This summer, residents in the Soulsville community will be able to access convenient and affordable healthcare thanks to the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC), the Soulsville Foundation, and the Kemmons Wilson Family Foundation.
The UTHSC Health Hub: Soulsville will be located at 870 East McLemore Avenue. UTHSC officials say the primary care facility will take a “neighborhood approach to healthcare,” and serve adults and children.
“The UTHSC Health Hub: Soulsville will address health and social needs of the community through individualized and empowering care that builds on existing community strengths and assets,” Jim Bailey, MD, executive director of the Tennessee Population Health Consortium and Robert S. Pearce Endowed Chair in Internal Medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, said in a joint statement. “UT Health Science Center seeks to work in partnership with the residents of Soulsville to meet essential health needs and foster wellness and abundant life in the community.”
Residents will be able to access health coaching, school nursing serving three community schools, and youth intervention services. Mental health counseling will also be available after the program’s second year.
The health hub will also offer screening for obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and social needs. Individual and group health coaching for diabetes prevention and self-management and tobacco cessation will be available.
“The care will be targeted to the residents of Soulsville, and personnel for the hub will be from the Soulsville community or deeply rooted in the community,” UTHSC said in the statement.
UTHSC officials say the Soulsville center will use the same approach used at their other facilities in Uptown at 534 North Second Street and the ShelbyCares facility located in the Westwood neighborhood at 3358 South 3rd Street.
“Health coaches at these two facilities have completed more than 4,000 total visits, more than 2,000 individual coaching visits, and served more than 1,000 unique patients,” UTHSC said.
Soulsville Foundation CEO Pat Mitchell Worley says Soulsville has “a lot to be proud of,” but there is also a need for access to healthcare. Worley said she is “thrilled” to partner with UTHSC on this project.
“Their commitment goes beyond offering just health education — they’re bringing essential primary care and mental wellness services directly to our students and neighbors. We are on a shared mission to help Soulsville USA thrive,” Worley said.
The health hub will open this summer in a temporary location, while the permanent space at 870 East McLemore Avenue is being renovated.
Chris Dean recently remembered a conversation he had with filmmaker Tom Shadyac, in which Shadyac asked him what the South Memphis community needed. Dean recounted going to a neighborhood meeting that was held at a church next to LeMoyne-Owen college and being handed a physical list of everything required to improve the area.
As the story goes, Dean in turn handed the list to Shadyac, who was determined to help the community.
“On the list was a recreational space, space for the youth, food, a place to exercise, and so many more,” said Dean.
He explained that while the list was exhaustive, it failed to include how much these necessities would cost the community.
But the two wanted to help, and while they didn’t know what exactly they were going to create, the end result came to fruition as Memphis Rox Climbing and Community Center, located at 879 East McLemore Avenue, and is now celebrating five years in the business.
According to the organization, Memphis Rox is the “first nonprofit climbing gym of its size, standing at 32,000 sq. ft. with yoga and meditation spaces, a fitness area, and system board.”
Shadyac explained that they are very much a “child of the St. Jude” model, with accessibility being at the heart of their purpose.
“We don’t want to turn anyone away for their inability to pay,” said Shadyac. “We keep our doors open and accessible to all people. We ask if you don’t have money – first it’s pay what you can afford – but if you have no money, we ask that maybe you volunteer in the neighborhood, you volunteer at your church, you do something positive as a sort of energetic exchange and a contribution to what we’re all trying to do.”
According to One Family Memphis’ 2021 annual report, the organization helped create 1,802 volunteer hours served and 518 volunteer impacts (which refers to anytime a volunteer completes a volunteer service). The report also stated that all volunteer hours totaled to a value of $44,203.06.
With accessibility being a major component of the work done at Memphis Rox, the organization still relies on some of the building blocks of rock climbing, such as collaborating and cooperating on the wall.
Dean, who grew up in South Memphis and now serves as creative director at Memphis Rox, explained that his first love was basketball, and that was what everyone in his community did, “from sun up to sun down.” However, he also noted a surplus of basketball courts and facilities, and thought young people needed exposure to more opportunities.
“We already know the numbers don’t work of how many people make it, right,” said Dean. “People get in fights on basketball courts, most of the fights I’ve gotten into have been on basketball courts.”
Dean went on to explain that the culture of sports and basketball incites the feeling of excitement more so when someone is injured, or in contact with another player. He explained that as a society, we are taught to celebrate the exact moment when “someone could have died.” A sport like climbing “turns all of that on its head.”
“Rock climbing is not about me versus you,” said Dean. “It’s about me versus me.”
While Memphis Rox may appear to be your standard rock climbing gym, Shadyac believes it’s simply a way to access a relationship.
“Anyone who comes in our doors, from the community, to grab a meal, to work out, or to climb, we listen to,” said Shadyac. “When we listened to the community we realized there were certain needs that weren’t being met.”
Aside from rock climbing activities, the campus also houses the Juice Almighty café, the Soulsville Community Closet, and an “educational food garden.” The organization also partners with Sister Supply for their Period Power program to “provide menstrual products to women in the community who are unable to afford that.”
“We want the whole city to embrace this culture of climbing and wellness and health and community,” said Dean. “There are young people in the community that don’t have access to all the rest of those things anywhere else, so you just come here and bring a little bit of yourself.”
Beginning in late 2020, there was a blast of publicity regarding the possibility of a massive redevelopment of South Memphis — two different and competing redevelopments, actually. More of that anon.
This is a sprawling territory — including ZIP code 38126, statistically the most impoverished area anywhere in Memphis — that unquestionably needs an economic shot in the arm.
