Orange Mound
By Amanzi Arnett
1.
Nostalgia
Specks of orange colored the crowd along Park Avenue. T-shirts and banners bearing the neighborhood’s signature hue light up my memories of those boisterous, amber-drenched autumn Saturdays. A thundering drumline and crashing cymbals underscored the collage of conversations on the crowded sidewalk as the Orange Mound parade made its way down the street passing old landmarks and new birth. Hoisted up in my father’s arms, I watched the animated marching band and majorettes kick up magic in the streets at the center of a flurry of activity and cheering. We stood at the corner of Keating Street where my father’s brothers owned and operated an auto shop. Slow walking and sweet talking Miss Jessie would come outside and wave as she placed an old pie crust pan full of milk on her porch for the neighborhood stray cats to lap up with delight.
As a child, since most of what we needed was in the neighborhood, what we affectionately called “The Mound” was the world for me. My mother and sister would take me around Lamar-Airways shopping center, the bustling marketplace of the Mound, and my eyes would dart around, taking in every familiar face and strange character we encountered. All of those faces had a story that led to another story, and all of those stories had a place. We received haircuts at Mister Johnson’s barbershop where the barbers would swap stories while Frankie Beverly and Maze poured through the speakers of a stereo mounted on the wall.
Every afternoon, like clockwork, the same jogging woman would press her way down the sidewalk past our house, skin glistening with sweat and wearing headphones with a walkman in her hand. Her colorfully beaded braids would swing behind her in the wind. I would ask permission to hop on my bike and ride around the corner to my grandmother’s house. “Don’t go past Barron Ave and don’t go past Bradley Street,” my mother would warn me, sheltering me from the dangers of a changing neighborhood. I didn’t know what was beyond those borders she set for me, and I feared my parents’ wrath more than I loved my curiosity.
My folks hid the deeper anxieties from me, but I sensed the shift in the neighborhood’s tone. New bulletproof glass was installed at the counter of the corner store where I religiously purchased Jungle Juice, pickles, and made the occasional Sunday morning pantyhose run for my mother. My suspicions of a new world were confirmed when I wandered away from my parents at a neighborhood funeral home, stumbling upon the wake of a young man whose mother tearfully wailed over his body. I overheard murmurs and conversations about the guns that took his life. Those borders set for me began to make sense, and I stayed close to home and watched my surroundings descend into something unfamiliar to me, uninviting, and worth avoiding.
2.
Mound History
“You know Orange Mound was the first,” is part of the enduring lore associated with Orange Mound and the notion that the neighborhood was the first in the United States created for and by Black people. Stories are part of the wealth of Orange Mound. Even when its future looks uncertain, Orange Mound residents are completely enthralled by its past.
With a name deriving from the bumpy, green osage oranges that grew along the edges of its land, it was born in 1890 out of small acts of defiance. It was land that was never meant to be ours. Mary Deaderick, the widow of plantation owner William Pitt Deaderick, could no longer maintain the land alone. After making the decision to offload the property, she sold it to a developer by the name of E. E. Meacham with one stipulation—the land could not be sold to negroes. She intended to deny formerly enslaved people access to the vast stretch of land on which they had once toiled and worked. Whether led by altruism or, more likely, the prospect of making a great deal of money, Meacham began to sell narrow plots of land to former slaves.
Shotgun homes were built from the ground up on dirt plots by prideful people in a quaint settlement on the outskirts of Memphis before it was eventually annexed. It’s a story that is familiar to Black Americans across the country. The early settlers of Orange Mound, many of whom came from surrounding areas hoping for fresh starts and new opportunities, were folks who fashioned oases in the middle of worlds that brutalized them.
In the years after the Second World War, Orange Mound’s population began to soar with the construction of new homes and the expansion of the neighborhood’s borders. In its most thriving moments, the community was once one of the largest concentrations of Black people in the United States, second only to Harlem in New York. As segregation was deeply ingrained in the city of Memphis and Black people weren’t allowed to engage in a white society, Orange Mound residents had an opportunity born out of exclusion to rely on themselves and become self-sustaining, creating a tightly knit ecosystem and an assortment of institutions, many of which are still standing.
