(marching band) ♪♪♪ (male narrator) It's football season and, as happens several times each fall, Melrose Stadium is filled with family and friends eager to cheer their favorite sons to victory.

Don't try to tell these fans that this is just about high school sports, however.

When the Golden Wildcats take the field they wear the maroon and gold also worn by their fathers, and their fathers' fathers before them.

With a school roster containing names that go back generations, a Melrose game is as much family reunion as it is school event, where not only parents and siblings, but also aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents come together to show loyalty to their school and to the neighborhood they call Orange Mound.

Growing up in Orange Mound, it might sound strange, but it was one of the greatest advantages to going out into the world that I had.

In 1825, John Deaderick joined a growing tide of settlers to the Mississippi Delta and moved his family to Shelby County.

Deaderick's father, George, business partner of future U.S. President Andrew Jackson and founder of the first bank in Tennessee, made his fortune developing real estate in Davidson County.

He'd helped grow Nashville into a prosperous city and now John planned to do the same for Memphis.

(Cupples) Very wealthy family...landowners.

At one time they had owned the land that the capitol was built on.

He came here as a builder and he came to West Tennessee when the city of Memphis was really very young.

He bought land...five thousand acres of land...about five miles from the river.

He's on out in the country.

(male narrator) With just a few hundred inhabitants, the small river town was a far cry from the city he left behind.

Here in west Tennessee we're out on the frontier and the city is young...there's a lot of building going on to accompany the growth.

We need to realize of course that river traffic was growing at a tremendous rate - we're just a few years at this point past the New Madrid fault and it's just a few years past the time when they had the high powered steam engines that could go up the muddy Mississippi River.

Being a builder in this area was a full time job.

(male narrator) A short distance from Pigeon Roost Road, Deaderick built a rambling, two-story house atop a small rise, which he surrounded with a thick grove of hedge trees.

Deriving its name from the plants' large fruit, commonly referred to as the Osage orange, the plantation became known as "Orange Mound."

He would live there just six years.

In 1831, at the age of forty, John Deaderick passed away, leaving the plantation to his wife and two young sons, Michael and William.

Deaderick's investment in Shelby County was well founded.

Thirty years later, Memphis was a bustling port city of twenty-three thousand and one of the world's leading cotton markets.

(Cupples) Memphis went through this great building growth in the eighteen forties and eighteen fifties.

Northern soldiers who came here in the eighteen sixties war commented on the many fine buildings, brick buildings, and well built wooden frame houses.

And this has all gone on in the last twenty years or so.

The eighteen forties come along, ten or fifteen years after he arrives, the building of the railroads... (male narrator) One of the railroads, the Memphis and Charleston, which dissected the Deaderick property east-to-west, was the first in the nation to connect the Mississippi River to the Atlantic coast.

♪♪♪ (male narrator) In 1825, slaves had been on American soil for more than two centuries.

Before the first plantations came to West Tennessee, however, only a few hundred African Americans - not all of them slaves - lived in Shelby County.

Memphis at that time had a small black population.

There were some, quote, "free people of color."

Slaves in the city itself would have been domestics or skilled workers, carpenters, inside carpenters, brick layers.

(male narrator) By 1860, that number was seventeen thousand.

(Cupples) They were profitable with the development of the cotton gin.

Prior to the cotton gin in the seventeen nineties, slavery was actually on its way out in America.

The cotton gin changed that.

One slave could produce as much cotton in a day as it had previously taken fifty.

And all of a sudden the economics of staple cotton farming changed dramatically.

(male narrator) An entire economy moved on a system fueled by slave labor and their owners would rather go to war than have that system threatened.

In 1861, they did just that.

(female singing) ♪ No more, my Lord, No more ♪ ♪ my Lord, Lord I'll never turn back No more... ♪ (male narrator) As Union armies advanced across the South, slaves caught in the wake faced an uncertain future.

When possible they seized the opportunity to escape.

♪ And He has made me glad... ♪ Out of the war early with its capture and occupation by Union forces in June 1862, Memphis became a magnet to those desperate for a new life and camps outside the city swelled with refugees.

Quite literally, they're stealing themselves away from the Arkansas delta, western Kentucky.

