Orange Mound Snapshot
Orange Mound’s story of a Memphis neighborhood is one with a surprising legacy. While the name may be familiar to anyone who lives in Memphis, there are few who know much about this community aside from fleeting and usually unpleasant images on the evening news.
Orange Mound is the first African-American community in the United States to be built by African-Americans. It’s origins can be traced to the 1890s, where a developer named Elzey Eugene Meachem purchased this land, a plantation at the time, from the Deaderick family for $100. From there, he split the land into 25 foot plots and sold them to African-Americans that began migrating to Memphis from Mississippi, Arkansas and East Tennessee. Brightly-colored “mock orange shrubs” were in Deadrick’s side home around the time, which brought the name we know today.
These families built their own homes and created a community for themselves. This was the first community in the South where black people were allowed to build and own homes. Orange Mound was a community with poverty prevalent in some parts, but it also had African-American professionals from all backgrounds like businessmen, lawyers, and other leaders living within its boundaries.
Around the same time the United States experienced integration, Orange Mound started to decline as residents, especially, young people, began to move away. Around this time, the drug epidemic swept in, and Orange Mound was not immune. Drug use ravaged poor and middle-class families. The community experienced a period of violence and lots of crime.
At the turn of the 21st century, several organizations assembled all within Orange Mound neighborhoods and institutions, like the Orange Mound Collaborative and the Orange Mound Development Corporation, with the purpose of keeping Orange Mound with fresh ideas and projects that make the community energized. Today, crime is significantly down from years past, and the community is on the brink of revitalization and fresh projects. In the past a strong sense of community was felt from the early settlers at the formation of Orange Mound, and that same spirit and pride lives on with residents now as traditions like the Orange Mound Parade continue to this day.
