Legacy

At the end of the summer of 1990, Harold Moses Love Jr. arrived at Tennessee State University's Nashville campus ready to claim his birthright. TSU was the school his mother, father, grandmother, and four older sisters all attended. As a kid, Harold killed time in the campus's Upward Bound office, which his mother, Mary, ran, while TSU students served as his de facto babysitters. The geography of TSU's campus was already programmed into his internal GPS.

On move-in day, Harold Jr. drove up in a black, two-door Suzuki Swift hatchback. The license plate, which his father Harold Sr. picked out, read "HL JR." The young adult version of Harold Jr. was confident — some family members would even say cocky. He was the heir, the only son, to a prominent Nashville family. His lean, six-foot frame was his father's. His big, round, inquisitive eyes were his mother's. 

Harold Sr. was a member of the Tennessee House of Representatives, elected in large part thanks to strong roots in North Nashville, the neighborhood that surrounds TSU. His oldest four children, all daughters, were successful, but none of them was captivated by politics. When his son was born, Harold Sr. finally found a vessel into whom he could pour everything he’d learned. 

"Being Junior is hard," Harold Jr. would say years later, sitting behind his desk, which looks out over the downtown skyline. "Whether Senior is a doctor, preacher, lawyer, politician, cook, business owner, whatever, if Senior made an impact on those around him, and you're Junior, the expectation is always that you'll do at least as much."

"Sometimes, people won't let you be anything but the next chapter,” Love says. “I'm blessed and grateful that it was something I actually wanted to do."

As an 18-year-old freshman, Harold Jr. had never deviated from the train tracks his father built for him. Before long, he'd have to navigate the world without him.

Rep. Harold Love, D-Nashville, at the Tennessee State Capitol entering the legislative chamber with his colleagues, Rep. Karen Camper and Rep. Justin Jones.

In the '70s and '80s, Love spent his formative years in the North Nashville neighborhood of Bordeaux, a five-minute drive across the Cumberland River from Tennessee State, Fisk University, and Meharry Medical College, the city’s three famous HBCUs. His parents owned a three-bedroom house on a quiet street without any painted traffic lines. Their neighbors were TSU professors, Meharry doctors, and big-time lawyers. Black excellence was the norm in their neighborhood. 

The Loves spent fall Saturdays at Hale Stadium – AKA "The Hole" – watching the TSU Tigers play football. Harold Jr. paid the most attention at halftime, when the TSU’s famed Aristocrat of Bands took the field and launched songs across the bow at their opponents. During the holidays, the family drove downtown to Morrison's on West End to watch the band march in the parade. On sight, Love knew that he'd be in that band and that he'd go to school at TSU. Not long after, he took up the alto sax. 

Once Love entered middle school, his dad took the lead on his political education. On Saturdays, Harold Sr. would load his son into his silver ’78 Chevy Malibu and drive the streets of North Nashville, the neighborhood that had been pivotal in electing him to the Tennessee House of Representatives in the late ’60s. For two or three hours, Harold Sr. pointed out the homes of elected officials, block captains, and anyone who’d advanced the cause of Black people in Nashville. At this age, Love wasn't particularly fascinated by politics. Elections and legislation were just what his family did. 

The North Nashville of Love’s childhood still reeled from the construction of I-40 through Jefferson Street. Originally an Agora for Nashville's Black community, Jefferson Street was where people went to learn, shop, gather, and relax. Future doctors and lawyers studied at the HBCUs, while riffs off Jimi Hendrix's guitar and threads of Etta James and Ray Charles drifted out of the Del Morocco and Club Stealaway. After Eisenhower's Interstate Highway Act passed in 1956, consultants recommended that I-40 be built near Vanderbilt, which was still segregated, and Belle Meade, the wealthy part of town built upon the residue of plantations. The state government proposed an alternate plan: build I-40 through Jefferson Street. 

The resulting construction demolished one hundred square blocks in North Nashville, including 16 blocks of businesses on Jefferson. Among the casualties was Harold Sr.'s childhood home. North Nashville was destroyed, poverty ensued, and those who could afford it moved across the river to Bordeaux, where Harold Jr. grew up. He spent his first few years on Buchanan Street in North Nashville, but the family moved to Drakes Hill Drive in Bordeaux when he was a toddler. 