They're coming in from rural areas of west Tennessee and northern Mississippi and they are drawn to those Union lines and those Union encampments.

Union army occupation in Tennessee signaled the de facto end of slavery for those regions where you found the troops.

(male narrator) At war's end in 1865, the city's black population, three thousand in 1861, had increased more than five-fold to over sixteen thousand.

♪ And perhaps you may find Find Him there... ♪ With the South's goal of independence in ruins, so, too, went its plantation economy and the fortunes made on the backs of slave labor.

(Cupples) If you owned a lot of slaves you lost a lot of capital with emancipation.

But if you put your money into Confederate bonds...if you became part of the Confederate economy...you lost.

You lost.

And if you did business with the Confederate government, you lost.

(male narrator) Spared the destruction of other cities such as Atlanta and Charleston, life in Memphis continued much as it had before the war.

To make room for a growing population - over forty thousand by 1870 - the city expanded eastward, absorbing land once belonging to local plantations.

In 1871, the Deadericks opened a hundred-fifty acre tract south of the Memphis & Charleston to development.

Naming the streets within for various family members, the brothers called their new subdivision "Melrose Station."

Building was halted, however, as three devastating yellow fever epidemics over the next eight years cost the city a fourth of its inhabitants.

Ultimately, from over forty five thousand, you had a reduced population during the height of the fever of about twenty thousand, of whom approximately seventeen thousand were African American.

You saw during this same period, ironically enough, although they had were not serving on the police force, it was in fact two militia companies of African Americans who patrolled the city, initiated a kind of martial law that in effect was instituted to protect not only the citizens but property.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ (male narrator) As the eighteen ninteties approached, Memphis' fortunes were returning.

Population was restored and even surpassed that of pre-epidemic years.

The quality of life for the city's residents was also improving.

Better sanitation, along with a new sewer system and the discovery of a vast supply of pure artesian water, reduced the risk of disease while improving public health overall.

Streetcars made getting from one side of town to the other more convenient, and construction would soon begin on the first trolley line to be powered by electricity.

On weekends the more affluent could relax at the recently expanded Memphis Jockey Club, first built in 1851 on land purchased from the Deaderick plantation.

Later, after Tennessee's ban on horseracing, the property would become home to the Mid South Fairgrounds.

In late 1889, Mattie Park Deaderick, widow of William Deaderick, who had recently died at the age of sixty-two, sold sixty yet undeveloped acres of Melrose Station to real estate broker E.E.

Meacham.

Son of a prominent commission merchant and wholesale grocer, Elzy Eugene Meacham was born in Clarksville, Tennessee.

After graduating from Kentucky Military Institute at the age of twenty, Meacham returned to Memphis in 1868 to work in his father's cotton exchange on Union Avenue.

He eventually found his calling in real estate, and would go on to develop numerous projects across Shelby County, including properties in the Annesdale and Cooper-Young subdivisions.

♪ Daniel saw the stone that was hewed out the ♪ ♪ mountain Daniel saw the stone that came rolling through ♪ ♪Babylon Daniel saw the stone that was hewed out the mountain♪ ♪ Coming down to redeem a mighty world ♪ Although numerous successful black businessmen managed to rise above the status quo and build homes the equal of any in the city, in the segregated South of the late nineteenth century, they were the exception and housing options for most African Americans remained grim.

Meacham was about to change that for a lot of families.

♪ I found that stone that was hewed out ♪ ♪ the mountain ♪ His new subdivision, which he called Orange Mound after the name given the Deaderick plantation years earlier, would attract not only lifelong Memphians, but others from across the South.

♪ down to redeem a mighty world ♪ Here, we could have a sense of ownership, we could have a sense of viability, we could have a sense of community, we could have a sense of belonging.

Property ownership has always been of tremendous value in American culture.

Everywhere you look in the city where you find a lot of black people, they are living in houses that white people moved out of.

One of the unique things about Orange Mound is, you look at the entire country, is that every one of these small houses in Orange Mound was built by black people forming a black community.

Memphis began its greatest economic boom that lasted from the eighteen nineties until the great depression began in nineteen twenty-nine.

So all of Meacham's real estate development takes place during a time all over South Memphis, which was the area that, historically, African Americans had been consigned to after emancipation, so he comes in and offers home ownership opportunity and a chance to build a community.

