Justin J. Pearson, a member of the Tennessee General Assembly who was briefly expelled in 2023 after leading a gun control protest from the chamber floor, announced on Wednesday that he planned to challenge U.S. Representative Steve Cohen, a fellow Memphis Democrat.
The primary challenge against Mr. Cohen is the latest sign of frustration among young Democrats nationally over senior leadership they view as ineffective. Mr. Pearson, 30, is a relatively new lawmaker with roots in Memphis activism, while Mr. Cohen, 76, was first elected to Congress in 2006.
Mr. Pearson said that he personally would not focus on age as an issue in the campaign, framing it instead as a question of whether Mr. Cohen was doing enough to address concerns in Memphis at a moment when President Trump has dispatched federal agents to the city — soon to be followed by National Guard troops — to address crime.
“This is about us being able to fight for our families, for our values, for our future, in this moment in time,” Mr. Pearson said in an interview.
Mr. Pearson became one of the most high-profile state representatives in the country in the spring of 2023, soon after taking his seat in the Tennessee General Assembly. After a mass shooting at a Christian school in Nashville left three children and three adults dead, he and two other Democrats stood at the front of the House chamber to protest the Republican supermajority’s unwillingness to consider restrictions on gun ownership.
Mr. Pearson was expelled, along with State Representative Justin Jones of Nashville, but they were quickly reinstated. The third Democrat, Gloria Johnson, avoided expulsion by one vote.
The legislators became known as the Tennessee Three and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from across the country. Ms. Johnson went on to challenge Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican, but lost.
The nonpartisan Cook Political Report considers Mr. Cohen’s seat to be safely Democratic, by a double-digit margin.
In an interview, Mr. Pearson emphasized his vocal opposition to the construction of a supercomputer in southwestern Memphis by Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, and to the presence of the federal crime-fighting task force in the city. Mr. Cohen has opposed the arrival of the National Guard and immigration agents in Memphis, but has stressed the need to support local law enforcement and reduce high crime rates.
Mr. Cohen has also had a mixed response to Mr. Musk’s development in Memphis.
“We really need someone who can organize and galvanize people,” Mr. Pearson said, “to protect us as we are seeing the social safety net being cut and as we are seeing the significant threats to our democracy.”
Mr. Pearson’s family became known around Memphis when they led a successful fight against a plan to build a pipeline through a Black neighborhood, a project that was dropped in 2021. He enters the congressional race with the backing of Justice Democrats, a left-leaning group that helped fuel Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset primary victory against a Democratic incumbent in New York in 2018.
Alexandra Rojas, the group’s executive director, said in a statement, “This district does not have time to wait or keep going with the same status quo leadership that has governed for decades.”
Mr. Pearson also has the backing of Leaders We Deserve, an organization founded by the political activist David Hogg to help elect younger Democratic leaders.
Mr. Cohen won his 2024 primary with nearly 74 percent of the vote, and the general election with a similar margin. Over two decades on Capitol Hill, he has held a variety of committee positions, worked to steer federal funds back to Memphis and been a reliably liberal vote for Democrats.
He is the only Democrat from Tennessee in the House, after Republicans divided a safely blue district centered in Nashville into three more rural, conservative districts.
In an interview Tuesday morning, Mr. Cohen
acknowledged Mr. Pearson’s success as an activist, saying, “He’s got a lot of talent and I’ve supported him. But he’s got a lot of room to grow.”
Ticking through a list of projects and federal funds he has played a role in steering toward Memphis and the surrounding area, Mr. Cohen said he was confident that his extensive relationships and experience would help him in a primary.
“I’ve been effective from age 26 to age 76, and I’ll be effective at age 77 and at age 78,” he said. “Because I do one thing, and I do it well, and that’s legislating.”
Emily Cochrane is a national reporter for The Times covering the American South, based in Nashville.
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