Photo: Jesse Davis
Besides containing large pockets of the most bleakly underserved parts of Memphis, South Memphis — “Soulsville,” in the larger generic sense — is also the home of some of the city’s most important landmarks: LeMoyne-Owen College, a pedigreed HBCU (historically Black college and university) that has produced no small share of the city’s influential movers and shakers; The Four Way, a venerable eatery and meeting place that has nurtured luminaries and grassroots politicians alike; and the Stax complex, source of so much of Memphis’ musical history and still functioning today as a museum and training ground for would-be musical avatars.
Soulsville is home to the Stax music legacy among other landmarks. (Photos: Jesse Davis)
The name “Soulsville” derives mainly from the Stax legacy, and it continues to serve as a descriptor of the South Memphis area and its citizenry at large. The people who live in this domain constitute the very textbook description of an underserved population.
The proposed map for the South Memphis TIF district (Photo: Courtesy CRA/SNDD)
Milton’s Method Reginald Milton, a member of the Shelby County Commission from the area and a community organizer for the last 22 years, has served on several boards, as commissioners tend to do. One of them was the board of the University Neighborhoods Development Corporation (UNDC), focused on the area around the University of Memphis.
Not too many years ago, that area, including the lengthy Highland Street artery that borders the university on its western side, was served by a few hit-or-miss storefronts and collegiate haunts. Nothing you could call a development as such — certainly nothing that was in sync with an educational institution that was ever upgrading and expanding from its roots as a small teachers’ college into the formidable research university that it is today.
But then the UNDC was granted a TIF (tax incremental financing) that accelerated the active recruiting of new businesses to serve the area. A TIF is one of three basic financial means by which local or state governments can incentivize investment, the others being arrangements for a PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) and a TDZ (tourism development zone). Usually, it is an individual business that is granted a PILOT; the recipient is freed, during a given period, from what would be the usual property tax obligations. A TDZ allows for the state sales taxes within a project area to be rerouted, during a set number of years, into the development of the project.
A TIF functions more or less like the TDZ, except that it is granted not by the state but by local government, and the tax deferment applies to the incremental rise in property taxes collected within the project area during the TIF period (usually 15 years or less). Under legislation passed by the Tennessee General Assembly in 1998, TIFs are approved, first, by a local CRA (Community Redevelopment Agency) and then by the two basic local funding authorities, in the local case, the city of Memphis and the Shelby County Commission.
If all goes well, the tax base within the project area will rise, and the additional tax revenues arising from that will be poured back into the project area, not into the general fund of city or county.
Recent TIFs have been approved in Shelby County for the Uptown area, for the Binghampton community, and, as aforementioned, for the University of Memphis area. The latter TIF, after a slow start, succeeded spectacularly, resulting in a much elongated Highland strip, replete with storefronts and upscale apartment housing from Poplar down to Southern.
Reginald Milton remembers: “I was on the UNDC board when they got the TIF. And I realized the tremendous benefit the TIF would provide. I saw how you can build up Highland around the university community. And I wondered if you could do something of that magnitude here in South Memphis.”
Before becoming a community organizer per se, Milton had developed his civic consciousness as a neighborhood specialist for the city of Memphis. “That’s what really got me into this. I realized that the city was really trying to help, but the reality was my job was to go and sit in community meetings, listen to the people, and go home and write it down. They would say, you know, there’s drugs in our neighborhood. Okay? Did not know that. Write that down and then go and file it in File 13.We weren’t bad people. It’s just, we weren’t doing anything.”
Milton left his city job and began doing hands-on work with several small community groups in South Memphis. “My task was to work with these community groups and show them that their problems came from working individually. You’ve got maybe 10 neighborhood associations. This association has 10 members; another might have 15 members,” Milton says. “Individually, you’re all trying to work with the city. You’re powerless that way.”
Reginald Milton working the phone from the laundromat owned by his South Memphis Alliance (Photo: Jackson Baker)
That effort saw the birth of the South Memphis Alliance (SMA), a grouping of such associations, which Milton founded and runs today as executive director.
“My goal, as a community organizer, was to somehow convince these nonprofits that it made sense to create a larger nonprofit, where they will sit on a board and be the voice, the face of South Memphis. And we would legitimately be so because we were from a community.”
Over the years the SMA became a functioning organization with income sources from adjuncts like a laundromat which shares a parking lot with the nonprofit’s headquarters on South Bellevue.
The component organizations of SMA range in area from Annesdale-Snowden to Longview Heights to Rozelle to the Soulsville Neighborhood Association to Shadowlawn. Says Milton: “You had all these organizations that were really doing a decent job. Alone, they weren’t doing the maximum possible job, though. Understandably, all these organizations had to be focused on their own leaky roofs.”
And, with a TIF in mind, Milton would join this conglomerate to others — to form the SoulsvilleUSA Neighborhood Development District (SNDD).
Coming together to form the district would be SCORE CDC, LeMoyne-Owen College CDC, Memphis Black Arts Alliance, Memphis Music Magnet, Soulsville Foundation, and SMA itself. Milton emphasizes that his role was that of facilitator; the district members elect their own officers.
Board of SoulsvilleUSA Neighborhood Development District (Photo: Jackson Baker)
A Tale of Two TIFs While Milton was putting together his conglomerate, another major player was expressing interest in organizing for a TIF in South Memphis.
This was J.W. Gibson, a prominent contractor and developer, who had already been responsible for numerous building projects. Gibson, through his Southeast Regional Development Corporation, had a somewhat different and larger TIF effort in mind, extending to a few areas — the South Main complex, the Medical District, Victorian Village — that were, technically, outside South Memphis proper.
