Oprah hails Tennessee lawmakers’ protest, blasts ‘leaders behaving like children’

Oprah Winfrey lauded the two Tennessee state lawmakers who were briefly expelled from the state’s legislature earlier this year for their protests over gun violence, saying the pair of men are “using their lives to prove the cynics wrong.”

Winfrey, delivering the commencement address at Tennessee State University on Saturday, her alma mater, reflected on the wave of mass shootings in the U.S., an issue fresh on minds in Tennessee after a shooting at a private school in Nashville left three kids and three adults dead.

“The leaders are behaving like children,” Winfrey said. “The children are being gunned down by military-grade assault rifles.”

It was the shooting in Nashville, which included the use of an assault weapon, that state Reps. Justin Jones (D) and Justin Pearson (D) were protesting when they drew the ire of their Republican colleagues. GOP lawmakers voted to expel both of the representatives, both Black men, from the House. A third white lawmaker who was being targeted by Republicans was spared the same fate.

The Democratic lawmakers’s expulsion over their gun violence protests drew national attention, with national Democrats rallying around the Tennessee lawmakers. Local leaders eventually voted to send both of the men back to the statehouse.

Winfrey heaped praise on the two lawmakers during the speech at the university that she received her degree from in 1987, saying they were leading young people by example.

“Representatives like Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson are using their lives to prove the cynics wrong,” Winfrey said. “And they’re building on the legacy of giants, mentors of mine like John Lewis, whose fight for justice started right here in Nashville.”

Winfrey’s comments on gun violence came on the same weekend that a man opened fire at a shopping mall in Allen, Texas, and killed at least eight people and injured at least seven others. It was the 203rd mass shooting in the U.S. in 2023, according to gunviolencearchive.org.