Our 2021 Memphians of the Year Are Victoria Jones and James Dukes

The leaders of TONE and Unapologetic are poised to transform the community with Orange Mound Tower.

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This magazine named our first Memphian of the Year in December 2013. The series began, as many good ideas do, pretty nearly by accident. Marilyn Sadler, our former senior editor, had written a feature story about Rabbi Micah Greenstein of Temple Israel, and as the editorial team was approaching its press deadline, they reviewed the story, considered the scale of Greenstein’s impact — and realized that they had more than the average cover story on their hands. “Why don’t we make him ‘Memphian of the Year?’” said then-CEO Kenneth Neill. Since then, the Memphian of the Year recognition has become an annual honor, spotlighting people who have left indelible positive marks on the civic, business, and cultural framework of the city.

This year, the debate in Contemporary Media conference rooms and Zoom calls was particularly intense, as we discussed many candidates who had gone above and beyond the normal call of duty as our city has endured nearly two years of pandemic strain.

Unprecedented times lead to unprecedented measures. For the first time, we have awarded the Memphian of the Year not to an individual, but to a partnership. Many, many people have excelled in their own fields and benefited our city, but what sets Victoria Jones and James Dukes (who performs as IMAKEMADBEATS) apart is the breadth of their impact — and the scope of their vision — across arenas. The organizations they founded — TONE and Unapologetic — have changed Memphis’ visual arts, music, fashion, culture, entrepreneurship, and philanthropy for the better. The project that has arisen from the two leaders’ collaboration, Orange Mound Tower, has the potential to transform a community that has long suffered under the yoke of poverty and institutional racism. For their refusal to accept the labels others may try to pin, and for their sweeping vision of a dynamic future Memphis, Victoria Jones and James Dukes are our 2021 Memphians of the Year.

Victoria Jones

Growing THROUGH History.

Sometime in 2015, Voresa Booker was rummaging through her attic when a long-forgotten scrapbook caught her eye. It was a collection of the civil rights news from 1991. Marked in her mother-in-law’s hand was a dedication to Voresa’s daughter, Victoria Jones, born that year. Now, 24 years later, as Voresa gave her daughter the scrapbook for her birthday, Victoria burst into tears.

“She was very serious about us knowing Memphis history,” Jones recalls of her paternal grandmother, Andrewnetta Hawkins Jones, who had inscribed the book. “In 1991, we had the first Black mayor and the opening of the National Civil Rights Museum. So the scrapbook had all the newspaper clippings from that, and a letter about her legacy and continuing her work.”

Growing up, Jones watched Andrewnetta making a mark on Memphis history. “She was from Memphis, and heavily into the civil rights movement,” she says. “She did a lot of work in diversity when the city was working to get more Black business owners and get them physical locations. She wanted us to be aware of what our skin means in this country. And the ways it shows up. But it wasn’t all just negative. She wanted us to know it was something we should be proud of. So I think that early understanding has framed my experience throughout my life.”

“My mom took a really long time to get on board with what I was doing. It was not because she didn’t believe in me, but because she was fearful for me.” — Victoria Jones

Armed with her family’s sense of history, Jones minored in the subject when attending Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) in Murfreesboro, along with minors in African-American Studies and English. Those fields of study helped her make sense of experiences far beyond Memphis. “My parents were both in the military, so we were moving all the time,” she says. “We lived in California, Virginia, and Seattle, and then moved to Florida. And that was a total culture shock. Because that was the first time I saw Confederate flags. I had no idea that was a thing until then. And not just Confederate flags, but the hunting gear. I was kind of nervous, like, ‘What’s going on?’ I got called the N-word for the first time. Someone told me that Black people weren’t a part of the human race. I remember my mom having these conversations about, ‘Don’t let them tell you who you are.’”

Since then, Jones has defined her identity on her own terms. In college, that blossomed into activism, focusing first on MTSU’s Forrest Hall. “The whole time, I thought it was ‘Forest’ because we have so many trees on campus,” she laughs. “Finally one of my professors explained [that it was named after Nathan Bedford Forrest]. As soon as I found out, I started organizing to try to get the name changed, and we started the Black Student Union there.”