Gibson’s premise was based on the old axiom that “it takes money to make money” and that for a TIF to work properly it should contain some already operating magnet areas to attract potential new investors.
And, in December 2000, he was the first to get his application in to the CRA for its appraisal.
Milton was still involved in the process of sounding out all his community agencies on collaborating in the TIF process. Gibson’s application upped the ante for him.
“We had to ensure that our body had the broad support of the community. We couldn’t just arbitrarily say we represented the community. We held numerous town hall meetings to get their approval to go speak on their behalf,” Milton says.
“Our reasoning for not turning ours in at the same time as J.W.’s was very clear. Until we met with every community that would be represented in our TIF district, we could not turn in an application. We made it clear to the CRA we would not do so.”
Milton’s group reached out for expert advice, hiring Andy Kitsinger, chief designer of Development Studio, an organization which specializes in the kind of by-the-bootstraps economic effort that the newly formed SNDD was seeking.
Kitsinger had acquired his experience and demonstrated his chops by assisting in several other projects, including a successful and functioning TIF in Binghampton. Once on the Soulsville job, Kitsinger saw the developing TIF as one that was “aimed at creating stability, at preventing displacement of the existing population and spurring the development of affordable housing.”
“We worked a long time at getting input from the South Memphis community, getting a sense of their highest priorities, which included blight remediation and affordable housing,” Kitsinger says.
Finally, the SNDD was ready with its proposal and submitted it to the CRA in April. “It put a lot of pressure on them to make a decision,” recalls Milton. The usual situation for the CRA was that the agency would receive a single application for a single project area. Here it was having to deal with two groups — Milton’s and Gibson’s — submitting overlapping applications for approval.
“I didn’t see it as competition,” says Milton. “My theory was that it was twice as good to have two organizations wanting to do something for the community, but the CRA had never experienced that before.”
Complicating the predicament was the fact that one mayor, Lee Harris of Shelby County, was publicly endorsing the Gibson project, while another, Jim Strickland of Memphis, was encouraging Milton and SNDD. “He understood the necessity for the community to control this. He got the idea what we were trying to do,” Milton says.
Even today, Milton and Gibson, the impresarios of the two separate TIFs, do not speak ill of each other. Yet they were definitely rivals, and their missions, while overlapping, did operate on different premises.
Gibson made it clear that, without specific magnet areas already functioning in a target area, “your baseline is extremely low,” making it “extremely difficult to attract investors.” Hence, his insistence on a larger territorial spread, consisting of some 8,000 parcels, some already generating significant revenue.
J.W. Gibson and Senchel Matthews of Southeast Region Development Corporation (Photo: Jackson Baker)
The Specter of Gentrification Milton renders his point of view this way, recalling a recent trip to Nashville. “As members of the County Commission, we get invited to a lot of places outside Shelby County. It’s always the same. They invite us to this very nice new hotel they’ve built, and at some point we’re sitting outside relaxing. And across the street is always a Starbucks, and two people come jogging. I swear it’s the same two people, I don’t care what city it is, it’s the same two people.
“And our host is saying very proudly, ‘Look at this area. Look how beautiful it is. Just five years ago, I wouldn’t have been caught dead in this neighborhood.’ I mean, here he was an elected official and he didn’t want to come into the area, which I’m sure he represented. And I asked the question, I said, ‘Could you tell me what happened to the local mom-and-pop businesses here and the residents?’ That man looked at me like I cursed his sister out. Because he never thought to talk about that. The fact was, those folks were moved out when they brought those glossier things in.”
What Milton was evoking was the specter of gentrification. “What happens is, in the effort to make an area better, you end up moving the poor out and into a more stable neighborhood. And because they arrive in massive numbers, you destabilize the community. So you’ve got dislocation on both ends,” he says.
“Water always goes downhill. It takes the easiest route. If you’re a business and you want to develop in an inner city community, the best way to do it is to buy up a lot of land in the area, push everybody out, and you can do your development. The hardest thing would be to try to actually go in there and work with the community.”
That’s one way of seeing the dilemma of economic development in an underserved area. To change the community by importing new business or super-charging the environment with up-to-date brick-and-mortar construction is, as Milton suggests, to risk transforming it and displacing its population. We’ve all seen — or even lived or worked in — such changed landscapes. (Hello, Edge District. Hiya, Cordova and Hickory Hill.) Such areas can once again become economic liabilities in the course of time.
Reginald Milton is urging what he acknowledges is basically an “experiment.” Can a poor community lift itself by its own bootstraps? Can it discover within itself the means to regenerate its prospects? In one of his discussions with the CRA, he recast the initials forming TIF this way: “The Indigenous First.”
In the end, the CRA — faced with having to choose between J.W. Gibson’s ambitious model and development expertise and the carefully coordinated community structure of the SNDD — decided upon a uniquely Solomonic solution. It would anoint neither the Gibson project nor that of Milton’s group. Maintaining that both projects were too large as conceived, the CRA produced its own territorial map, consisting of roughly 4,000 parcels, and proclaimed a TIF project under its own auspices.
Gibson, disappointed at the outcome and at the snail’s pace by which the necessary approval of the CRA’s TIF by the City Council and County Commission has advanced since its unveiling last fall, is skeptical of the agency’s reasoning. He points out that the CRA, which contended that a project of 8,000 parcels would stress out its staff, had forwarded out an Uptown TIF involving some 7,700 parcels.