Meachum only sold the lot.

He didn't build anything so when he sold the lot you had to come in and build on it.

So that not only provided the opportunity for someone to own a house but it also provided work for a carpenter, a brick mason.

Those people had jobs now because somebody has come to buy a lot and now they need someone to build on it.

And when you build this person's house you find out hey I just made fifty dollars, I need fifty more dollars and I can go buy this lot down the street and build my own house.

In many ways, Mr. Meacham, even though he's obviously making a very substantial return on his investment, is at the same time providing housing opportunities for African Americans at a time when home ownership among African Americans was practically zero.

♪ Won't you ring old hammer?

♪ ♪ Hammer Ring ♪ ♪ Won't you ring, old hammer?

♪ ♪ Hammer Ring ♪ ♪ Broke the handle on my hammer, Hammer ring ♪ ♪ Broke the handle on my hammer, Hammer ring ♪ ♪Got to hammerin' in the Bible Hammer ring Got to hammerin' in♪ ♪ the Bible Hammer ring ♪ (male narrator) In January 1890, Alice Speggins took possession of plot number thirty-nine in Meacham's Orange Mound subdivision.

Facing Park Avenue about halfway between Grand and Marechalneil, it was twenty-five by one hundred four feet and cost forty dollars.

The prices varied but, in all, Meacham went on to sell almost a thousand plotshe same basic dimensions for ten dollars down and fifty cents a week.

♪ Hammer ring... ♪ ♪ Ring, old hammer, Hammer Ring ♪ ♪ Ring, old hammer, Hammer Ring ♪ For some time, most of the houses built in Orange Mound would be the so-called "shotgun" style.

Consisting of just three or four rooms arranged in a straight line, the homes were easy and inexpensive to build.

For a few hundred dollars, a family could own a piece of land and a small house to live in, but, at first, they would get little else.

There were no additional city facilities.

You used a well for your drinking water, a privy was the necessary - it was your outdoor plumbing; plumbing hadn't come indoors yet - and there were no paved streets.

They were not paved, they were not gravel.

(male narrator) Many years would pass before those amenities came to Orange Mound.

Nevertheless, the small lots and shotgun houses attracted not only domestics and laborers, but also people of learning as doctors, lawyers, and teachers built their homes next to mechanics and laundry workers.

Ithink the word "community" sums it up.

You had people who had common goals and people who sought to rear their children in a safe and vibrant community and they did what they had to do to make sure that happened.

You could be a garbage collector.

But when he came into that community, this was Mr. Jones.

Mr. Jones is not viewed to be the garbage collector.

Mr. Jones is the head deacon of Beulah Baptist Church.

He is the superintendent of the school.

He is somebody of note, of worth.

And Orange Mound gives him that, and gives his family that.

♪♪♪ (male narrator) As Orange Mound neared the end of its first thirty years, the population of the Bluff City, at over one hundred sixty thousand, was nearly triple that of 1890, in part thanks to annexation.

In 1919, Orange Mound joined a growing list of suburbs to become part of Memphis.

With schools for the children, doctors to tend the ill, and a growing commercial district, the enclave had become, to a great extent, self-sufficient, and those who grew up there were not eager to leave that comfort behind.

Thus began the tradition of generations of families who called Orange Mound home.

The home I live in, my father built it, I was born in that home, Dr. Spade was the attending physician, and then my brother, nine years later, was born in that same house.

I was born and reared in Orange Mound.

I was born on Marechalneil Street.

In 1942, when I was six years old and had just started first grade, my family moved to the house where we live now.

I have seen family activities of seven generations in that house.

We are part of a huge tradition that goes back to 1939 when my grandfather first came to Orange Mound with his family, one of eight children, my father was.

Everybody knew everybody.

If I was down the street or on another street and I was acting up, Mrs. So-and-so knew me because she knew my parents, we went to church together, my brothers and sisters, we went to school with each other, so we knew each other.

You couldn't get away with anything... No one felt out of place.

We always felt that community, we felt that love, we felt supported in this community.

Everything that you would cherish in terms of the value of the concept of community, Orange Mound had it.