She also organized art shows at MTSU, which led to her first work at then-new Crosstown Arts, when the organization was in a smaller space across Cleveland from the Concourse. Jones recalls, “Lester Merriweather is a brilliant visual artist, and his was the first show I worked. I was a gallery attendant and event person. But nobody who looked like me came into the space. Honestly, the CLTV started by trying to get Black folks into Crosstown. I think we had a chance to see the capacity art has for building community. And then it kind of grew from there.”

The CLTV, a Black arts and community nonprofit, launched in 2016. They settled into the CMPLX, a gallery and workspace on Lamar Avenue in Orange Mound, in 2019; in 2020, they rebranded as TONE. Whatever the name, the group expresses the same drive Jones embodies, to expand what Blackness looks like in today’s America.

Even with a family that grasps the importance of history, it’s been an uphill climb. “My mom took a really long time to get on board with what I was doing,” says Jones. “It was not because she didn’t believe in me, but because she was fearful for me. Or my grandma, before she passed, she was like, ‘Baby girl, I just want you to relax a little bit, because you’ve got to remember where you are.’ She’s had actual experiences where people have been run out of town. And so there are moments where our parents, our grandparents, our elders are showing up, and at the core of it is fear and the desire to protect us.”

James Dukes

Orange Mound beats run soul-deep.

Imagine a bleak winter morning in Orange Mound. Young James Dukes clambers into an old car. His father, Michael, turns on the radio — dial set to 91.7 WUMR, the Jazz Lover — and suddenly colors warm their world.

“My dad would drive around listening to jazz because it would keep him calm,” Dukes remembers. “He hated the way people in Memphis drove. He would use jazz as a way to calm down. He was definitely tuning in to the University of Memphis station a lot, but he also had his own collection. And I immediately gravitated toward jazz emotionally before I even knew what was going on. No teacher told me that stuff. I didn’t even know the artists’ names. I just liked that it was unpredictable.”

Dukes, known over the years as NeMo, then IMAKEMADBEATS, or simply MAD, is the founder, beatmaker, and philosopher of the Unapologetic collective. He was born to embrace the unpredictable, whether the new style of hip hop that he and his musical cohort have produced for the better part of a decade, or the new vision of community development that Unapologetic and TONE are pursuing in Orange Mound.

“Secrets don’t start movements. Uncovering them does. Someone is waiting on you to be you. Extremely you. Awkwardly you. Effortlessly you. Vulnerably you. Unapologetically you.” — IMAKEMADBEATS

Dukes’ diverse background imbued him with the urge to strip away the scripts people unconsciously follow until something real and fresh emerges. “My mom was born in Guyana, raised in Europe, married and had her first child in Canada, married again, and had her next two children in the United States, me being one of them,” Dukes explains. “She spoke in three different accents; it just depended on how she felt. So, having a broad intake of things is in my DNA.”

Even in Memphis, Dukes’ life was a study of contrasts. “My dad was raised in White Station, right near where Whole Foods is right now,” he says. “He had eight siblings and a mother and a father living all together there. And — how do I put this? — they were firebombed into leaving their home in White Station.

“There was a big argument between my grandmother and my grandfather about whether or not they should leave,” Dukes explains. “My grandma wanted to leave because it was unsafe for her children, but my grandfather didn’t. He wanted to stay and go to war. But they ended up leaving. That’s when our family moved to the Orange Mound area. My granddaddy opened up a store there. I was on Barron and a few other locations. That’s where my dad raised us. My great-grandma was already there. So when we’re talking about uplifting our ancestors, the people who came before us, I think about that all the time.”

Orange Mound became a sanctuary for the family. Today, Dukes feels his Orange Mound roots deeply, but he had to leave his hometown before he could fully appreciate it. After tinkering with recording in his teens, then attending college in Florida, he got a job working at Quad Recording Studios in New York. There he met many stellar artists, including Busta Rhymes, whose encouragement led the artist/engineer to create his alter ego, IMAKEMADBEATS. That was when “MAD,” as he’s known to his friends, truly began following his own star.