Milton, too, sees something disingenuous in the CRA’s solution — though in a different sense. “Basically, the CRA said, ‘Well, we’re just going to create our own map, and we’re gonna design it on community organizing and outreach,’ which just so happens to have been everything we did. They literally took all our data and our design and copied it. They took it and made it their model. And they reduced our size by just a little. It was basically SNDD’s model.”
But Milton sees in the outcome the cause for a declaration of victory on his group’s part. He and the SNDD board, chaired by Rebecca Matlock Hutchinson of SCORE CDC, are official advisers on the project to CRA, though it is the agency itself that will direct things.
And Gibson has an open invitation to align himself with the CRA model. He and his associate Senchel Matthews are keeping their powder dry on a South Memphis Revitalization Action Plan — including a long-desired grocery store complex — which, to some degree, will undoubtedly come to fruition in part or in parcel.
Meanwhile, the CRA-crafted TIF — the Soulsville TIF — is finally about to hit the council and commission calendars for the final approval stages. There was some symbolic preliminary action last week in the commission on a $1 million grant to be shared by the SNDD itself and three of its components— the Memphis Black Arts Alliance, PURE Youth Athletics Alliance, and SCORE CDC. This funding, through the federal government’s American Rescue Plan, is technically unrelated to the TIF, but it does have the look of a favorable omen.
This Saturday afternoon, Goner Records and the Stax Museum will host the Soulsville Record Swap, a giant swap meet featuring albums, 45s, music memorabilia, and everything in between. Goner Records has been hosting a record swap for the past three years, but co-owner Zac Ives said this is the first time that Stax has gotten in on the action.
“The new director over at Stax reached out about six months ago, and this is one of the things we discussed doing right away,” Ives said.
“We were both really excited to work together, and we have some other things planned for the future.”
Don Perry
Ives said that vendors are coming from as far as Seattle to sell records this Saturday and that all vendor spots have been filled. In addition to awesome music memorabilia from Memphis and beyond, the Soulsville Record Swap will feature food trucks from Central BBQ and Hot Mess Burritos. The Stax Museum will also be selling deeply discounted CDs, books, apparel, and more. Admission for the event is $5, unless you want to get in an hour before everyone else (10 a.m.), in which case the cost of admission is $10.
“All of our record swaps in the past have been great, and working with Stax is going to make this event our biggest one yet,” Ives said.
Because no Goner-related event is complete without a pre-party and an after-party, there will be both. The pre-party goes down on Friday at Memphis Made Brewery from 7 to 10 p.m., and the after party will be at the Goner Records store from 7 to 10 p.m. as well. Both parties will feature DJs that have yet to be announced.
If you’re a fan of Memphis music (you better be), there’s no better place to spend your Saturday afternoon.
This is an open letter to Memphis Mayor A C Wharton. Yes, you’re still the mayor. You will be until December 31st, 2015. That gives you roughly 10 weeks left in office as the leader of Memphis. I’m just wondering what you plan to do in the next 10 weeks.
First, let me say that I have no beef whatsoever with Mayor-elect Jim Strickland. I haven’t met Mr. Strickland yet, and I hope he is wildly successful in making the hometown I love so much a better place. More than anything right now, though, I want to thank you, Mayor Wharton, for doing just that.
I think you have done a fantastic job in your roles as public defender, county mayor, and mayor of the city, despite the odds you have faced. In addition to your passionate work to get guns off the streets, help incarcerated, mentally disabled people get a fair shake, make Memphis a healthier city, and help distressed neighborhoods become thriving centers of commerce, culture, and hope, you have done this with grace, intelligence, and the sharpest sense of both honest concern and a sense of humor. You are one of the funniest people I’ve ever known, and I love that about you. A wit as quick as yours in a politician? Pretty rare.
But I also love your serious side and the fact that you seem to be able to always be at 10 places at once every day of every week. When something bad happens, you are there to try to come up with the answers. When something good happens, you are there to share the moment and pat people on the back for a job well done. You’re an incredible ambassador for Memphis, everywhere you go. Are you perfect? Nah. Nobody is. I don’t know a lot about politics, but I know something about good people, and you are certainly that. I’m proud to call you a friend.
The day after the October 8th election, I read a very disconcerting headline that proclaimed, “In humiliating loss, Wharton has only self to blame.” You’re probably too much of a gentleman to respond to that opinionated, kick-’em-when-they’re-down kind of smear tactic, but I will go on record saying that you have nothing to be humiliated about. It’s politics. Times change. The world keeps spinning. And the 15 million or so people who come here from all over the world every year to experience Memphis will continue to come to one of the coolest cities in the world, a city in which the majority of its residents don’t have a clue what a pilgrimage that is for so many of them.
Because so many people blame you for every single thing that goes wrong in Memphis, I’m going to give you credit here for every good thing that has happened during your mayoral tenure. Your Mayor’s Innovation Team, under your direction, has done wonders for areas like Broad Avenue and Crosstown. Those once-dilapidated, sad places are now so thriving that other cities should be following the revitalization model your team has set forth. While a lot of other people also deserve credit for that, you should certainly take credit, too. The transformations began under your watch. Likewise with Overton Square, one of the best urban success stories in the country right now. Same with the South Main Arts District, Chisca Hotel, Front Street, Soulsville, Beale Street, Cooper Street, and now, finally, hopefully, Clayborn Temple across from the FedExForum. Take credit, Mr. Mayor. A lot of great things have happened in Memphis with you at the helm.
Perhaps the most existentially important things that have happened on your watch are the renaming of the city parks formerly known as Confederate Park, Nathan Bedford Forrest Park, and Jefferson Davis Park, things that baffled those 15 million visitors a year to Memphis — and many of us who live here. That was an awesome accomplishment and proof of progress directed at no longer honoring and paying tribute to slave owners. Yep, it’s that simple.
