Overview

From June 12, 2020, until the passage of the state law making the occupation a felony two months later, peaceful protesters set up camp at Nashville's Legislative Plaza and renamed it for Ida B. Wells. Central to the occupation was Justin Jones, a student of Fisk University and Vanderbilt Divinity School whose place at the forefront of the protests brought him and the occupation to the attention of the Metro Nashville Police Department, state and US senators, and Governor Bill Lee. The result was two months of solidarity in the face of rampant abuse, community in the face of state-sponsored terror, and standoff after standoff at the gates of the people's house with those who claimed to represent them. In this, his first book, Jones describes those two revolutionary months of nonviolent resistance against the state's soldiers who sought to dehumanize its citizens. The People's Plaza is a rumination on the abuse of power, and a vision of a more just, equitable, anti-racist Nashville—a vision that kept Jones and those with him posted on the plaza through intense heat, unprovoked arrests, vandalism, theft, and violent suppression. It is a first-person account of hope, a statement of intent, and a blueprint for nonviolent resistance in the American South and elsewhere.

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9780826504975

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Jones describes law enforcement, the Tennessee State Assembly, and Governor Bill Lee's attempts to curtail their First and Fourth Amendment rights and the brutal and callous way they were treated while occupying a public space. The sixty-two days in this book are at once a reflection of, a prayer for, and an indictment of America in the Twenty-First Century. - Learotha Williams Jr., co-editor with Amie Thurber of I'll Take You There: Nashville Stories of Place, Power, and Struggle

Jones describes law enforcement, the Tennessee State Assembly, and Governor Bill Lee's attempts to curtail their First and Fourth Amendment rights and the brutal and callous way they were treated while occupying a public space. The sixty-two days in this book are at once a reflection of, a prayer for, and an indictment of America in the Twenty-First Century. - Learotha Williams Jr., co-editor with Amie Thurber of I'll Take You There: Exploring Nashville's Social Justice Sites

Author Information

Justin Jones is an activist, graduate student, and community organizer in Nashville. He came to Fisk University in 2013, where he received the John R. Lewis Scholarship for Social Activism. Inspired by its legacy of the student-led movement for civil rights, Jones became involved on campus and in community groups and spent the past nine years in Tennessee organizing campaigns for the expansion of healthcare in Tennessee, the repeal of restrictive state voter ID laws, the removal of confederate monuments, and community accountability in cases of police violence.

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