This is the first of seven profiles of the candidates running for Nashville mayor. For more on the mayor’s race, click here.
Mayoral candidate Howard Gentry grew up in Nashville when parks and restaurants were off limits to blacks. He experienced racism, like the time a little girl at a city swimming pool asked him why he didn’t have a tail.
But he also knew privilege, as the son of African American icons.
And his parents wanted to make sure their children didn’t get too big for their britches.
“Howard just was one of the children running around,” 90-year-old Carrie Gentry says. “That’s the way he presented himself, and that’s the way we wanted him to present himself.”
Carrie Gentry was one of the early black women to earn a college degree. She taught dance at Tennessee State University and led the TSU majorettes. She helped integrate the Davidson County Democratic Women. The basketball stadium at TSU bears her husband’s name as the long-time football coach and athletic director.
If there was a silver spoon, Howard Gentry says it must have stayed in the drawer. The 62-year-old recalls when his parents bought a new house, high on Geneva Circle — home to black doctors, lawyers and professors. The enclave overlooks TSU and the nearby Preston Taylor public housing projects. But when they moved in, Gentry says his father—who was already “bigger than life”—dropped him off at the Preston Taylor community center to spend the day making friends.
“He needed me to experience real life,” Gentry says. “Even though I saw the Civil Rights movement, and I was discriminated against as a young person, there were realities, and realities were that the life we were living on the hill was not the life that most people were living in this community.”
Gentry says those kids from the housing projects did become his friends, some life-long. He took in one buddy who developed diabetes and couldn’t afford to care for himself until his death. Gentry says these class-straddling kinships helped him realize his experience as a black man was not the norm. He knows what it’s like to shop on food stamps, because he has close friends who do. He knows what it’s like to be on the losing end of gentrification.
“Growth and development helps the city, but it also hurts people,” he says. “And so you’ve got to be cognizant of the pain too.”
When those projects down the hill from his family’s house were bulldozed years ago, hundreds of tenants were moved to far-flung neighborhoods. Gentry says they were housed miles from city services and bus lines, with no supermarkets in walking distance. That’s why he would create something called the “Office of Social Equity” in his administration.
“When we sit around the table, and we plan these new and exciting things for our city, that there’s an entity there that’s thinking about how to minimize the negative effects of today’s market decisions on other people’s future.”
Gentry’s quick to say as mayor he won’t focus solely on the plight of the poor. He’s been a businessman too. He worked in banking and ran an insurance office. He even sold cars for Beaman Automotive. He considers himself a salesman at the core. But he also says he’s not willing to sell out the less fortunate in the name of progress. Those, he says, are my friends.
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