Which brings me back to my initial question of what you plan to do in these last 10 weeks in office. In the aforementioned newspaper article that declared your mayoral election results a “humiliating loss,” the writer also mentioned that “Everyone’s seen the cranes in Nashville, seen the resurgence so many other cities are enjoying, and wondering why they weren’t seeing enough of it here.”
First off, the reason there are so many cranes in Nashville is that over there they are demolishing historic landmarks as fast as they can to build hideous, generic-looking condominiums. The resurgence of Memphis has been more carefully executed. It’s a bit subtler than Nashville, but then Nashville is more about glitz and glamour.
I would like to see one big crane, though. I remember my heart sort of leaping out of my chest not too long ago, when I read or heard that you, the mayor, personally issued a request that the city remove the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest that still resides in the park on Union Avenue that used to bear his name. I don’t know what the status of that request is now. The crane I’d like to see before you leave office is the one extracting the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest from that park and moving it wherever it is most out of view. The park has been renamed, so why not move it? I would give anything if you could pull that off by the time your term is up. I’d be happy to help.
Soulsville needs more organic development, a reinforced neighborhood identity, better wayfinding signs, and maybe a coffee shop, according to members of an Urban Land Institute (ULI) technical advisory panel.
Members of the panel — a mix of architects, artists, development professionals, and Soulsville residents — discussed these recommendations and others at a public meeting Tuesday afternoon at the Stax Academy.
The group found that Soulsville lacks neighborhood connectivity, especially between the Stax Museum and LeMoyne-Owen College, and has too many vacant spaces in between existing businesses. Brian Whaley with CBRE led the presentation, and he said some of those blighted or vacant spaces should be activated with community gardens, mini parks, or other uses. He also said the black windows at Stax, although there for historical reasons, made the museum seem uninviting from the sidewalk.
Missing from Soulsville are healthcare facilities, eateries, pocket parks, public gardens, live music venues, and fitness facilities, according to the ULI presentation.
“Tourists come here for Stax, and they want to eat. But they end up leaving the neighborhood to eat,” Whaley said.
The ULI panel interviewed Soulsville neighborhood stakeholders, and they said Soulsville should focus on offering places where the next generation could connect to the neighborhood. They also wanted a coffee shop, an ice cream shop, and a place where neighbors could interact. Accessibility and walkability were also high on the list of stakeholder needs.
The design recommendations from ULI suggested new wayfinding signs directing tourists to various points around Soulsville, a Soulsville sign on the bridge over I-40, visual transparency into the Soulsville gift shop, and signage explaining Stax’s black windows (which were actually never explained in the ULI meeting).
They also envision a sculptural seating area at the rock garden being built by the I Heart Soulsville mural, more community gardens on empty lots, more affordable housing, and having artists paint abandoned structures. Better connections between the Soulsville bike lanes and downtown bike lanes were also mentioned.
Retail recommendations included a record shop, a music store offering lessons, and a coffee shop/bookstore.
At the end of the meeting, film director Tom Shadyac, who recently purchased the foreclosed Towne Center in Soulsville at an auction, stood up to address the audience. He said he has plans to build a restaurant with a pay what you can model. And he plans to turn Towne Center into a spiritual healing center that will help heal people through meals, art, and mentorship — a sort of St. Jude for spiritual needs.
“We feel there is something moving here. There is a spirit here. I think it’s called Soulsville for a reason,” Shadyac said. “There are no limits to the soul. And there are no limits to what we want to do in Soulsville.”
Gennie Suggs-Smith is “angry as hell,” and she says that’s what keeps her hanging on to the blight remediation group she founded, Census Tract 61 Neighborhood Council, years after losing its South Memphis office in a property dispute with Shelby County.
Now Suggs-Smith believes the county is dragging its feet on giving her a free property from the Shelby County Land Bank to replace the one she lost in a tax dispute.
“A good year has gone by that I’ve been trying to get another property [from the land bank],” Suggs-Smith said.
The trouble began in 2008. The Census Tract 61 group, which was founded in 1986, had been operating out of a house at 1249 Cannon since 2002. There they coordinated efforts to deal with blight in an area just east of Soulsville. They also ran a club for kids, fed meals to needy residents, and organized neighborhood get-togethers for the small area bordered by South Bellevue, South Parkway, Walker, and the BNSF railroad.
Suggs-Smith said she filed for nonprofit status with the IRS and property tax exemption status with the state Board of Equalization (BOE) in 2004. But that didn’t stop tax bills from piling up. The outstanding tax bill on Census Tract 61’s office rose to $11,600.
“I started getting letters about property taxes, but I thought, since we were a tax-exempt organization, sanctioned by the IRS and the state of Tennessee, that they were making a mistake,” Suggs-Smith said. “I didn’t follow up about the taxes though. Since I’d filed all the necessary [nonprofit] paperwork, I didn’t think they were serious.”
But turns out they were. In 2008, Suggs-Smith received a letter from the county letting her know they were serious about taking the property. Although she said she’d filed for tax-exempt status with the state, the county never received confirmation, and at the time, Suggs-Smith didn’t have all the paperwork to prove her status.
“We had a flood in our building and lost a lot of files, but I eventually found a copy of the state stuff and showed it to the courts,” Suggs-Smith said.
Bianca Phillips
Gennie Suggs-Smith and her former office on Cannon
But it was too late to save her office on Cannon. It was sold in a tax sale in 2008.