(male narrator) As new generations spread into adjacent neighborhoods, such was its identity, that once-familiar names like Melrose Station, Montgomery Park Place, and Meacham's own East End subdivision were forgotten, while that of Orange Mound remained.

Anywhere black people moved in this area, it was called Orange Mound, even though it was not a part of the original boundaries.

Orange Mound boundaries have mysteriously expanded over time.

It depends on who you ask what's Orange Mound.

Ask ten people and you'll probably get six or seven different bordering streets.

We've annexed a lot of streets that we call Orange Mound now, and it sort of grows in that fashion.

I've got friends who live out as far as Highland who tell people they live in Orange Mound.

And I say, "That's right.

Orange Mound annex.

Bethel Grove - Orange Mound annex."

♪ This is the way you build a bridge, ♪ ♪ build a bridge ♪ ♪ This is the way you build a bridge all day long.

♪ ♪ Now come to Sally, Sally, Sally, Come to Sally all day long ♪ (male narrator) In 1918 Melrose School was built to replace the small county schoolhouse that had served the community for nearly twenty years.

Part of the system of schools founded by Sears co-owner and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, the eleven-room fame and stucco building housed seventh through twelfth grades, while the first six grades attended another, smaller, Rosenwald school a short distance away on Park Avenue.

♪ This is the way you build a bridge all day long.

♪ Mr. Rosenwald not only had an immense fortune, but a social conscience, and he funded schools throughout the South to educate Blacks.

(male narrator) Twenty years later, the two schools, badly overcrowded and needing repair, moved together into a new building on Dallas Street.

Financed through the New Deal's Public Works Administration, the modern brick facility had twenty-four classrooms, a library, and a health clinic.

Later expansion added another fifty-five rooms.

From the time they first entered a classroom, Orange Mound children could count on support and encouragement from everyone in the community.

(Mitchell) On Carnes Avenues, there was Crawford's Sundry.

That building is still there.

We would go there for ice cream and things like that.

So when everybody started first grade, they knew everybody in the neighborhood, my peers, they would give us one of these wide line tablets and a pencil and encourage us to do well.

When people are able to go through their community school and the community school is able to give back, it does tend to bring people closer together.

They nurtured and expected community work.

You didn't just get to go to school.

You had to do more than that.

You had to be out, you had to be involved.

You had to show up, you had to show out, you had to show your maroon and gold, you had to bleed maroon and gold.

You had to be a Melrose Golden Wildcat, and once a Wildcat, always a Wildcat.

People in this city always think of Melrose being this big athletic school, just producing athlete after athlete after athlete.

And it did -- still does -- very proud of it and we have all sorts of stories that you probably heard about that.

The thing is, I think that it is important that you talk about that it's a complete school, academic-wise.

We were tough.

Music-wise, okay?

I'm talking about across the board, it really did have as much of a complete program back in my era during the time before integration came about that you could possibly have.

Of course, everybody knew the Crawfords and knew of Alvin Crawford.

(male narrator) The first African American to earn a medical degree from the University of Tennessee, 1957 Melrose graduate Alvin Crawford is an internationally recognized expert in childhood bone disorders.

Author of two hundred articles and six books, Dr. Crawford has won several awards for his pioneering work in orthopedic surgery, and is currently head of pediatric orthopedics at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.

When I did the last part of my residency at the University of Tennessee, and since I now work there on the faculty, I mean...he's a legend.

♪♪♪ (male narrator) An active sports program rounded out the Melrose curriculum and, in 1948, the school had a new stadium in which to showcase that program.

To this day, games in Melrose Stadium are community events.

On a Friday night, Football season, Orange Mound is probably one of the largest communities in this city because people come back from everywhere to come to a football game.

That's one of the links that they still have with the community.

Even though they may not live in the community any longer, and they may not have relatives who live in this community any longer, they always can come back to the football games and see each other and rehash old friendships.

It's one of the few places in Memphis where you can go to a football game on a Friday night and you've got more boosters than you do kids.

There are more people my age there.

It's like a reunion every Friday night.

(male narrator) Fans have also shared the experience of watching players during their formative years, who went on to play sports professionally.

Football is not the only sport in which Melrose graduates have excelled.

Olympians Rochelle Stevens and Sheila Echols added Gold Medalist to the list of honors, while Ronnie Robinson and Robert "Bingo" Smith give bragging rights to the basketball program.

