Stay Tuned for Another World

Today, Tennessee decides whether we’re ready for another world.

Before we dive into the politics of it all, I want to start with a little Nashville history — because this city has always known how to lead in uncertain and challenging times.

In the late 1950s and early ’60s, Nashville became the heartbeat of the Southern civil rights movement. College students from Fisk, TSU, Meharry, and American Baptist Theological Seminary organized the Nashville sit-ins that desegregated our city’s lunch counters. Standing behind those students was Reverend Kelly Miller Smith Senior, the pastor of First Baptist Church on Capitol Hill, a historically black church located in the heart of my House District.

Smith was one of the quiet architects of the civil rights movement; he founded the Nashville Christian Leadership Council, the first affiliate of Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and trained a generation of nonviolent leaders who went on to shape the movement. During a February 13, 1969, sermon in Johnson City, Tennessee, he delivered a sermon entitled “Stay Tuned for Another World,” drawing on Revelation 21:1 to inspire hope and perseverance amid struggle. In this sermon, he emphasizes the importance of envisioning a transformed society grounded in justice and compassion.

Throughout this campaign, I’ve repeated this “stay tuned for another world” again and again, as I felt the entire RNC apparatus breathing down my neck the last few weeks. It’s what this campaign has been about, believing, even when the world feels like it’s burning, that something better is still possible.

Earlier this week, a pastor I organized with during the 2017 Medicaid expansion campaign, Rev. Marie King (pictured below at a 2018 Medicaid expansion rally at the Tennessee Legislature), texted me to check in. I told her I was having a rough time, and she responded, “Read Psalm 121.”

I lift up my eyes to the mountains—
Where does my help come from?
My help comes from the Lord,
The Maker of heaven and earth.

A few days later, at Mt. Zion Baptist Church on Jefferson Street — a cornerstone of Nashville’s Black spiritual and civil rights tradition — Bishop Walker preached from the same Scripture. He told the story of the pilgrims who walked forward even when the wind was beating against them, when danger surrounded them, when the path ahead looked impossibly narrow. They didn’t make their way because the journey was easy; they made their way because they kept their heads up, fixed on a horizon they refused to surrender. Not to be dramatic, but as I sat in the pew, looking up, trying to stare away the tears streaming down my face, I felt like the sermon was grabbing at my soul.

This campaign has been a lot, unbearable for me most days— the 16-hour daily schedules, the barrage of negative attacks, the President of the Free World tweeting about me, right-wing media outlets calling my family members and friends, violent rape and death threat e-mails sent to my legislative account, it hasn’t been fun by any measurement of the word. But this race has stretched my belief in our city, state, and country, humbled and sharpened me, and it’s shown me again and again that we haven’t given up on each other. And if that’s the case, then stay tuned for another world.

This campaign has been about so much, but most importantly, to me, it’s been a vehicle to radically reimagine what’s possible, the imagination that Rev. Kelly Miller Smith preached from his pulpit, the imagination that turned Nashville into a bastion of transformative, generational change. Today is a test of whether Tennessee still believes in itself, whether we believe we deserve more than crumbs, whether we can out-organize despite oppressive circumstances, and how we move forward in the aftermath of chaos and destruction.

Whatever happens tonight, we’ve already proven that the future of this state will not be written by the wealthy and well-connected, but by those of us willing to imagine something better and do the beautiful, soul-hurting work of making it real. Another world is possible — and Tennessee just might be the place where it breaks through.

Let’s go out and win this.

Love,

Aftyn

P.S. Polls are open from 7 AM to 7 PM. Need voting information, click here. Join us in Nashville for the election night watch party tonight from 7-10 PM at Marathon Music Works. RSVP by clicking here.