Howard Gentry has served as the Davidson County Criminal Court Clerk since 2011. His office is responsible for keeping the records of the court, collecting fines and fees and other clerical duties as required, staffing courtrooms, and running the bond and warrant office.
Prior to being the Criminal Court Clerk — and yes, he will run again for this office — he was the first African American to be elected as Nashville’s Vice Mayor. Before that, he served as councilmember-at-large.
Gentry, a native Nashvillian, is known in our community to fight for marginalized populations and create collaborative efforts with the goal of reducing poverty and ending homelessness.
You have been leading collaborative efforts for expungement clinics for years. Tell us about them.
Expungements are one of the statutory requirements of my office and that is to provide the materials and the assistance and expungement records [for] everybody who … has the right to have their records expunged.
The fact is that expungement clinics came out of realizing that the majority of people did not know what expungement was until somebody told them. I started walking around the community asking people if they had gotten their record expunged, and they didn’t know what that word meant. I checked with the courtroom clerks and determined that people were not finding out in the courtrooms that they could get their records removed or expunged. Even if they were told, they didn’t know what to do.
So, we realized there was a need, and that’s how the expungement clinics started. They first started as an informational session, just to tell people about [the process], and then it morphed into actually going through the expungement process at the expungement clinics.
We’ve done around a hundred since 2011. When we came into our office, it was about an average of 8,000-9,000 expungements a year. We average between 20,000 and 30,000 expungements a year now. We move out into the community to ensure that we’re educating the community not only about the expungements but also about how to get their driver’s licenses reinstated and voting rights restored.
You established the Nashville Poverty Reduction Council. What happened to that effort?
If there is one thing that saddens me, it’s that I was talked into walking away from that. When I became Criminal Court Clerk, it was suggested that maybe my being the Criminal Court Clerk and heading the Poverty Initiative might be a conflict. And I made mistakes in my life … I don’t know if it was intended to be a dismantling — but it was a dismantling of an amazing mix of public-private involvement of what I believe would have made a huge difference in how poverty is approached in this city. Yes, it changed, and we were never able to get that amazing mix of public-private stakeholders that really were committed to making a difference in the area of poverty in Nashville. I still hurt today.
It started when I was running the Public Benefit Foundation at the [Nashville] Chamber [of Commerce]. That’s when we had the first Poverty Summit in Nashville. It started there in the most unlikely place. And that’s where the leaders on the private side came into the fold and really bought into the pillars that needed to be constructed to reduce poverty in our city.
I can’t run around blaming myself, but I am saddened that that initiative was changed and [caused] the persons who were left to have to go out and create their own structures. And it has turned into more of a siloed effort again. We’ve been working hard around it, but it’s in silos.
Where do you see opportunities right now when you think about poverty reduction?
I do see opportunities. That Poverty Plan is still sitting on somebody’s shelf. And it has to start from the top. That’s the way that we started it. I mean we started it (from the Public Benefit Foundation) but we had support from the administration and Mayor Purcell was very involved. He actually was the person that brought to us the idea of the Homelessness Commission, and he did agree that we needed to look at poverty in a huge way.
Even when the Dean Administration began, they were very, very supportive of initiatives around poverty. But somewhere along the way, somebody had another idea. And unfortunately, it changed what we were doing and how we were doing it. The desire to have quicker results fueled the engine to do it differently. I just think there was a lack of understanding that the results were moving forward and would have been huge.
And so, it needs to start at the top again. The Administration needs to really embrace it. They don’t have to do all the work. There are people and entities in the community, stakeholders, I’m sure, who are willing to come back together and then make it a priority and create policy that will attack poverty at its core.
You were the founding chair of the Metropolitan Homelessness Commission, which later was merged with the Continuum of Care’s homelessness governance board into a community board called the Homelessness Planning Council. When you look at the city’s efforts over the years from where it was started, how are we doing as a community?