But the name probably most associated with Orange Mound and Melrose is that of 1969 graduate, Larry Finch, Memphis State University basketball's all-time leading scorer when he graduated from there in 1973.

Finch returned to Memphis State thirteen years later.

There he would go on to win more games as the Tiger's head coach than any other in the school's history.

Larry Finch never left the community where he grew up, but even for those who moved away, the bonds formed during their years at Melrose are not easily broken.

There are four alumni chapters across the country: In Memphis, in Atlanta, in Los Angeles, and in Chicago.

And I chair the Atlanta Melrose High School Alumni committee, as well...So you're always connected, you always get an opportunity to serve, whether you're in a leadership position or whether you're a servant.

If someone calls you and they say "Melrose needs 'X, " or "Melrose needs 'Y,'" we respond.

Roy McLemore was my band director.

He visited me here in my office recently, and he's giving me a hard time, you know, "Hello, Mr. CEO," but, to him, I'm still that sax student.

It would have been a curse to have gone to another high school, living in this community, because everybody you knew went to Melrose.

Even the teachers in the elementary and junior high schools, they all went to Melrose, and their children went to Melrose, and grandchildren, so everybody you ran into went to Melrose.

So as a child, that was one of things I knew I had to do, I had to go to Melrose.

In 1972, Melrose High School moved to its present location on Deaderick Avenue.

Other schools were opened for first through eighth grade students and classes in the Dallas Street building ended.

When plans for building a new community center in its place were unveiled, neighborhood residents fought to save the historic structure.

As one of the few surviving examples of Art Modern institutional architecture in the city, the building's plight attracted the interest of the Memphis Landmarks Commission, which joined with the Orange Mound activists to save the schoolhouse from demolition.

Those people were strong.

They would go down and voice their opinions to the mayors, "You just don't do this to Orange Mound."

That's the thing about people that go to Melrose: they stick together.

They can stick together.

It's like glue.

Mrs. Alcine Arnez, she is the one who fought so diligently to make sure that the historic Melrose school building was not torn down.

Very, very civic involved.

She had cancer and passed away but she was very active, that's why I am so passionate about us fulfilling her dream about creating something in that building and not tearing it down.

Current plans are in the works to convert the building into a senior living center and heritage museum.

Ultimately, the Orange Mound Community Service Center, with its heated pool, variety of activity rooms, and computer labs, was built around the corner on Park Avenue.

Today, the center's gymnasium occupies land once used by the earlier, eleven-room Rosenwald School built in 1918.

In the fall of 2011, the Smithsonian Institute selected the Orange Mound Community Center to be the only urban venue in the state to host its traveling museum series "The Way We Worked."

Along what had been the carriage entrance to the Deaderick house, though not at first an official part of Orange Mound, Carnes Avenue became home for ambitious shop owners who supplied the daily needs of the growing community.

It was almost like a city in itself to people who lived there.

Even though economically it has never had that kind of economic clout that you see in a lot of communities, just on being able to meet the basic needs.

Even as new businesses opened on Park Avenue to compete for customers, Carnes continued in its role as an important commercial district well into the nineteen sixties.

On Carnes Avenue there were African American businesses.

Mr. Barksdale had his jewelry shop...there were beauty shops always...cafes and restaurants...and of course there were white-owned businesses like Evensky's.

My father, Milton Evensky, came home from World War Two - he was in Europe in the Army -- and they got married in 1942, he went overseas, came back, and he wanted to work for himself.

So he managed to find a little business on Carnes Avenue.

There was a store, and originally there was one room attached to the store, a kitchen, and a bathroom, so therefore they had a place to live as well as to open up a business.

And that's why they chose to move to Orange Mound rather than downtown Memphis.

They had everything in there that anybody could want to buy and they always kept Melrose school colors.

We had a great childhood.

I was blood-sisters with my neighbor.

Her mother was a schoolteacher.

So I was living in a neighborhood with all kinds of people -- educated, uneducated.

In 1960, Evensky's moved to its current address on Park Avenue.

People have been coming in here for forty and fifty years and still come in here.

Kids that grew up in the area still come in here from time to time.

Never thought about closing it, never thought about moving it.

It's just something we never thought about.

