Justin Jones 
The People’s Plaza [EPUB ebook] 
Sixty-Two Days of Nonviolent Resistance

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 Tennessee state troopers, 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 doorsteps 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 a police state that 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.

Зміст

Foreword by Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II

Introduction

Chapter 1: We’ve Been Here Before

Chapter 2: Lay Your Burdens Down

Chapter 3: ‘Do Not Underestimate Your Opponent’

Chapter 4: Shift Change

Chapter 5: Power Washing

Chapter 6: ‘Wait in the Plaza, Children’

Chapter 7: Capitol Hill

Chapter 8: Back the Badge?

Chapter 9: ‘It Was Like We Were Being Hunted’

Chapter 10: Night Terror

Chapter 11: Aggravated Littering

Chapter 12: State of Tennessee vs. Justin Jones

Conclusion

Timeline

Notes

Про автора

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.