Suggs-Smith eventually won an appeal to the state BOE in 2012, but although the board ruled Census Tract 61’s tax exemption should have begun in 2004, it also determined such findings “would not likely affect the validity of a tax sale that has otherwise become final.”
According to Greg Gallagher, a delinquent tax attorney with the Shelby County Trustee’s office, the issue was that Suggs-Smith lacked proof of her tax-exempt status at the time of the tax sale.
“Unfortunately, she had already lost ownership of the property by the time the BOE came in and said, ‘Well, we think the property was used as a nonprofit starting in 2004. But you no longer own the property, so we don’t have jurisdiction.’ It was a done deal. It had been sold,” said Debra Gates, chief administrator for the Shelby County Trustee’s office.
Suggs-Smith says she has an agreement with the Shelby County Land Bank to select a new property, but she said she has been turned down for two buildings and is awaiting a response on a third. Meanwhile, without an office, she says Census Tract 61 Neighborhood Council’s membership has dwindled down from about 20 active members to only a handful of people.
“When we lost the building, people stopped coming. There are only a few of us left cutting vacant lots here and there and serving a few meals for the people left in our Meals on Wheels program,” Suggs-Smith said.
As for her old property on Cannon, today, it sits vacant. It was purchased by an investment group in 2008, and Suggs-Smith said renters lived there for awhile. But it’s remained empty for years. A “For Rent” sign hangs in the window.
“Every time I pass by that house I get angry,” Suggs-Smith said. “It’s just sitting there. It’s going to become part of the blight scene.”
CREDIT: Courtesy Memphis Convention & Visitors Bureau
First of all, thanks to all of those who came out for the SOUTH MEMFix event this past Saturday at the corner of Mississippi Boulevard and Walker Street. Despite the midday rain, which later gave way to beautiful blue skies, the event proved that people could come together and make things work. Black, white, young, old, gay, straight — it didn’t matter. People from all walks of life came out to see the vision of what that iconic intersection could once again become — alive with retail businesses, pedestrian traffic, artists, live music, and other new life.
Courtesy Memphis Convention & Visitors Bureau
It was downright utopian. Even some of the police officers were dancing. There was a hot tamale wagon with the Delta delicacies steaming away in crock pots. There was an art gallery. There was the Green Machine, a bus that services food-desert neighborhoods with fresh produce. There was jazz, hip-hop, hard rock, and soul music. There were neighborhood folks, politicians, community activists, and leaders. There were actors and actresses. There were street banners and fire trucks and barbecue and catfish and on and on and on. But mainly it was the people who made it so much fun and so successful — people with no agenda other than to try to make Memphis better.
Now juxtapose that with the petty, partisan civil war going on in Washington, D.C., between those for universal health care and the Tea Party diehards who, in the “name of God,” care more about their perverse personal agendas than they care about whether people are able to eat and educate their children.
I have purposely tried to pay as little attention to that as possible, even though the shutdown and now the looming default pose threats of whatever kind of potential chaos might happen if Ted Cruz and his ilk don’t pull their heads out of their butts and work things out with those across the aisle. It’s just too much and too frustrating.
But leaving the SOUTH MEMFix event Saturday and watching a couple of minutes of news about Washington gave me mixed feelings — kind of like I wanted to laugh, cry, throw up, and keep my head high (no, not that kind of high!) because if one small community and some hard-working volunteers could make something really wonderful happen, why can’t these religious zealots stop hating Barack Obama long enough to get something done?
Oh, I know it sounds very naive and the comparison is a real stretch, and maybe the tamales had gone to my head, but it really did strike me as odd and ironic and reminded me that sometimes it takes real grass roots to make anything meaningful happen. That’s one of the reasons I love Newark mayor and Senate hopeful Cory Booker so much. He gets that. And I hope he is president one day.
But back to MEMFix. This is a program of the Mayor’s Innovation Delivery Team, which is funded by the Bloomberg Foundation. There have been a couple of previous such events but I missed them. I won’t miss another one. It is now a model that other communities and organizations in Memphis can use to do their own things. And I hope others in Memphis take advantage of it. I know it’s meant to be more of an economic growth tool than a festival or block party, but SOUTH MEMFix definitely had the feel of all of the above. If that could happen every Saturday at different locations around the city and start attracting huge crowds, it would be such a success story for Memphis. And every community in Memphis has a story, some history that is worth noting and celebrating. Similar events have taken place on Cleveland Street in the Crosstown neighborhood and on Broad Avenue in the Binghampton neighborhood. Both had great success and resulted in new, permanent improvements to the streets and well as new businesses moving in to stay. Truth be told, it is much like what the Cooper-Young Festival did for the Cooper-Young neighborhood.
I’m thinking now about blocks on Danny Thomas Boulevard in North Memphis leading from downtown and Uptown into Frayser, where my family lived when I was born and where my grandparents lived for decades. I’m thinking about areas in Whitehaven, where my family lived when I was in elementary school. About Bellevue between Soulsville, USA, and farther south toward Graceland, where there is so much potential and so much character. The goal isn’t to take away that character and replace it with big-box stores; it’s to celebrate that history and character for what it is and breathe some new life into it. Drive down Madison in Midtown, take a look at the blocks where it intersects with Cleveland, and tell me that area couldn’t be the next cool place to be.
In Memphis, it’s all about authenticity. No, we are not Atlanta or Nashville or Dallas and thank goodness for that. People from all over the world come to Memphis because it has soul and feeling and guts and we don’t need any glitzy skyscrapers to make us better. We just need to take what we have and be proud of it.