And that self-sustaining community was what I also knew while growing up in the Mound. The pride was centered on the fact that the folks in the Mound owned it from the beginning.
Homeownership, an important piece of the journey to generational wealth in America, was something that the Black people of Orange Mound were well-acquainted with. For years, in spite of what the community has endured, Orange Mound still boasted rates of homeownership that exceeded the average of Black homeowners in Memphis.
In the 1990s, the neighborhood had a rate of fifty-three percent homeownership but, according to the county assessor’s office, that number declined to forty-two percent by 2021. That’s on par with the Urban Institute’s current numbers for homeownership for Black Memphians, averaging around thirty-nine percent.
Despite these numbers meeting the city’s average for other Black neighborhoods, this reality does not quite translate to a future of wealth as property values remain low. This is often due to the homes' low resale value, inhibiting residents’ ability to borrow money against their homes to fund repairs.
These issues coupled with an aging population whose children are increasingly uninterested in returning to the neighborhood or lack the resources to maintain the costs associated with keeping additional properties, Orange Mound’s story of ownership has been muddied with a sense of burden and obligation, threatening to eclipse the pride.
3.
Unraveling
There was a sea of blue in 1994. The lights atop a swarm of police cruisers illuminated the corner of Deadrick Ave and Pendleton Street as we watched through the wrought iron door at the front of our home. Jesse Bogard, a sixty-eight-year-old Orange Mound resident, had chased vandals from his front yard by waving his handgun. Moments later, police responded to his distress with a barrage of bullets fired by two officers, killing him at the scene. The Mound rallied together, eventually painting a mural bearing the likeness of Bogard on the sidewall of a corner store. Community leaders wanted to restore a sense of unity in pride, but the community was left critically wounded with no signs of repair.
Over-policing often begets police violence.
Once a thriving community, its story was interrupted by the infiltration of drugs, years of neglect, and underfunding by city and state leaders. There’s no simple answer regarding what happened to Orange Mound. It’s not a story of people who did not have the intentions and capacity to care for their community. And while Black settlements like Rosewood and Greenwood, more commonly known as Black Wall Street, were decimated in easily defined explosions of violence, Orange Mound’s decline resulted from a series of gradual divestments. Burning and pillaging are more obvious forms of white supremacy than what spawned many of the Mound’s issues.
Desegregation, legislation intended to integrate, and hopefully elevate, Black citizens had adverse results in Black communities. Black families began seeking lives in more resourced areas previously inaccessible to them. This exodus of more upwardly mobile residents coupled with the exporting and busing of Black students that severely impacted Black neighborhood schools eroded the power of Orange Mound.
Deregulation, union busting, and distribution jobs began to hit the Black middle class as well, further harming residents in these Black communities. The biggest blow to Orange Mound, however, was the crack epidemic and the subsequent war on drugs. The drug itself tore through the community, but an equal culprit was mass incarceration and the excessive policing of the neighborhood. To this day, Orange Mound is one of the most policed and surveilled neighborhoods in Memphis.
4.
Resurrected
Pride
As a neighborhood that has cheated death many times, Orange Mound endured challenges and reemerged with a renewed sense of pride, mostly surrounding the neighborhood’s institutions.
In Memphis, high schools are the prevailing marker of who you are and what you are made of. “Where did you go to school?” Is a question that allows the asker to make a quick assessment. Melrose High School is among the earliest Black high schools in Memphis. The high school and its golden wildcat mascot are nearly synonymous with Orange Mound. The pride and commitment to Melrose rival that of historically Black colleges and universities, as Melrose alumni have maintained a ubiquitous presence in the city of Memphis. Echoing the marching song of many of those HBCUs, Melrose alumni sing with their whole chests “I’m so glad I go to Melrose High” with the drumline and punching tuba line underneath. There is no Memphis alumni presence as fiery and compelling as those who matriculated through the halls of Melrose.