So there were plenty of reasons for a young, Black Nashvillian to get into politics, represent their neighborhood, and change laws. Harold Sr. was a vocal leader in the community who raised bail money for TSU students who were arrested at downtown sit-ins against segregation at Morrison's, the same cafeteria where he'd eventually take Harold Jr. to watch the parades. He marched during the Civil Rights Movement. But there were limits to what a Black politician could accomplish in a conservative state in the '70s. At times, he was forced to set aside pieces of legislation or pet causes in hopes that someone would eventually arrive to finish what he'd started.

The Harold M. Love Sr. Student Success Center was named after Rep. Harold Love Jr.’s father.

In 1998, at 26 years old, Love sat alone in his house in North Nashville. He'd just finished his first campaign, and a victory party made up of everyone in the world who loved him waited for him at the Maxwell House Hotel. 

The only problem? He'd lost. 

After graduating from TSU, he struggled. As an undergrad, a political future wasn't Harold Jr.'s sole focus. He marched in the Aristocrat of Bands, and he so enjoyed pledging Omega Psi Phi, Harold Sr.'s fraternity, that whenever he babysat his niece Christiane at the Bordeaux house, he put Spike Lee's "School Daze" on the TV. Still, Harold Sr. made sure the door stayed open. A couple times, he'd called Harold Jr. in his dorm room and told him to put on a suit and drive downtown to meet a governor or representative. He never hid that he was shaping and molding Harold Jr., just in case. In 1994, the year he graduated from TSU, Harold Jr. finally put the question to his father.

"Should I go into politics?"

"No," Harold Sr. said. "You go get a job."

Harold Jr. was stunned. After all those childhood drives, after all those arranged meetings, this was his father's response? 

"I need you to get a job and work. If people call you, then you know it's the right time for you to be in office. But you can't just go. You have to have the people want you."

Harold Sr.'s words carried extra weight because he was on the cusp of retirement. He'd been diagnosed with cancer and had begun to take treatments. Harold Jr. listened and enrolled at divinity school at Emory University, close enough to drive home whenever he wanted, see his family, and eat Mary's salmon croquettes. 

When classes ended for Spring Break on a Friday in March 1996, Love arrived home to learn Harold Sr. was sick, and by Monday he'd been taken to St. Thomas Hospital. Harold Jr. visited his dad, who lay in the hospital bed, a little foggy but still clearly himself. He asked Harold Jr. if he had enough money for food. That was the last conversation they ever had. 

On Wednesday, on his way to Bible study, Harold Jr. felt a tremendous, foreign pain in his stomach. Right then, Mary paged him. He was needed at the hospital immediately. By the time he arrived at St. Thomas, his father was unresponsive. Over and over, Harold Sr.'s heart kept stopping. Eventually, the doctors could do nothing else for him. 

Harold Jr. knew he needed to step up for his mother, so he decided to transfer from Emory to Vanderbilt Divinity School, from which he graduated in 1998. He held close the advice his father had given him his senior year at TSU. But now that Harold Sr. was gone, he felt an urgency that he couldn't bear.  He decided to put job-hunting on the backburner and go right into politics, running for a seat in the Tennessee House of Representatives, hoping, naïvely, to beat Edith Taylor Langster, one of three Black women in the state Legislature, in the Democratic primary. Langster was an incumbent of three years and formerly the first ever patrolwoman on the Nashville police force.

Sitting in his apartment, defeated and adrift, he couldn't hype himself up to face his people. He put everything he had into that campaign, and he still lost. His mind drifted to all the doors he'd knocked on, all the people who'd said they'd vote for him, the neighbors who'd waved signs that bore his name, his father's name. Most of them still called him "Lil' Harold." Now he had to face those people, thank them, and apologize. 

Of course, he'd mostly wanted to win this election for Harold Sr. And to some degree, he felt like he'd been a disappointment. He was still reeling when his friend Eric Townsend – AKA Snoopy – pulled up to his house.