I think there are two pictures here. One is that we’re absolutely putting more resources into homelessness. And it is a very open and intentional discussion. There are efforts that are taking place that are real. And for that, I am happy. I am even proud about the facility that has just been opened (referring to the Strobel House that offers permanent supportive housing units for people experiencing homelessness) and those types of things.
What concerns me is that I don’t believe that we are as grassroots [as we should be] and that we’re digging deep enough into the problem these days to avoid homelessness continuing to move in the direction it is. When we first started, even though we made a mistake by not having homeless persons on the Homelessness Commission at the very beginning – but we corrected that mistake quickly – I don’t see us being as grassroots as we were [and] dealing with the root causes of homelessness in the way that we attempted to do.
Seeing homelessness where it is and looking deeper into the root causes, it’s hard, and it’s costly, and it’s time-consuming. The only way to keep the numbers from growing and generations from having to live in that state is to do what we need to do to keep people from being homeless in the first place; and minimize the results of mental health, minimize the results of disabilities, minimize the results of true poverty, and minimize the results for living in a homeless state for so long that it becomes your culture and the culture of your family and your children and their families. That’s the hard work. That’s the dirty work. That’s the almost- impossible-feeling work. And I don’t see enough in that area anymore.
Maybe it’s happening, but I know that if it were happening at the level that we started, I’d see it more.
You have spent a good portion of our career working at Tennessee State University. Do you want to comment about the current financial struggles and the future of TSU?
We’ve been talking about homelessness. We’ve been talking about poverty and the like. And of course, TSU was created to help a certain population, the black community, to help us to not fall into those categories. To educate a population of people who did not have the opportunities to create the abilities to move forward in their lives in a manner that would allow them to live a sustainable life of dignity and service to the community. To be able to do that, you had to go to the white institutions and of course, they did not want us there.
TSU was created because somebody thought it would be a good idea to educate negroes. It absolutely was a good idea. It is a good idea. And somewhere along the way, it feels like somebody [decided that instead] of a good idea, it was a bad idea. The dismantling or the attempt to dismantle HBCU’s (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) across the nation, not just TSU, did not just start with this administration.
Tennessee State is a great institution. It provides opportunities not just for Black folks but for all people. It’s very multicultural. It always has been. Never has it been segregated, and anybody could go to TSU from the day it was created, even though it is an HBCU.
TSU has had its challenges with all those factors in place. Underfinanced, underfunded, under supported and Tennessee State has survived anyway.
Now today, we’re in a situation where Tennessee State is still educating thousands of young people. Tennessee State is still educating people who are getting second degrees, third degrees, they’re still doing their job. But Tennessee State has fallen into a financial state whereby it needs to restructure, and it needs help in doing that. Tennessee State is not failing. Tennessee State is not crumbling. Tennessee State needs help.
This is an opportunity for TSU to even be greater. This is an opportunity for some of the mistakes that we might have made to be corrected. It is also an opportunity for those powers that be to help make it one of the greatest state institutions there is.
The financial situation at TSU is a result of a lot of things. It’s a result of the state not funding it at the level that they should have. It’s also a result of we, the alumni, not supporting financially at the level we could. It’s also the result of the community not being as supportive as it used to be. And even possibly, TSU not involving itself in the community as much that we could have or should have.
But all that being said, I have not said one thing to you that is not fixable. There is money that is available to the university. There are efforts taking place and could be even greater with the assistance and support of state entities to correct the findings that are real and need to be corrected. And having leadership at the top from the board down that can help create an improved Tennessee State University. All that is doable.
Is there anything else you would like to address?
I was around when The Contributor first started. And I always looked at it as basically a great opportunity for persons who were without housing, without jobs, who were struggling to be employed and be able to sustain themselves. And that’s [how] I looked at it.
But I know you are bigger than that. You are more important than that, even though that’s a big deal what I just said. And I just want to thank The Contributor for doing what you do because, of course, you create a media source for us to be able to read and hear what we need to read and hear and don’t think of enough. But you also create opportunities that go unnoticed by the population at large and I just want you to know that I see you.