Melrose High School’s popularity, mostly surrounding the football team and their winning record, surged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, uniting the community around the players and one of the Mound premier institutions. The Mound’s resurgence in that era was particularly satisfying after the community had been written off and labeled as one of the epicenters of violence in Memphis. Millennials who grew up in the Mound could feel what our elders felt.
When Melrose High School’s football team carried the school to the state championship, my father, who had retired from teaching at Melrose, drove us to Nashville to attend the game in the blistering winter. I remember the golden leotards the prancing majorettes wore and the crowd cheering through shivers. But Melrose was losing. The officials had already marched the trophy to the sidelines of the opposing team. Never quick to accept defeat, Melrose fans roared on as the team miraculously pulled off a comeback in the eleventh hour. The team of hungry and persistent teenagers embodied the spirit of Melrose and The Mound and strengthened the foundation of the school’s boastful alumni and faculty.
Kayla J Smith describes that pride as something that she carried with her, even as she began to carve out new paths elsewhere. “I was able to go outside the city and learn so much because of Orange Mound. I saw so much Black beauty in the Mound in the sense of Black people existing in the actual community. I felt safe. Coming back, I wanted a deeper connection with the Mound for understanding my place in the world.”
5.
Back To The Source
I, too, desired to reconnect after leaving the city for a few years. When I returned to Memphis in late 2017, I revisited the Mound to see what time had done. Standing on the corner and looking at my childhood home, it had a new paint color in a dull brown with the wood on the columns deteriorating and the lawn poorly maintained. While areas of Memphis not far from the Mound were experiencing a boom of improvements and developments, I found countless vacant homes, many of them boarded up, along my slow drive through the streets of my old community. I soon learned that Orange Mound was next in line.
Revitalization conversations have been happening in the Mound for years. But, as Memphis experiences an overall renaissance, Orange Mound is experiencing renewed attention. The process has not been an easy one. Community organizers in the Mound stress the importance of a cohesive effort in order to move the needle in revitalization. Many cite intracommunity conflict and power struggles as barriers to progress.
“If we all have family history in the Mound and connections, it’s not about a hierarchy,” says Orange Mound native Kayla J. Smith of the Center for Transforming Communities. “We get so caught up in that, and we gatekeep among ourselves based on who has the most Mound in them.”
Orange Mound leaders are notoriously territorial and protective of the work. Many false starts and broken promises over the years have left some jaded and other organizers worrying about a lack of a unified force they believe is possible to both preserve the Mound’s legacy and combat the threat of gentrification. Organizers fear that a constant jockeying for power by individuals dilutes the overall power of the neighborhood.
“They say divide and conquer, and they don’t see it. They don’t see it. These folks are coming in, sliding on in without you even noticing. And before you know it, Orange Mound ain’t Orange Mound anymore,” says politician and Orange Mound native Latonia Blankenship. Blankenship is active in a new initiative titled Orange Mound Collaborative made up of various community members from educators to clergy who aim to streamline revival efforts and gain more funding for community programs.
With new developments and gentrification looming, who determines the future of this community? Without asking these questions and facing these truths, we cannot dream with a clear vision and restore Orange Mound’s identity as a Black cultural center and emblem of pride and community. Organizers also stress the importance of self-reliance and agency, even when demanding more investment from city leaders. And they intend to ensure that the fruits of revitalization benefit existing residents, particularly those who have been in the trenches for years.
“I know for sure that’s what Orange Mound started from and was rooted in. Black autonomy. I don’t want that piece to get lost with the new developments. It can’t leave out the people who live there and have been doing the work.” -Kayla J. Smith added.
Smith’s organizing in the community has contributed to an Orange Mound agenda, a concise and thorough list of demands, desires, and aspirations for the community. The idea is to have a centralized effort to create a coalition of the various groups and task forces scattered throughout the Mound.
6.
A New Day
New developments have been met with both excitement and skepticism as they appear in the Mound. Among those already in play are the local education and youth initiatives at Red Zone, renovations for the building known as Historic Melrose which is slated to be turned into a community center, library, and genealogy center, and the most ambitious project is the Orange Mound Tower.
