Rev. Davie Tucker has served as the executive director of the Metro Human Relations Commission since 2022. But before he took up the fight for equality and justice, he went down a completely different career path.
Tucker grew up in Cheatham Place, a public housing project in North Nashville. His mother taught him that “you’re not grown until you can take care of yourself.” That led him to join the military early on.
When he left the Marines after nine years, the natural career path was “to either go to fire, police, or the post office.” Tucker said he ended up in the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office. While he did not consider it a career choice, he said he found his groove in learning about corrections.
“But in learning about the development of corrections in this country, I also came in contact with the dark side of that development of corrections,” Tucker said.
After leaving the Sheriff’s Office he became COO of TransCor America, Inc., which eventually was bought by CCA (Corrections Corporation of America), which is now CoreCivic. Tucker said he was pretty successful at that time, but he didn’t really feel a sense of self.
When he was about 40 years old, Tucker quit working and went to seminary at American Baptist College full time, and since 2007 he has served as the pastor of Beech Creek Missionary Baptist Church.
“I found my voice, my purpose and calling at 40.”
The Metro Human Relations Commission (MHRC) is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. What is the Human Relations Commission?
The Human Relations Commission was born out of the Civil Rights Act in 1965. A lot of [these groups] were set up to attest to the federal government that if they received [federal] funds they were not used discriminatorily. And so they sprung up all over the country.
But in places like Nashville, MHRC was actually written into the Metro Charter. Our goal is to protect and promote the general health, safety, security and welfare of all Nashvillians. That’s really broad. We do that through training, awareness and investigation of potential discrimination.
It’s a weird place to be a government agency challenged and charged with often bringing claims against Metro for acting inappropriately. That’s what we do.
We’re a 15 member commission with 10 commissioners appointed by the Mayor and five by the [Metro] Council. They’re our appointing and authorizing authority. So while I work for Metro, it is the commission that hired me, evaluates me and ultimately would be the one to decide whether or not to terminate me.
So it gives me a certain level of freedom as it relates to the political ideology of whatever mayoral administration may be in at the time. Some are more friendly to our mission, and others in the past have not been. In MHRC’s 60-year history here in Nashville, it has been defunded before.
I think it’s important work. I’m grateful that I get up every day and I get to work toward the common good.
You have said in a recent TV interview that the Human Relations Commission has more losses than wins. What did you mean?
Literally, we lose more than we win. Within bureaucracies, the rightness of a situation is not always the end goal. So showing up to advocate for groups that are marginalized and generationally appear to remain on the margins — and often strongly and courageously advocate for them, sometimes it feels like you don’t make any difference because you don’t win much.
I believe Nashville would not be the Nashville it is now if it had not been for this long history of MHCR. MHRC piloted and advocated for the first passage of an equal employment law regarding the hiring of Metro employees. So there is this history of wins.
But I have to say for the work we do, I am glad I don’t get evaluated on the number of wins that we have.
Whether it’s from the equitable distribution of public resources to mass incarceration to policing, those issues change slowly. Requests are made, demands are presented, and very little happens. And that’s what I mean with “we have more losses than we have wins.”
What are some of the specific wins you’d like to highlight?
There was a Title VI claim brought by some citizens of the inequitable distribution of public funds for the arts in Nashville. [Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin.] The press spent a lot of time on that. There have been a couple of executive directors that changed [within a year and we] found probable cause that inequitable distribution has probably happened.
What ended up happening was [that] the various parties — MHRC, Metro Arts, and Metro Legal — agreed to a conciliated agreement that in effect paid $2.3 million to that affected group and caused some other policy changes to be put in place that would hopefully keep that from happening again in the future.
We’re nearing a year inside of that agreement, and we count that as a win.
What is a top priority of yours right now?
Right now we’re beginning the process of assessing Metro’s language access system.
We’re grateful that the current mayor put this project in his budget. We’re really excited about that. It was just 15 years ago that the seated council at that time voted [whether] Nashville would be English only. That’s not that long ago, and so there are still pockets and places where language access is not readily available. But even as we begin our deep dive into it, Metro has spent some resources on being better than it was 15 years ago. And so MHRC has the ability through the Mayor’s Office to have access to learn what dollars are being spent towards language access, how they’re being utilized, and what would be a better way of doing it.
It’s those partnerships from the start that almost guarantee a win. So, we think at the end of this exercise and what comes out of it that language access services will be better for all Nashvillians.
There has been talk in the Metro Council about the need for a community safety plan and that the Metro Human Relations Commission would be the best entity to lead the development of such a plan. Define for us what a community safety plan is and how is it different from a public safety plan?
A public safety plan generally looks at police, fire and emergency response. From a social science perspective, community safety is broader. It takes into account societal impacts and how people measure what it means to be safe.
The intersectionality of these disciplines has been able to show us that the more abject poverty becomes, the more prevalent violence is, the more likely someone is food threatened, the more likely that someone does not have adequate health care. All of these add to groups’ and individuals’ idea of what it means to be safe. The premise is if you address those things, you also reduce crime. You reduce these things that are squarely under public safety.
Public safety by design is a reactive model, whereas community safety is a proactive model. And by being proactive, ultimately, you reduce individuals coming into contact with the criminal justice system. We know how it impacts marginalized people.
To the other part of that question, Nashville within the past decade began talking about community safety because typically political attitude is toward public safety. All that [public safety] is is more police, more responses to the criminal justice-sided resolution of societal problems, many of which are systemic in nature.
The plan [to tackle community safety] was not presented by MHRC. But the presenter suggested MHRC as a place for that to be housed. We were not opposed to that. But we also agree and are working out ways in which we could possibly partner with the Health Department, which — when you look at the rising field of public health — may naturally be a better fit. So MHRC is ready to assist in that regard. We won’t be leading that effort, but we definitely will be part of it.
How does our local community fight for and preserve the freedoms of all people, and what can citizens do when they see local government leaders fall short of their ethical responsibilities?
They must say something.
Silence has been and will always be complicit in what’s not right in the world. And so citizens to me have a duty to let their feelings be heard.
When citizens show up, they’re often late to the game in the sense that business interests maintain relationships. You saw that with the debate over the East Bank. It was citizens who asked, “Is this the best way to spend public funds?”
Consequently on the other side, you had those business-related interests that tied to the Titans that ultimately won out. But there was a vigorous public debate that I was heartened by. People did show up. People who love football, who would say, I think we could do something better with these billions of dollars.
I can see that the people letting our elected officials know, “I’m watching this process, and I’m watching what you’re doing with our funds.” That has shaped it. The establishment of the Office of Youth Safety is a direct result of the public showing up, advocating for itself.