I'm gonna moan right on that shore Right on that shore Lord, I'm gonna moan Right on that shore I'm gonna moan for my Jesus Jesus I'm gonna moan In 1879, at a corner of the Deaderick plantation called Greer's Bottom, a small group of African Americans founded a new church.

With an abundance of spirit but a shortage of cash, for the first few years the congregation of Mount Pisgah C.M.E.

Church held services in a small clearing under a makeshift brush arbor.

At about the same time and a few miles away, a group of baptists began worshipping under similar circumstances as the first congregation of Mt.

Moriah Baptist Church.

When you start worshiping God, the weather becomes a non-factor for you.

So even though in wintertime you would be cold, people would still just give God to Glory.

Holy, holy, holy!

Lord God Almighty!

With as many as twenty or more churches within its borders at any given time and several that are more than one hundred years old, the Orange Mound story has always been rooted in worship.

Holy, holy, holy!

Our churches were seen as hubs of the community so when anything went on in the community it came through and filtered through the churches and then went out to the community.

...blessed Trinity!

One of the aspects about black church life is that it does not segregate the spiritual and the secular... we don't preach to the soul and forget to feed the mouth and the stomach, or forget to educate the head and the heart.

It all goes together.

A dozen years after their simple beginnings, as African American homes began appearing on streets carved from the former Deaderick plantation, the congregations of Mt.

Moriah Baptist and Mt.

Pisgah C.M.E.

followed.

For the next thirty years, the two churches would feed the mouths and educate the minds of Orange Mound residents with ever larger facilities until, in 1926, Mt.

Moriah moved into its present location at the corner of Carnes and David.

In 1929, Mt.

Pisgah finished construction on its own building at Park and Marechalneil.

Except for a brief period for repair after a fire seriously damaged Mt.

Pisgah's sanctuary, those buildings have been home to their respective congregations since.

I was married here and my daughter was married here.

And, actually, my mother was married here when she married my stepfather.

A few blocks away at the corner of Douglas and Grand, Beulah Baptist Church would establish its own reputation as a community church through active involvement in the civil rights movement and support of the Orange Mound Day Nursery.

Designed from the start to be a safe daytime environment for children of working parents with limited means, prior to approval for federal subsidy in the early nineteen seventies, the center's primary support came through fundraising efforts led by Beulah Baptist.

Its mission also attracted the help of numerous charitable organizations and prominent Memphians such as Elvis Presley and Nat Buring, whose $225,000 donation in 1970 gave the center a new home, and a new name.

In 1987, the Nat Buring Orange Mound Day Nursery became the first center in Memphis to receive national accreditation.

I have a little book was given to me And every page spelled liberty From the pulpits, messages of deliverance from Jim Crow darkness reached members' ears in equal measure to those of divine salvation.

When someone came to speak regarding the issues of the day, they didn't go to City Hall -- they couldn't go to City Hall.

They came to a black church.

The churches in this neighborhood, especially Mt.

Moriah at the time, and even Beulah, Mt.

Pisgah CME, some of the main churches in this community were used as platform areas for people to come and speak and to share the information that was going on.

All my trials, The church became a powerhouse whereby they could speak and the people would listen, and the pastor was one of the focal points.

I think about some of the voter registration that took place.

It really was within the black churches, and from the community, they would go around knocking on doors, "Have you registered to vote?"

and try to make sure to get them to the polls.

So all of these things took place within the churches that were in the heart of the community.

And when you have a church community that is in a sense isolated in an area all of its own, you get that cohesion between the church and the community.

Sixty years of building that cohesion within Orange Mound resulted in a well-organized community network poised to help elevate Memphis politics above its segregationist past.

I could make five phone calls and touch every house in the community on a street-by-street basis.

We had street captains, block captains, the whole who were enthusiastic about their responsibilities.

And when they received a call to contact the people that they had responsibility for, they did and we could make a turn out which was in incredible proportions for this community.

Although calling it home for more than forty years, Fred Davis did not grow up in Orange Mound.

Somebody offered me a job working for North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, which at that time was the largest Black business in America.

So, they assigned me a debit in Orange Mound...As a result I eventually moved out here and I got to know the community very well.

