecting union dues. This basically means that the well-founded teachers’ union will now have to have its members pay individually rather than automatically. This form of union busting is being disguised as a massive pay raise when more funds should have been diverted to our teachers rather than just giving them the bump that they should have received during the COVID pandemic. Gov. Lee thinks that $50,000 is a boastful wage for teachers when the Median Household Income in Tennessee is just under $60,000. In Madison County, representatives largely support Lee’s tactics.

Even though Republicans have been in control of local education for years, Madison County ranks 94 in Family and Community with one of the bottom five scores in the state for 3rd to 8th-grade literacy and high school graduation rates. Charter schools in 2010 had less than 5,000 students and as of 2019, there were over 40,000 students. Gov. Lee is attempting to push the privatization of education while eliminating CRT and social justice concepts.

As a result of increasing gun violence in our state that puts our students at risk, a special session proposing new Red Flag laws has been vehemently fought by local political leaders and failed candidates. For Trey Cleek, a failed Trustee candidate, he decided that his love of shooting AR-15s was more important than the safety and security of Tennessee’s children. At a recent tour stop by the Our Kids Deserve Better campaign, he called a local father an idiot because he wants the right to carry an AR-15 and use it as he pleases. He currently is the director for West Tennessee’s Americans for Prosperity group, like the We the People of West Tennessee hate group that was founded by Ray Condray and Londa Rohlfing in 2020. Both groups aim to influence all of Madison County’s political positions.

Representatives Chris Todd and Ed Jackson have specifically targeted the LGBTQ+ community for many years now, recently becoming empowered by the Trump Administration’s dehumanizing campaigns to eliminate protections for queer citizens. Add in a plethora of extremist rhetoric and then we get the current atmosphere, where every single LGBTQ+ event receives hate and threats, with some having to be changed or canceled entirely. The gender-affirming care ban specifically affects many different children in Madison County and Tennessee overall, while the drag ban has already caused a significant impact on individuals within the community, leading to legal issues and impactful signs of protests. These dehumanization efforts lead to countless intersectional issues from housing to healthcare to general well-being overall for many citizens in our area. In schools, some teachers and administrators are enabling bullying and even are participating in harming openly queer students with little to no retribution. National trans activists have called against these atrocities, but SB1 and SB3 are still in place today, along with over two dozen other bills restricting citizens’ rights to free speech.

Personally, I have been called a groomer/predator numerous times over the last year or so. This sort of rhetoric, especially when it is directed at SA, rape, and CSAM survivors that are thriving within the LGBTQ+ community is particularly dangerous as it minimizes the struggles of survivors of traff1cking and sexual violence. It also feels like it is a projection of Republican conservatives who do not want to go against massive churches that allow predators to have continued access to children. Some Republicans have fought to lower and eliminate the age of consent, and there are still child marriages seen across the state each year. All of the issues are crossing in one way or another. (See National Grooming Research Links and Pastor offender List)

Let’s take some time to discuss some of Madison County’s and Jackson’s history because understanding our past is a crucial aspect of this intersectional battle. We can learn from the past to see where we need to go in the future. Using voting records from presidential elections from over 100 years ago to the present day, we can see clearly that Madison County has often been split politically, with Democrats often controlling the vote from 1912-1960, and during this decade we see the swap to more conservative values with the Republican party, with the 1976 election of Democratic President Jimmy Carter narrowly being the only exception. Before this time, records were less clear on percentages.

Our home is named after President Andrew Jackson, who is famously known for creating the Trail of Tears that forced millions of Native Americans from their homes and land onto reservations through the Indian Removal Act in May 1830. This brutal atrocity was an act of g3n0c1d3 committed by our own local government less than 200 years ago, and it forced Chickasaw peoples from their sovereign nations. They had agreed to let colonists settle in an 1818 treaty for 300,000 dollars, but it was not enough for our historic leaders. Madison County was founded just three years later in 1821. (Pg 78 Tennesseans and Their History)

As an agricultural community, industrialization in place of slave labor was an unwanted change for a vast majority of the political players, and as a result, Madison County was fighting on the side of the Confederacy before Tennessee’s Succession. The Battle of Shiloh was a major military battle that placed Madison County along with the rest of West and Middle Tennessee back in Union hands towards the end of the Civil War. However, there was an incredible amount of tension, famine, and other wartime problems as a result until the end of the war and the reconstruction era in 1865, even after we were the first state to return to the Union. Many of the beginning railways had been destroyed by explosives, which only harmed the slow recovery period. Only two years later, Black men were granted enfranchisement, sparking the beginnings of the suffragist and Civil Rights movements in the early 20th century.

The Memphis Riots on May 1-2, 1866, were one of the most destructive riots in history, where white men raided the Black communities killing dozens, raping multiple women, and burning over 100 buildings to the ground. We saw the founding and the mobilization of the Ku Klux Klan in December of 1865, just six months earlier, and these events are correlated because of post-war efforts to fight unionists by Confederate sympathizers. Over the next several years, Governor Brownlow fought back and eventually had to employ the State Guard and martial law in nine counties, which included neighboring counties. Brownlow had hired a Cincinnati Detective who was murdered by the KKK after he attempted to infiltrate one of their meetings with the Grand Wizard. His resignation a month later led to the empowerment of Conservatives and the downfall of the Radicals that held power for years previously. All the ex-confederates that had been banned from voting were enfranchised again after a Tennessee Supreme Court decision ruled it unconstitutional. During the 1869 elections, DeWitt Senter, who took over office for Brownlow, supported this enfranchisement, and this period saw a massive swap of political parties in a landslide favor of conservatives. By August 1870, all Tennessee Supreme Court justices were Conservatives.

Historically, Conservatives have always gutted our healthcare and education systems in favor of private lobbyists. They immediately repealed the Ku Klux Klan Act and State Guard Act, eliminated the statewide school system in favor of leaving it up to the counties, and reinstated segregation law while also eliminating protections for the right of laborers. (Tennesseans and Their History pgs. 174-178)

Decades later, we saw the development of The New South, with protests for worker rights and against low wages in extreme ways. In this era from the late 1880s through the 1930s, we began to see the foundation of corporate America because of railroad lobbyists aiming to control the massive profits to be had. Women began fighting for suffrage, and Black communities across the state experienced absurd amounts of racial discrimination and hardships because of our political environment. Railroad companies like L&N invested extreme amounts of money into local newspapers and bribed Conservative political leaders to overlook regulations. All of this occurred across the state, including in Madison County.

This is a lot of information to take into account in one essay, so it is important for everyone to continue studying history and the facts it gives us in order to tackle modern problems within our democracy with a wise, educated perspective relying on facts and logic. This is not going to be a battle that is won with a singular election. It will take years of systemic, mindful reforms in order to grow from our troubled records. Intersectionality is the key principle to abide by when understanding where our priorities should be focused and how our energy should be spent.

Sources:

• Intersectionality:

o Ted Talk: The urgency of intersectionality | Kimberlé Crenshaw - YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akOe5-UsQ2o

• Recommended Books:

o Tennesseans and Their History Paul Bergeron

• Statistics:

o Jackson, Tennessee - Ballotpedia

https://ballotpedia.org/Jackson,_Tennessee

o Tennessee State Household Income | Department of Numbers (deptofnumbers.com)

https://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/tennessee/

o Madison County.pdf (tn.gov)