TOKENS PODCAST: S6E6
“Justice is what love looks like in public.”
These words from Dr. Cornel West have long inspired the work of activists and community organizers who seek to speak out against injustice. But what if the public practice of doing justice lands you in a jail cell?
For Justin Jones, this is exactly what happened.
“I was isolated from the other protestors, and taken in a lot of humiliation by one of the guards,” he says, recounting an experience he had during a non-violent protest in 2020 outside the Tennessee State Capitol. “I kept praying, I kept singing the songs my grandmother Harriet taught me to let them know that I knew I was not alone.”
Noticing his prayers, a guard in the jail made a remark to Justin – something about how scripture tells us that we’re supposed to listen to authority.
“And I told him that I ascribe more to the theology that we see in books like Exodus, where you see Moses telling Pharaoh to let my people go,” Justin recalls. “You see this non-cooperation with injustice, you see a God who has a preferential option for the oppressed.”
He has often found himself an enemy in the eyes of the law. But by courageously standing up for the community he loves, he continues to bring attention to a vast array of state-perpetuated wrongs. In today’s episode, he discusses his recent book “The People’s Plaza” which tells the story of those 62 days outside the Capitol.
Listen to hear his thoughts on doing justice in public, and how fighting for the oppressed is itself an act of faith, steeped in self-denying love.
ABOUT THE GUEST
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.
ABOUT TOKENS SHOW & LEE C. CAMP
Tokens began in 2008. Our philosophical and theological variety shows and events hosted throughout the Nashville area imagine a world governed by hospitality, graciousness and joy; life marked by beauty, wonder and truthfulness; and social conditions ordered by justice, mercy and peace-making. We exhibit tokens of such a world in music-making, song-singing, and conversations about things that matter. We have fun, and we make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And ourselves. You might think of us as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians and humorists transgressing borders.
Lee is an Alabamian by birth, a Tennessean by choice, and has sojourned joyfully in Indiana, Texas, and Nairobi. He likes to think of himself as a radical conservative, or an orthodox liberal; loves teaching college and seminary students at Lipscomb University; delights in flying sailplanes; finds dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sea salt to be one of the finest confections of the human species; and gives great thanks for his lovely wife Laura, his three sons, and an abundance of family and friends, here in Music City and beyond. Besides teaching full-time, he hosts Nashville’s Tokens Show, and has authored three books. Lee has an Undergrad Degree in computer science (Lipscomb University, 1989); M.A. in theology and M.Div. (Abilene Christian University, 1993); M.A. and Ph.D. both in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame, 1999).
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