Vice President of the Orange Mound Civic Club even before moving to the neighborhood, Davis also became a member of the Shelby County Democratic Club.

The Shelby County Democratic Club participated in all kinds of elections: for the school board elections, for the city elections, for county elections, for the state representatives.

...The first black state representative since Reconstruction was elected -- A.W.

Willis, there's a bridge named after him -- then later on H.T.

Lockhart, who was a lawyer, was elected to the County Commission.

Gradually we started making inroads into the elective process of this county.

In 1967, Davis moved to Orange Mound, where he opened the first general agency in the country owned and operated by an African American.

The same year he moved to Orange Mound, Davis was elected to represent District Four on the Memphis City Council and, on January 1, 1972, he became the first African American to serve as Council Chairman.

Other members of Orange Mound would follow Davis into public service, each one building on the community's reputation for civic involvement.

In 1978, just six years after Davis became council chairman, Harper Brewer was selected as the first African American ever to serve as Speaker pro tem of the Tennessee House of Representatives.

Our community was recognized when my mother and I were selected for the Whitehouse Community Leaders program.

As a part of that selection we had an opportunity to speak on behalf of the community: the projects, the people, and the passions.

And that was an amazing experience that we had an opportunity to connect with various partners and agencies.

The schools and the churches have been the major factors.

And then, there have been several businesses that have been there forever.

Fred Davis has always been in the community, never left, and he's active in the church as well as his business.

There's several "meat and three's" that have been around there for awhile.

In true American fashion, the lunch counters of eateries such as the Orange Mound Grill, first opened in 1947, became ad hoc community forums.

One such establishment became so associated with public meeting that its owner was given the honorary title "Mayor of Orange Mound."

I was participating in a lot of activities, a lot of committees, in Orange Mound, that was going on.

And whenever they would have the different meetings, or we were trying to get something passed, or there was something we would have to go and fight for, I used to be there.

It was just a good history-making place down there.

All the politicians would come in.

Like Steve Cohen, he used to come in all the time.

Best hamburgers, I think ever in Memphis, even better than my buddy Boggs' "Huey Burger, Tyler Burgers were the best.

I know some people liked the sausages more, and I know there were a lot of fans of the sausages, but I like the Tyler Burgers.

Ford used to come in there all the time, and we'd sit down and talk.

Born in 1929 and raised just two blocks from his current home on Marechalneil, Glover was already well known for his civic involvement before opening his restaurant.

It was kind of the center spot for Melrose alumns and Melrose students.

There was always a lot of memorabilia on the walls, of Melrose historic occasions.

That's just Orange Mound.

Orange Mound was just like that and that's why I love it and never left it and I know I'm not going to leave it now.

In 1947, a short distance from Melrose Stadium, Memphis businessman Kemmons Wilson opened a new movie house for African Americans.

Billed as a "showcase for the finest in Negro entertainment, W.C.

Handy Theater also doubled as a venue for the leading R&B and jazz orchestras of the time.

When they built the Handy it was really just the place to go and that's where a lot of big bands came.

Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Nat King Cole, all the big bands came so we got a chance to the W.C.

Handy Theater and that was exciting for us.

And then on Tuesday nights, I believe, they had amateur night.

Not long after the theater opened, Riley King hitchhiked from Indianola, Mississippi, to Memphis.

With little more than the cloths on his back and a thirty-dollar guitar, King found his way to the Orange Mound home of his cousin, blues great Bukka White.

Soon, the man better known as "B.

B.

King" was electrifying crowds with his unique guitar style from the stage of the W.C.

Handy Theater.

Not all performers had to travel so far to play there.

A few blocks away on Hamilton Street, a young Melrose trumpeter began forming his own band when he was just fourteen.

Within a few years the Willie Mitchell band was well known in the community and frequent performers on the Handy stage.

In 1959, Mitchell joined Hi Records, where he produced twenty-eight gold and platinum recordings for the likes of Ike and Tina Turner, Anne Peebles, and Al Green, among others, and is recognized as one of the creators of what became known around the world as the "Memphis Sound."

Handy Theater closed in 1955.

It would re-open from time to time, and even host other top acts of their day, but never again achieved its former glory.

In the nineteen sixties the theater had a brief run as the Showcase Lounge.