Fifty years ago, white Memphis fiddle player Jim Stewart started a music label, called Satellite, releasing a few pop, rockabilly, and country singles. A few years later, that label, rechristened Stax, would emerge as the Southern giant of soul music, rivaling its Detroit counterpart Motown as the country’s most important purveyor of “black” pop music (not such a simple distinction at Stax).
This year, three organizations — Soulsville (which operates the Stax Museum of American Soul Music and the Stax Music Academy on the original label site at the corner of College and McLemore in South Memphis), the Memphis Convention and Visitors Bureau (MCVB), and Concord Music Group — have joined forces to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Stax with a yearlong campaign that will involve a massive slate of classic Stax reissues, a publicity campaign, a new documentary about the label, a series of revue-style concerts (including June 22nd at the Orpheum), and, most daringly, a relaunch of Stax as an active record label.
According to Deanie Parker — a former Stax publicist, songwriter, and artist who would go on to head up the Soulsville organization and is spending her final year on the organization’s board overseeing the “Stax 50” celebration — the genesis of this celebration came a few years ago, right after the museum opened in 2003 and Soulsville board members were looking toward the future: “While we were concentrating on the stabilization of Soulsville — the academy and the museum — we were also thinking, What is the next thing that warrants our time and attention? And one of the things the board had put on its agenda was Stax 50.”
Under Parker’s direction, Soulsville partnered with the MCVB, which had overseen the city’s “50 Years of Rock and Roll” celebration in 2004. But what could have been — like the “50 Years of Rock and Roll” campaign — a primarily Memphis-generated P.R. initiative became something more tangible when the California-based Concord Music Group came into the mix.
Concord purchased Fantasy, which had acquired the bulk of the Stax catalog (that not distributed by Atlantic records during the early years of the Memphis label’s history) and the Stax name after the soul label’s messy mid-’70s dissolution, in 2004, with plans to re-energize the Stax brand.
“In the purchase of Fantasy, everyone thought that Stax was a very important part of the package,” says Robert Smith, senior vice president of strategic marketing for Concord. “Those Stax records, obviously, never went away, but it was certainly looked at as a property where the catalog could be further revitalized and the label could be relaunched. It’s one of those very few actual brands in music. So the plan was never just to do more reissues and raise awareness about the legacy but also to move forward and relaunch it as an active soul-music label.”
Smith says that the 50th anniversary of the label was a definite factor in Concord’s initial planning, making a partnership with Soulsville and the MCVB a mutually beneficial relationship.
“We found within the Concord family, I think, an appreciation for and a sincerity about the Stax catalog,” Parker says. “And one of things that I like about Concord is that they do have marketing and promotional savvy. They’ve got that. They’ve got the capacity and creativity to recognize promotional opportunities, seize them, and take them to the next level. And [we’ve] not had that opportunity with the previous owner of the Stax catalog.”
Parker praises Fantasy as a respectful guardian of the Stax catalog, but says that now “the need is different.”
Concord’s revitalization of Stax began earlier this year with what promises to be a massive reissue campaign. The first foray came in February with Johnnie Taylor: Live at the Summit Club, a concert album from the Stax singer (best known for his 1968 hit “Who’s Making Love”) recorded in Los Angeles during the filming of the famous 1972 WattStax concert. Concord followed in March with the two-disc Stax 50th Anniversary Celebration, the first self-contained collection to span the gamut of Stax’s history, and a bonus-track-laden reissue of Carla Thomas’ 1967 studio album The Queen Alone.
The reissues will continue with a series of “very best of” collections from multiple Stax artists, expanded reissues of Isaac Hayes’ studio albums, multi-disc sets dedicated to the Staple Singers and the 1967 Stax/Volt Revue European tour, and other releases.
A Stax documentary — Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story — produced and directed by Memphian Robert Gordon and Los Angeles filmmaker Morgan Neville will be released on DVD by Concord in August, following a broadcast as part of PBS’ Great Performances series.
Many of these releases require cooperation between Concord and Rhino, which holds the rights to the portion of the Stax catalog retained by Atlantic after that label’s distribution deal with Stax ended in 1968.
“Traditionally, over the years, there has been a great deal of cross-licensing between Atlantic, now Rhino, and Stax, so that’s just continued,” says Smith. “If you go through your Stax Justin Fox Burks
collections, there is a great deal of intermingling. Stax 50th is clearly a major piece of collaboration. Twenty-one [songs] from Atlantic and 29, I think, from our Stax catalog.”
The Stax 50th compilation was produced and compiled by noted Stax scholar Rob Bowman and Cheryl Pawelski, a Concord executive who left the company in January to take the job of vice president of A&R at Rhino, a move that Parker hopes will help bring the two sides of the Stax legacy even more in line.
“Without a total understanding of how all of that fits together, and realizing that whatever they’ve structured today is going to change tomorrow, because the industry is in flux, I will say this with total confidence: That woman loves the Stax product and the soul music that comes out of Memphis,” Parker says. “So we have an ally. We have somebody there who understands and appreciates it enough that when she has to go to a meeting where there are 20- and 30-year-olds making a decision and who can only relate to rap and hip-hop, she’ll bring some balance to the table. Makes a difference.”
But as exciting as the current (and future) reissue campaigns might be to fans of Stax’s classic sound, Smith emphasizes that that’s only a part of what Concord has planned for Stax.
“The real purpose is to combine the heritage and legacy of Stax with the relaunch of the label and the signing of new artists and releasing of new records,” Smith says. “If you’re only dealing with it from a catalog standpoint, then you’re really missing what is truly behind this, which is that soul music is truly an important part of American musical culture.”
