It’s time to create a better 'Nashville Way' that truly works for everyone | Opinion
A plan that helps everyone in Nashville would address challenges with policing, schools, COVID-19 and housing and the arts.
- jeff obafemi carr is an interfaith leader, innovation strategist, and community advocate.
In 1968, a working class couple in South Nashville had a dream. The husband and new father, a World War II veteran and food service supervisor, and the wife, a dedicated mother who worked in dry cleaners and as a domestic in the upscale suburbs of the city— saved their hard-earned money and put a down payment on a small home one street over from Sevier Park. Once the White owner found out the couple was Black, he attempted to back out of the deal.
A local attorney took up their cause, ultimately winning them the right to purchase their home and move their growing family into the neighborhood. That attorney was the legendary Z. Alexander Looby. That couple was my parents.
For years, my father labored as a food service supervisor at the VA. In addition, he and my mother worked as dry cleaner employees, entrepreneurs, and even housekeepers in Green Hills and Belle Meade to pay their mortgage and taxes, and to inspire their three young children to dream beyond the limitations placed on them by society, as well as their lack of even a high school diploma between them.
Eventually, they paid off their mortgage, $6,000, and got all three of their kids through Tennessee State University, with two of them being elected Student Government President and leading successful movements for change.
Years later, with my father transitioned, and my 91-year-old mother still residing proudly in the home they occupied together and where my siblings and I experienced a memorable childhood, the neighborhood has changed completely.
A vivid example of Nashville gentrification, the area is now known as “12th South.” The car wash my brother and I frequented with our first cars is now an upscale restaurant. Waverly Belmont School, where I attended Kindergarten before it closed the next year to the Black kids in the neighborhood, is now renovated, reopened, resourced, and resplendent; the pride and joy of the self-proclaimed “progressive” new residents of this well-groomed, re-born neighborhood.
Prosperity and pandemic have exposed racial inequity
Today, million-dollar mansions surround my mother and the few remaining Black neighbors who huddle together in anxiety to dispose of their stacks of developer’s purchase offer letters.
My mother and her neighbors remind each other to get their tax freeze applications in each year to protect themselves. Some would say this is no equitable way to live, and many of us who were born and raised here — and made a choice to stay and be a part of the future — would agree.
Nashville has seen it’s fair share of obstacles in 2020 that threaten to transform the city even more. The tornadoes stormed through the city, hitting many areas where people can barely afford to live now, especially North Nashville.
Dr. James Hildreth, a highly respected infectious disease specialist and president of historic Meharry Medical College, points out consistently how COVID-19 has a particular impact on Black communities because of inequity in access to healthcare. The protests that have rocked Nashville and other cities—sparked by the killing of George Floyd and fueled by long-standing calls for police reform have only highlighted the inequities in Nashville that threaten to deepen class and race divides.
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On June 17, the Metro Council delivered a whopping 34 percent increase in Metro property taxes, the largest in history. It came amid the calls of thousands who told elected officials we were in need of a people-centered budget, a call that fell on deaf ears.
More:The costs of growth and change in Nashville
How a plan for all Nashvillians would work
We are in need of a plan that will truly elevate Nashville to a city that works for everyone who lives and works here.
That plan must include priority in at least these areas:
- Metro Nashville Police Department. Policing reform that is inclusive of community voices and respects Community Oversight, which citizens endorsed overwhelmingly. The selection of the new chief simply cannot be an inside job, with no transparency. A new chief must commit to reform across the board.
- Metro Nashville Public Schools. A concrete plan for the future of Metro Nashville Public Schools in the COVID-19 era that reassures those of us who have our kids in public schools that they will be healthy, safe, and effectively educated, with advanced notice and assurances. Our teachers, already strapped with classroom management, recently closed schools in Black neighborhoods, and adapting on the fly to new ways of reaching their kids, surely cannot be expected to instantly become disease control specialists.
- COVID-19 Relief. Nashville received over $100 Million Dollars in CARES Act funding, a portion of which has been spent to provide laptops and internet access to needy MNPS students. If we don’t spend the balance, it goes back to the federal government in December. The Mayor’s office has been criticized — and justifiably so — for “quietly gathering” together an elite group of government insiders to mastermind how to spend these funds. New voices must be brought to the table, and this money must be prioritized for the underserved, lest we end up with still another amphitheater on the riverfront, financed with relief funds.
- Innovative Housing and The Arts. We are a city that became the “it” because of the creatives who sent their gifts into the world, going back to the Fisk Jubilee Singers who earned us the name, “Music City” in the first place. With rising property values, property taxes, and lack of available land in the inner-city, Nashville must partner with landowners, non-profits like The Housing Fund, banks and financial institutions to give creatives and artists—particularly those of color—spaces where they can live, work, and thrive; where a storm and taxes won’t force them to leave the neighborhoods they love.
People need a hand up, not a handout
We have a remarkable crossroads before us: the chance to turn obstacles into opportunities. I was fortunate to grow up in a city where powerful, respected legendary civil rights heroes like Z. Alexander Looby saw themselves as organic members of a community.
They weren’t too important to give the people what they needed: not a handout, but a hand up. I’m fully convinced that this was the energy that birthed the original “Nashville Way.”
If city government, the council, and the business community cannot devise a vision that works for everyone, that affirms that Black Lives Matter, too, and provides tangible opportunities for equity we all can get behind, then it may very well be up to the people of Nashville to stop waiting on others and create a plan ourselves.
It’s time we envision and enact a new Nashville Way; one that truly works, for everyone. One that once allowed young Black families—like my parents—the opportunity to create a future for their children.
jeff obafemi carr is an interfaith leader, innovation strategist, and community advocate. Read more at www.thecarrwindow.com.