One of the regular acts, a popular soul group from the Stax Records label called the Bar Kays, had direct ties to Orange Mound.

I was, I think, nine years old.

I met this boy who was my age more or less who lived, not next door, but the next house over.

His name was Blair.

You know, real good British name, "Blair Cunningham," or, as we would say in the neighborhood, "Blair Cunnin' ham."

I found out that first day that Blair was the youngest of ten brothers, all of whom were drummers, the next to oldest of whom was Carl Cunningham, who was the original drummer of the Bar Keys, which is a Stax phenomena.

And I knew exactly who the Bar Kays were, and I was, like "Really?"

Not only that, his brother had perished in the plane crash with Otis Redding, so he was famous on a few different levels.

And so, to meet Blair and to hang out with him, and even to go back there and sit behind the drums where his brother used to practice was huge.

Fast forward, I'm living in Paris in 1991 and Blair is living in England.

I got a chance to go over there and visit him and I thought, wow, look at this, here we are two kids from Orange Mound.

I'm living in Paris touring with Whitney Houston and he's living in England playing with Chrissy Hind of the Pretenders and Paul McCartney -- and Charday eventually -- and I thought Wow... Wade in the water Wade in the water children Wade in the water God's going to trouble the water Eighty years after Alice Speggins paid forty dollars for a small lot on Park Avenue, legalized segregation was no more.

Ironically, in the absence of that which, in many respects, had been the reason for Orange Mound's existence, the once-stable community that has witnessed generations who lived their entire life within a few square blocks began seeing empty houses along its streets.

Wade in the Water... People never come in with the intentions of staying, it's a always a temporary thing..."We just gonna be here till we can get on our feet, then we're going somewhere else, and they stay longer but they never come with a sense of community.

So when the negative stuff comes in sometimes it's with drugs or whatever, sometimes they bring that with them.

As you move people out, you tear down houses, you rebuild, you change the structure and so on, it's got to go through what history dictates that it goes through.

...in the water children Wade in the water In the water But a community that produced legends in the arts, pathbreaking politicians, and nationally acclaimed leaders in business and medicine, would not forsake what their parents had built any time soon.

You have your churches, got your strong families, the schools.

That element is still there, it's a viable community.

The schools are still there.

Hanley is still there, probably one of the best elementary schools, a lot of people don't know about it but it's an excellent elementary school.

Melrose has its problems but it, too, is seen to be a community school and people are trying to keep it going and they take pride in it.

There's a very good sense of place, of belonging, and of community.

The principals in the Orange Mound neighborhood are looking for something special for their students.

We have three grants that have supported the Orange Mound program.

There are a number of schools who are open to what we are doing.

Hanley Elementary, Dunbar Elementary, Cherokee and Bethel Grove are all within a few blocks of each other and the principals have a very tight network.

So for us to engage children, we have to go through the schools.

We know they're going to be in school -- almost all the time -- we know that Memphis Leadership Foundation, another supporter of the Orange Mound Program will go pick up these children at school and deliver them home to their front doors.

So there are a lot of natural things that made this a very attractive partnership.

We try to train every individual that comes through our doors.

We show them the pros and cons of home ownership, it also shows them a way to help enhance their quality of life.

When you step inside the boundaries, and look beyond the boarded-up buildings that you might see today, that standing on the shoulders was an amazing group of people who made it possible for people to be educated, for people to find great, progressive jobs in Corporate America, for people to find great success as entrepreneurs, across all kinds of industries.

Love for Orange Mound is still here.

Even though we have experienced some changes, I really believe that seed that's been planted is still growing; it's still flourishing.

When people think of Orange Mound, Tennessee -- they do think of Orange Mound, Tennessee -- Orange Mound is a special place.

It is almost - it's considered a city unto itself.

And as long as Orange Mound has that special flavor and that pride of "Orange Mound, Tennessee, Orange Mound will continue to prosper.

I think Melrose and Orange Mound have a advantage in that the two are locked at the hip, joined at the hip, and we have that advantage over most places.

You're not going to do to one unless you do to the other.

They come as a set.

Who may be living right under your nose?

Who may be living in that little neighborhood that you drive past and you try to speed up when you're going past it?

You never know what kind of seeds of greatness or raw diamonds could be in that neighborhood.