TONE, an arts non-profit in the Lamar-Airways shopping center, and Unapologetic, an entertainment company and record label founded by an Orange Mound native, joined forces to purchase a landmark building sitting ten acres of land with a tower in the center that boasts a view of nearly the entire city of Memphis from the top. The Tower project alleges the construction of art galleries, communal spaces, a performance complex, a food court, and affordable housing. The founders behind the project have eloquent speeches framing the development as a vehicle for the community to honor the glory of its past and break ground for a bright future of innovation and cultural rebirth.
However, there are concerns among residents that these new ventures are not inclusive enough of community voices. There are questions about who is pulling the strings and, ultimately, who will benefit from these new imaginings. And while the new projects may offer some new amenities, residents, and organizers feel as if their own efforts will be overshadowed.
“Even if it’s folks who look like us, it can still be a form of gentrification and displacement if you are not listening to local voices.” Kayla J. Smith expressed. “A key component to revitalization is connecting to the source.”
Back to the source is where a specific project at Melrose High School aims to take students. The grant-sponsored Heritage Room focuses on Orange Mound narratives of family, community, churches, entrepreneurship, and also Melrose itself.
Historian and Heritage Room curator Roniece Gilkey says “The idea was to have this room where the students could gain a sense of pride [in the neighborhood]. The elders have a sense of pride, but that sense of pride is not trickling down to the next generation.” Gilkey believes that history the only way to a bright Orange Mound future is by connecting the youth with the community’s history in a way that makes sense to them. She believes the children don’t know history and intergenerational conversations are not happening. “Orange Mound’s history has been romanticized and is steeped in nostalgia, but younger generations are detached from that rich history. In order to honor the history, we must make it relevant to younger generations so that the pride, love, and legacy will live on and the community can successfully move forward for future generations,” Gilkey added, later elaborating that time spent engaging the youth is as valuable as monetary contributions to the community.
Generational wealth is often focused on the material, which indeed serves an important function in our current society. However, there are opportunities to change the conversation around wealth and extend it beyond the material which often eludes the hands of Black people in this country. As is the case with Black culture throughout the diaspora, Black wealth is not only tied to land and capital. It extends to culture, relationships, and community.
7.
Undying Orange
The parking lot of Lamar-Airways shopping center is buzzing with activity as local organizations prepare for Juneteenth celebrations. A group of elderly women is laughing and doing the electric slide in front of a senior citizen facility next to a vacant drug store. I purchase a snow cone and pickle from the street vendor, relieved to be back in Orange Mound, this time as a community volunteer rather than a resident. Community in the Mound has meant many things over the years, but at its core, it is a village. It’s a settlement of Black people insistent on self-reliance and resilience to a fault. As new developments arrive, villages change. Beyond displacement of people and rising costs, the spirit of a neighborhood is often erased or diluted, replaced with generic commercial businesses and people with different values, and a lack of interest in communing with those who have stood firm on the land throughout its many transformations.
The Mound’s active players change throughout history. The people shift, the ecosystem ebbs and flows, and new people move in and out and the neighborhood becomes more transient than fixed. But all have a unique connection to the community and each other in the form of customs and community in the way that an ethnic enclave does.
That’s the wealth of the Mound. It’s the abundance that stems from stories of W.C. Handy Theater, foot race legends of former residents who went on to be Olympians, street vendors, endearing stray animals, local food joints, and an array of characters that shuffle throughout the spaces regardless of whether that’s on foot, by bicycle, or commuting by car to return to the source of their familial and ancestral roots.
Orange Mound is sacred land. Already stretched beyond its original borders, the Mound is not confined to the land on which it rests. It’s grown into something immaterial. And, while the homes, the institutions, and the land which anchors Orange Mound in its place may see newcomers or change hands, the legacy is the community’s consistently reanimated commitment to itself, its idiosyncrasies, and its symbols which must always be remembered and relayed to future generations. That wealth cannot die and exists in the smallest gestures, as residents in defense of the neighborhood stand ten toes down and exhibit the Mounds signature hand sign colloquially described as “Two fingers round, three fingers down.”
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