When he returned to Memphis ten years ago, he founded Unapologetic, a music, media, and fashion collective. After years of struggle, Unapologetic is now making waves nationally, snagging an endorsement from Red Bull and placing tracks in commercials and Netflix series. From the beginning, being unabashedly “you” has been at the heart of Unapologetic’s mission. In his 2019 TEDx talk, Dukes celebrated individuals doggedly pursuing their unique visions while sporting a shirt that read “DisrupTEDx.” His embrace of the unpredictable guides both his work with Unapologetic and his collaboration with TONE.

“Secrets don’t start movements,” he told the rapt TEDx crowd. “Uncovering them does. Someone is waiting on you to be you. Extremely you. Awkwardly you. Effortlessly you. Vulnerably you. Unapologetically you.”

The Great Project

Around 2015, if you were anywhere in the Black arts creative ecosystem of the city, you probably ran into one of these two organizations, if not both, in the same spaces,” says Dukes, referring to TONE and Unapologetic. “We supported each other. We were fans of what each other was doing, and we had a lot of the same friend circles.”

Still, a partnership between the two groups was not immediately obvious. Jones worked in the more traditional world of arts nonprofits, while Dukes was an entrepreneur operating in the cutthroat music business. “Victoria and myself, we created these organizations out of what we felt was missing,” says Dukes. “As leaders of organizations, we eventually became friends. We would periodically meet up just to talk about how to build and debate approaches to solving issues that both of our organizations had.

“First and foremost, it was how to be us,” he continues. “That seemed to be the continuing theme through almost every facet of our discussions: Where can we go to be extremely us — not kind of us, not the version of us that would get us paid, but the version that will make us happy as artists. … That was the real foundation of the friendship and partnership that allowed us to sit in the room one day and say, ‘Hey, you know, there’s gotta be some way that we can move together.’”

“The heart of our connection was watching people show up and do what they were doing with similar energy. This isn’t just people using the word ‘Black.’ This is the diversity of Black, and I love it.” — IMAKEMADBEATS

Jones says the focus of their conversations was often less about what they could do than where they could do it. For Black artists, working in gallery spaces that historically owe their existence to wealthy, white benefactors brings invisible constraints. “We have to tip-toe this line of perfection and be twice as good to get half as far,” she says. “We never get to experiment. We never get to explore these shadowy parts of ourselves or these curious parts of ourselves.”

In Unapologetic’s Dirty Socks Studio — which Dukes built in his spare bedroom — Jones saw a model of artistic freedom. She wanted to create something similar for the visual arts. “I was ready to bring in a bunch of folks just to sign leases, to rent,” she recalls. “It was NeMo who said, ‘We can’t do this if we don’t own it.’”

They knew owning a Black arts incubator space meant entering the opaque world of real estate, assuming the responsibility for maintenance expenses, and, most daunting of all, coming up with a way to pay for it all. That means creating, as Jones says, “… a self-sustaining organization where grants are just a nice thing to have, not a necessity.”

Dukes says the potential upside outweighs the risks. “That’s the beauty of it. The heart of our connection was watching people show up and do what they were doing with similar energy. This isn’t just people using the word ‘Black.’ This is the diversity of Black, and I love it. And I would love to do it in the first neighborhood built by Black people, to explore that diversity and create that space on a larger-than-life scale. One of the key things about ownership was, we knew that we needed to make the space as excellent as our minds could make it. And we knew that if somebody else controlled the property, that it could be limited — and it most likely would be limited.”

At first, the idea was simply to go from renting to owning by buying the strip mall on Lamar where the TONE gallery was located. Negotiations began soon after TONE moved there in 2019 and dragged on for years. “Somebody bought it from underneath us, and we were pretty sad about that,” says Dukes. “The second-tier idea was the United Equipment Building at 2205 Lamar.”