"Come on, man," Snoopy said. "Let's go. I ain't gonna let you sit here the whole night. People over here love you. When you go in there, don't you feel ashamed by none of this. You ran a good race. Don't let anybody tell you you've let your father down. You did the very best you could."

So Harold left the house, and with Snoopy alongside made his way to the party at the Maxwell. Two decades later, Snoopy would be a groomsman in Harold Jr.'s wedding.

Burnt out after the loss, Love teetered on giving up. He was about to become a pastor; maybe elected office wasn't his calling. He made a deal with God – he would call his father's old office number. Usually, when a representative resigns, retires, or loses, their number transfers to the person who takes their place. If someone answered, Harold Jr. resolved, he would leave politics behind.

He called the number. Disconnected. His father’s seat, he felt, was still waiting for him. 

So in 2000, he ran again. And lost. Throughout the neighborhood, he still hadn't shed the diminutive moniker. "That's just Lil' Harold," people would say. There was a sense among some people that he didn't fully understand or comprehend everything that North Nashville was. Like his father, he dressed up to go to work. He owned maybe one pair of jeans. He didn't necessarily come off as a man of the people. 

"I think I would have described him in his younger years as cocky," says Christiane Buggs, the niece with whom Love used to watch "School Daze." "He really is a phenomenal person. But I do think it's important to note that he was just young and immature. He'd just lost his father, who was probably his best friend and certainly his biggest mentor.”

Buggs notes that these initial forays into politics happened “before he was able to really figure out who he was” and appreciated the value of experience. “He was Harold Love, Junior be damned. He was Harold Love, right? I do think early on there was that cockiness that just said, 'I'm good-looking. I'm smart. And I come from a good background. The world is my oyster, right? I should have everything I want.’"

Over the course of these election losses, Love internalized a universal political truth. The morning after each election, he drove around North Nashville and Bordeaux and collected his campaign signs from his neighbors' yards. After each failed election, those signs grew heavier. 

After his second loss, Love turned his attention to his community. As pastor, he spoke at the pulpit of St. Paul AME, a four-minute drive from his childhood home, every Sunday. He got a certificate in nonprofit management and started a Ph.D. in public administration, both at TSU, gaining a better understanding of the Legislature. In 2010, a flood wiped out big swaths of the city near St. Paul AME. He and his congregation spent the week tracking down food, shelter, clothing, and cleaning supplies for neighbors whose houses had been flooded. Periodically, he traveled to Africa to hand out food, install wells, and distribute medicine and immunizations. 

"The older he got, the more he was around, the more he realized all the different ways that Nashville needed to be changed," Buggs says. "And I think that instead of him having absorbed information from my grandfather [Harold Sr.] and kind of almost taking credit for things that my grandfather was able to do, he's now able to point to things he's done all by himself."

On his fourth try – in 2012, 14 years after his first campaign – Harold Jr. once more faced off against an incumbent, this time a representative who'd held office for 26 years. On election night, he started off strong by winning the early precincts. Gradually, his opponent caught up and overtook him. Love had seen this movie before, and he dreaded its ending. 

But he'd changed since his first election. No longer was he just a smart 26-year-old in a suit and cufflinks, a kid with clean fingernails, a famous name, and a master's degree from a fancy school. He was a near 40-year-old with real experience in the trenches of his community, a man whose accomplishments could stand on their own. Love had finally accepted his father's advice: go do the work. When your community specifically asks for you, then it's your time to run for office.

Love felt confident. He hadn't lost too badly in South Nashville. He'd kept pace in East. Now he just needed his home court, North Nashville, to deliver the win. And it did. After years of dismissing him as Lil' Harold, North Nashville finally embraced him as one of their own. 

"I've seen my uncle grow, and I appreciate it," Buggs says. "And I think that's just maturity. Like he is really now just, 'I'm confident in who I am. I'm confident in what I do.'"

Harold Jr. felt more relief than joy. Soon after he took office, Beth Harwell, the Republican speaker of the house, reached out to him. 

"Look," she told him. "Your father was great to me. If there's anything I can do for you, just let me know."

