Editor’s Note: Some might tell you that Memphis is the biggest small town in America. We would say that Memphis is a patchwork of small towns — in the form of distinctive neighborhoods — stitched closely together into the form of a city. So we’re highlighting some of the city’s best towns, if you will, by spotlighting some of our classic neighborhoods. Maybe this will remind you to revisit an area you don’t call home, or to identify more strongly with the one you do.
As one of the most historically significant neighborhoods in the city, Orange Mound is practically a model community, even as it continues to struggle with the chronic underdevelopment and poverty inflicted upon African Americans for generations. In a sense, it serves as an object lesson in how a neighborhood can rise to confront such obstacles through activism and community pride.
The pride has been there since the 1890s, when a developer carved lots out of what had been a plantation. The lots were so affordable that it soon became the first neighborhood in America to be built by and for African Americans. By 1919, it was annexed by the city of Memphis, and it has been a kind of oasis for Black culture in the city ever since. By the 1970s, only Harlem had a more concentrated population of Black Americans.
That pride of place is highly visible every September, when the Orange Mound Community Parade Committee organizes high school marching bands and other attractions to help kick off the Southern Heritage Classic, in which the longtime rival football teams compete at the nearby Simmons Bank Liberty Stadium (this year’s matchup on September 7-9 pits Tennessee State University against the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff).
But there are other celebrations of community, from the community garden to the relatively new Juneteenth celebration, now in its third year. Orange Mound’s first Junteenth event, on June 19, 2021, marked the start of a new partnership between the Black arts and community development nonprofit TONE and Unapologetic, the music, arts, and culture collective founded by Orange Mound native IMAKEMADBEATS. That year, the two groups received a grant to develop the long-abandoned United Equipment tower and surrounding property on Lamar.
The celebrations are a way of bringing people to the former industrial site, and they’re only gaining in popularity. As TONE marketing director Madame Fraankie notes, “We nearly doubled the attendance at this year’s Juneteenth, compared to last year. It’s all about getting folks’ feet on the ground, getting them used to being over there, making it feel like it’s theirs.”
That was also the goal of Brick X Brick: A Billion Pounds of Cultivation, an interactive exhibition hosted by TONE and the nonprofit Mama Sundry (co-founded by singer/songwriter Talibah Safiya) that ran from February 18th to May 7th. “We had that property activated the entire time for months,” Fraankie says of the United Equipment tower lot, “with rolling events going back and forth, like a dinner on the inside of the warehouse. This was an opportunity for folks doing agriculture to shape it in a more artistic lens. They talked about both the distribution process and the consumption process of agriculture.”
What was most exciting about the exhibition, staged as part of the Tennessee Triennial for Contemporary Art, were the new faces it brought to the community. “We continue to see new and young creatives coming into the space.” Those newcomers will be crucial to TONE’s work, Fraankie says, as they take time this year to regroup and consider their next steps. “It’s kind of like a slingshot,” she says. “And right now we’re in that pull back. Soon we’re just going to fire off, because we’re always got our hands on so many different projects.”