Built in 1951 as a feed mill, the 200-foot-tall tower and adjacent 80,000-square-foot warehouse complex had been vacant for decades. It’s a landmark in Orange Mound, visible from all over the neighborhood. The symbolism was not lost on Jones. “I think as soon as we really started considering the tower as a viable option, it became the best option. It’s obviously way more work, but we can start from scratch and build a state-of-the-art campus for Black innovation, Black artists, Black culture, and Black businesses.”

The pair embarked on what Dukes calls a “trauma tour,” sharing their life stories with potential funders and investors to try to convey the impact this project could have on a community that has long struggled with racism, neglect, and blight. Anasa Troutman, executive director of Clayborn Temple, connected them with The Kataly Foundation, whose Restorative Economies Fund “seeks to close the racial wealth gap and transform our financial system by strategically reinvesting resources into community-owned and governed projects that create shared prosperity.”

The Kataly Foundation seemed tailor-made to empower Orange Mound Tower. When Kataly representatives visited TONE, Jones recalls, “We didn’t even go on-site. They just looked at the tower from the gallery, and we told them what it would mean to Black creatives, what it would mean to the community, and what it would mean to Memphis as a whole.”

Securing the Kataly grant, which required matching funds from local investors, proved decisive. “Once we were able to wave a national funder in conversation with local folks, that conversation began to shift,” says Jones.

“It’s not the DJ, it’s the first person on the dance floor,” says Dukes.

In the spring of 2021, the partnership closed the deal for Orange Mound Tower. They celebrated with a Juneteenth concert which attracted thousands of people to the seven-acre site. Once completed, the $50 million complex will include 120 apartments and condos, ample commercial space, an arts incubator and galleries, a performance venue, and Unapologetic’s offices and recording studios.

Jones, who says the ongoing capital campaign will expand in early 2022, describes their progress as “rounding third and heading home. … We’ve got a cohort of stakeholders from Orange Mound who are helping us talk through and think through what shared prosperity looks like, and what the businesses need to be like. We’ve got groups of artists who are talking with us about how we need to structure this, to make sure that their craft and career can flourish in this space. At every touch point, folks are already aware of it and engaged with it. We have an opportunity to not just show a funder, ‘Look, wouldn’t this be cool because we said so?’ but, ‘Look what our community has said they need.’”

Jones and Dukes never expected to find themselves at the forefront of a project with such transformational implications, but now that they are, they are determined to build something that will last.

“We are not the first people to think of doing this,” says Jones. “But the lack of resources keeps forcing us to start from scratch, so every generation is having to start at ground zero because the city — and I’m gonna blame it on the city — didn’t do its part in making sure that these institutions and organizations have the capacity to live on to the next generation. … I think on paper, pioneering is sexy and cool, but it is exhausting. It’s frustrating. It can be depressing. I have experienced my biggest bouts with depression in this work. That’s not to say that this thing will cure depression! I’m not making that big of a claim, but the thought that the next generation will not have to take on the same emotional, spiritual labor that we have had is at least 50 percent of why we do what we do.”

It’s the synergy between the two leaders that has made this exciting project possible. “I think Vic and I, we have a lot of similarities in our history, but a lot of very different experiences that have provided us with a well-rounded approach,” says Dukes, who grew up only a few blocks from Orange Mound Tower. “If everything we want to be in that tower was already there, I can imagine being 16 years old, and walking down the street to make beats. That would have been crazy. … I look forward to income that has nothing to do with making a beat, or selling a record, or doing a show. This is a real estate venture. So that’s going to empower us as foundational organizations to take some risks. And y’all know, we love risks.”

Jones says she and Dukes are the right people, in the right place, at the right time to make difference.

“I feel my ancestors moving all the time,” she says, “putting the pieces in place, and there’s a really beautiful opportunity for us to continue the work they’ve been doing. Even if they weren’t able to hand us a physical baton, they put the pieces in place to make sure we’re able to do this for the next generation.”