He asked for Harold Sr.'s phone number, which had somehow remained disconnected since 1994.

Rep. Harold Love, D-Nashville, left, talks with colleagues while leaving an education commission meeting at the Tennessee State Capitol.

As a freshman representative, Love moved cautiously, as is traditional. Freshman legislators tend to watch more than act. 

Soon after Love took office, Bill Johnson, then the director of teacher education at TSU, recalls approaching him. Johnson hoped to prevent the state Legislature from changing the minimum required ACT score to 26. This new threshold would eliminate a ton of minority candidates who'd attended lower-performing high schools. Then-Governor Bill Haslam wanted to plug the gaps with Teach For America-type programs. Johnson wrote an amendment to the bill and needed someone on the committee to carry it, so he approached Love, hoping to win over the newcomer. 

"It's too politically hot," Johnson recalls Love saying (Love does not recall this conversation or the amendment). "I can't." 

Johnson was furious. But at the very end, he remembers, the bill got pulled. 

Within Love's first year in office, TSU had its Day On The Hill, when higher-ups visited the state Capitol and talked to legislators about the issues they faced. TSU's dean of agriculture and president told Love they hadn't received some of their state matching funds for their land grant programs. By federal law, state governments are required to match dollar for dollar the funding that land grant universities receive from the federal government. At the time, they didn't know how much was missing.

Love was stunned. He'd heard his parents talk about this same issue around the dinner table when he was a kid. He assumed Harold Sr. had taken care of it. 

Around the same time, he met Leah Dupree at the revolving doors of the Statehouse on one of his first days on the job. She was a trained lawyer/lobbyist and the director of legislative services, and it was her job to reach out to new members. Dupree grew up in Jackson, not Nashville, but she was a TSU alum and an Alpha Kappa Alpha. She's a decade younger than Harold Jr., but her older sister knew him from college. "Look out for my friend," her sister told Dupree. "He just got elected."

They became good friends right from the start, two policy nerds who treated the first day of the legislative session like the first day of school, psyched about what they were going to wear – like his father, Harold Jr. favored three-piece suits and wide, solid-colored ties – and what bills they would dive into. 

"I think I like you," Love said one day. 

"I think I like you, too," Dupree replied. 

After the Day on the Hill, Love started digging, spending his days in the legislature's library. One day, he emerged from the Statehouse attic with a report dated 1970. It was written by Harold Love Sr., and it focused on TSU's missing funds. Since Harold Sr. was one of few Black legislators in Tennessee – and as a Black man in the ’70s, he was still fighting for personhood – the report had been ignored and shelved. 

The inequality would be unthinkable if it weren't so believable. At some point, the state had eliminated TSU's matching funds as a line item in its budget. All these years, the state's other land grant universities had no problem getting their funds. 

A committee formed after George Floyd's murder set out to address the issue. They discovered there were $318 million in deferred maintenance costs. They tell a story on campus about a student who lived in a rat-infested dorm, got bitten, and had to go to the hospital. At one point, TSU employed four world-class astronomers, but was unable to retain them because other universities could better fund their research. The chair of the biology department conducted a doctoral dissertation in which he collected plants from around the world and stored them in a specialized refrigerator. Power is spotty at TSU because of the poor-quality grid, and a power outage thawed his samples. Forty years of his life's work, destroyed.

A view of the courtyard at the center of Tennessee State University’s campus.

Out in the world, TSU's alums have accomplished plenty. But there's a sense that they succeeded in spite of subpar resources. A lot of TSU's medical equipment is old – dusty 1950s mannequins and beds, ancient microscopes. Some graduates reported that once they got to a hospital for their residencies, they were looking at tools they've never seen before. The real tragedy, professors believe, is the opportunity cost. What could TSU students have accomplished with up-to-date facilities and resources?

"What if," Bill Johnson wonders, "instead of having nine (famous) names, it was 40,000? How would the world be different?"

The committee finished its work in 2021. In 2022, Governor Bill Lee approved $250 million in the budget for TSU. The money is allocated for capital improvement projects and academics, a new engineering school. So TSU won't be able to immediately fix its rundown buildings. But the university will have the power to take on more projects like the new health sciences center, which houses a birthing room, an emergency room, a nursing simulation room – everything you'd find in a hospital. 

