When the Rev. jeff obafemi carr sets out to afflict the comfortable, he often begins with himself. In 1990, as the student government president of Tennessee State University, he led a sit-in calling for capital improvements at the university — and then went on a hunger strike to demand amnesty for the protesters. In 2009, he pitched a tent on the roof of his Amun Ra Theatre on Clifton Street — one of the city’s few theater companies operated by African-Americans — and braved autumn storms until he raised the money to keep it afloat for the season.
Now he’s moved into a 6-by-10-foot micro-home, built on a repurposed auto trailer and towed to Monroe Street in North Nashville. And there he plans to stay, until his campaign achieves its fundraising goal of $50,000 — enough money, he hopes, to build a whole village of them.
For carr, homelessness is neither a stunt nor an abstraction. During the economic downturn a few years ago, he and his family had to move into his mother-in-law’s attic for a time, after their house went into foreclosure. He was grateful to have a safe place to go, but he keenly felt the humiliation of living under someone else’s roof.
“When everybody was asleep, it made me question who I was and what I was doing for my wife and kids,” he says. “I can’t imagine how a person emerges from homelessness with sanity intact.”
According to a 2013 NashvilleNext , between 800 and 1,000 Nashvillians are chronically homeless. (continue reading at NashvilleScene)