This relaunch of Stax as an active label began modestly with the March release of Interpretations: Celebrating the Music of Earth, Wind & Fire, a tribute album to the ’70s Chicago funk/R&B band — founded by Memphian Maurice White — in which contemporary soul artists cover the band’s songs.
This relaunch kicks into a higher gear in August with a new release by highly regarded neo-soul singer Angie Stone, followed by albums from Lalah Hathaway (daughter of soul star Donnie Hathaway), N’Dambi, and Soullive. But the highest-profile release on the new Stax will likely come from a name inseparable from the old Stax: Isaac Hayes, whose first album of new material under the Stax name in 20 years is set for release later this year.
John Burk, Concord’s executive vice president of A&R, acknowledges that it was important for Concord to launch this new Stax with a connection to the label’s legacy, but Smith says the signing of Hayes goes far beyond mere symbolism.
“Isaac Hayes is still a really vital artist and still a really important one, and we’re very fortunate to have him recording for Stax,” Smith says. “It wasn’t done for another reason. He’s just a great artist and one who does stand for what Stax is about, so of course it’s important from that standpoint. But Isaac Hayes is not recording here because he was on Stax. He’s recording here because he’s Isaac Hayes.”
Concord hopes to expand interest in a classic artist with the Hayes release, something the label, which released the hugely successful 2004 Ray Charles album Genius Loves Company, has some experience in.
“There are a lot of reasons it would be satisfying,” Smith says. “Isaac Hayes is one of those cornerstones of great American music. He hasn’t gone away. He’s so well-recognized and by young people, which doesn’t mean they own a lot of old Isaac Hayes records.”
And there’s a chance other veteran Stax artists could follow Hayes back onto the Stax roster. Booker T. Jones has acknowledged discussions with Concord, and Burk says, perhaps teasingly, “a lot of those original Stax artists are still around and still have things to say.”
But however much original Stax artists may get involved in the relaunch, the core of the new Stax is likely to be just that: new.
“There are great singers who, in a modern way, fit what that Stax tradition has always meant,” Smith says. “I think it’s exemplified by Angie Stone or Lalah Hathaway. Of course, if we didn’t have Stax we’d still want to have Angie Stone on our label, making a great record. She really epitomizes what Stax is about.”
But this relaunch may be bittersweet for a lot of Memphians. After all, Stax isn’t just a name but the product of a specific time and place, a specific set of unrepeatable historical circumstances. Burk cites the way Motown has remained a viable label over the years. But even though records have continued to be released with the “Motown” imprint, that hasn’t made those records Motown. Similarly, can the new “Stax” be Stax, especially based in Beverly Hills rather than South Memphis?
“I’m not critical of that,” Deanie Parker says of the relaunch. “But I have thought about it. I take comfort in my belief that Concord is not going to put anything on that Stax label that would destroy or belittle the integrity of that brand. I am all for Stax making a quantum leap into the 21st century and providing an opportunity for today’s artists to express themselves if they have a love, understanding, and appreciation for what we did.”
“It can’t be repeated,” Burk says of the creative formula that forged Stax, “but it can be a model for an artists’ community, which is what we’d like it to be. But that’s not geographic anymore. The world has changed.”
“People buy music because its great music,” Smith says. “I think the new releases will speak for themselves. They’re certainly of great quality. Very few things stay the same or stay in one place. What Stax was at its very beginning is different from what it was in its later years. Art, the commerce of art even, evolves. Tastes change. And social and cultural influences change music. What Stax started as and what it was by 1975 were very different things, because it’s a living tradition. One wouldn’t expect anybody to make music that tried to sound like it. So, I think the question is, what did Stax stand for, and how would it have evolved going forward? I think that the kind of artists we’re signing and the respect we’re paying that label and what it stands for will be really self-evident in the records we’re putting out.”
“The kind of place that Stax Records created is not one that can be duplicated,” Parker acknowledges. “But we could emulate it, and I’d like to see that happen in Memphis.”
If you believed everything you read in Memphis last fall, you would have been under the impression that it would, indeed, be happening in Memphis, with Millington-bred pop star Justin Timberlake overseeing Concord’s Stax relaunch from here in the heart of Soulsville. But that didn’t happen and isn’t likely to.
“There are so many things that are reported, and there are so many conversations that happen that go somewhere or don’t go somewhere, and I’m not in any official capacity to be able to talk about it,” Smith says of the Timberlake rumors.
Another source close to the situation acknowledges that there were discussions between Concord and Timberlake, though the two sides never got close to an agreement about the extent of his involvement with the label. But the two sides have maintained a good relationship, and it isn’t out of the question that Timberlake could get involved in the new Stax in some capacity.
Even though the new Stax won’t be based out of Memphis, Concord executives stress that an active relationship with the city is a priority.
“We’d like to have a presence in town,” Burk says, suggesting that could come in the form of a satellite office in Memphis or the signing of contemporary Memphis artists to the new Stax, if the right situation emerged.
“We feel that we’re attached at the hip,” Smith says. “And that’s where the pleasure of working with people in Memphis, especially Deanie Parker and [original Stax] artists, is very satisfying.”
As for Parker, her hopes for the bundle of activity surround this 50th anniversary celebration are many, from financial and publicity benefits for Soulsville and its mission to tangible benefits for original Stax artists to raising the profile of Stax as a model for what’s possible in Memphis.
“Stax served its community,” Parker says. “Too much of [music today] exploits the community. This focus [on Stax] distinctly defines what music can do: economically, morally, socially, culturally. It has the capacity to do that.”
Don Perry 
Toby Sells 
Bianca Phillips 
Courtesy Memphis Convention & Visitors Bureau 
Justin Fox Burks