In late 2021, Love was one of 11 state legislators to receive a fellowship from E Pluribus Unum. As a fellow, he created a three-step toolkit that land-grant HBCUs can use to receive matching funds they may be owed. EPU is currently working with two HBCUs that want to implement Love's toolkit. 

This money could not come at a better time for TSU, which is currently transitioning from an R2 to R1 research university. No HBCU has ever held R1 status — which designates the top-tier of academic research. At the R1 level, TSU will compete with the likes of Carnegie Mellon, Vanderbilt, UNC, MIT, and Berkeley, which should significantly expand its national profile. 

This legislative victory is Love’s apotheosis. The childhood rides in the Malibu, the Aristocrat of Bands and the Omegas, the lost elections, his 26-year-old self cosplaying his father in a three-piece suit – it had all led to this. He made mistakes along the way, as a 2019 audit revealed that he illegally spent approximately $15,000 on food and beverages, dry cleaning, and gift shop items, among other personal expenditures. Love claimed some purchases were for constituents and argued that the policy on personal food purchases wasn't in place when he made them, but he did admit some fault. Ultimately, he grew from a cautious freshman legislator to an elder statesman willing to stand out front and put his name on something he believed in. 

"If I was in leadership, Harold would be in the room,"  Johnson, once furious, says now. "I would want Harold in the room."

For Love, the main takeaway from the TSU legislation isn't the injustice, the work he did for his family's alma mater, or even that he's finished what his father started. Now pastor of historic Lee Chapel AME, much of his life takes place in a two-mile radius that encompasses TSU, Lee Chapel, and the Statehouse. 

"My father was right," Love says. "That's what I want people to understand. He was right."

Before they were even engaged, Harold Jr. asked Leah if she wanted a ride in his dad's Malibu. It was peak summer in Nashville, and by the time they made it to Charlotte Pike, Leah was sweating waterfalls, her hair plastered to her scalp. 

"Roll the window down," Love advised her, locked into nostalgia. Leah touched her face. The car was so old that the roof began to shed, and little particles had landed on her face, mixed in with the sweat. Finally realizing what was going on, Love was horrified. A little chastened, he drove them to a car wash. Afterward, as a token of apology, he took them to Sonic and bought Leah a peach lemon slush, her favorite. 

Throughout their marriage, they've maintained this ritual passed down from Harold Sr. On many Saturday mornings, they'll drive around Bordeaux, past the old family home on Drakes Hill, past the houses of former neighborhood big shots. They'll cross the river and drive through North Nashville, onto Jefferson Street, past the former site of Harold Sr.'s childhood home. Each week, Harold Jr. will take some kind of detour to share some piece of North Nashville history with Leah, the West Tennessean. When their tour ends, they'll stop at Sonic for a slush or Baskin-Robbins for a cup of daiquiri ice. Then they'll cruise down Buchanan, past Slim & Husky's Pizza back to the house they share, the same one where Love’s sisters were born. 

Sometime in the near future, they'd both like kids. And once these heirs come of age, it's easy to picture Harold Jr. carting them around in the Malibu on a Saturday, molding young Loves for whatever lies ahead, driving North Nashville streets that are etched into his family's bones.

~ In partnership with E Pluribus Unum ~

Mikeie Reiland is a narrative nonfiction writer whose work has appeared in the Oxford American, The Bitter Southerner, Gravy, and SB Nation. He is a recent graduate of UGA’s MFA in narrative nonfiction program.

Andrea Morales is a documentary photographer and journalist who was born in Lima, Peru, and raised in Miami, Florida. Her personal work attempts to lens the issues of displacement, disruption and everyday magic. Adding glimpses of daily life to the record is central to how she makes work. While earning a B.S. in journalism at the University of Florida and an M.A. in visual communication at Ohio University, she worked as a photojournalist at newsrooms like The New York Times and The Concord Monitor. She is currently a producer at the Southern Documentary Project, an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi and the visuals director for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism.

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