Jeremy Markovich is a writer in North Carolina.

MEMPHIS—One day in April 2018, Demond Jackson wanted to see what everyone was talking about over on McLemore Avenue. Walking from his house, he crossed the parking lot behind the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, cutting between it and the The Soulsville Charter School. Five minutes later, he was facing a boxy brick building with the faces of Ida B. Wells and Mohandas Gandhi painted on it. Inside, it was bright and loud, with polygons of white, gray and blue walls, all studded with brightly colored hand-holds. The place was nearly the size of two football fields. There were kids he knew from the neighborhood, strapped into harnesses and clinging to the walls. He also saw something he didn’t often see in his part of South Memphis: white people.

Demond had just stepped into Memphis Rox, the city’s first indoor rock climbing gym.


Demond, 16, was sturdily built, but too short for basketball and too small for football. Rock climbing could be his thing, people at the gym told him. Demond thought of himself as a good kid, but he had a tough-guy reputation to keep up. Climbing didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would enhance that image. Still, the people at the gym seemed nice; he even recognized some of the employees from the neighborhood. Plus, for some reason, they didn’t ask Demond to pay.

What Demond didn’t know at the time was that Memphis Rox was not only unique in Memphis. It’s one of the only facilities like it in the country: a climbing gym aimed at introducing disadvantaged urban youth to a sport that its founders hope will challenge them physically and mentally — and keep them in school and off the streets. To lower the barriers, Memphis Rox has a pay-as-you’re-able model that differentiates it from the standard membership-only setup. Opened in March 2018 by Hollywood director Tom Shadyac (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective), and operated by a small corps of millennial climbing enthusiasts and neighborhood activists, Memphis Rox has quickly become more than a gym. It is a foothold in a private sector effort to help Memphis climb free of its reputation as one of the poorest large cities in America. In the 11 months since it opened, the facility has more than doubled its goals in terms of paying members. And it is filled in the afternoons and on weekends with kids eager for a low-cost extracurricular activity that doesn’t involve a video-game controller.

Demond Jackson, a 16-year-old climber from Soulsville, comes to the gym almost everyday after school. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine

Through a program called Community Lift, Jamond Bullock painted a mural outside of Memphis Rox. The colorful painting is rich with imagery representing the historically black Soulsville neighborhood. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine

It helps that climbing is having a moment. “Free Solo,” a documentary that shows how Alex Honnold became the first man to climb Yosemite’s daunting El Capitan without a rope, just won an Academy Award. Sport climbing will be featured for the first time at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. The United States is one of the world’s fastest growing markets, with an estimated 8 million people participating in 2017. And the climbing gym industry has been growing at least 6 percent every year since 2010. Climbing gyms are as common as co-working spaces in many cities; more than 517 such facilities have opened since Vertical World became America’s first indoor climbing gym in 1987. But the demographic driving that growth is mostly white.

And yet, at many times of day, the majority of people climbing, talking and lifting weights at Memphis Rox are black. Like any indoor climbing gym, it’s a shrine to the virtues of overcoming fear and testing physical limits, but it is also has a broader cultural mission: to break down the invisible barriers of class and race in a city that has lived with the painful legacy of segregation. As Demond Jackson noted on his earliest visit to the climbing gym, the crowd didn’t look like what he was used to seeing in his neighborhood. As one observer would later note, the gym was “the most integrated place in Memphis.”

Demond Jackson, 16, is a Soulsville resident and regular climber at the gym—though stopped visiting while recuperating from wounds after being shot at a party in the area. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine

But the challenges for Memphis Rox are not wholly different from the challenges that face the Soulsville community at large and the people who live there. No single nonprofit, no matter how popular, can act as a cure-all for problems that decades of misguided urban planning and neglect have allowed to take hold. Only a few weeks after he had first set his eyes on one of the hundreds of steep routes, Demond suddenly stopped coming. It was several days before anyone at the gym knew what had happened. He was in the hospital. Recovering from a bullet wound.




***

Tom Shadyac was 23 when he became Bob Hope’s youngest joke writer. But he always wanted to direct movies. When he got the chance to direct his first film, he teamed up with a young, fairly unknown comedian named Jim Carrey and in 1994 made a strange, screwball comedy about a private detective who specialized in solving pet mysteries. The movie made more than $100 million in theaters and launched Shadyac’s career.

Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine In Memphis, traditional fears of gentrification are tempered by an appreciation for the vitality that newcomers bring to communities in need of a spark. Click here.

After successes with Liar, Liar and The Nutty Professor, he started to command seven-figure deals and moved into a 17,000-square-foot mansion in Pasadena. He zipped around the country on a private jet. Then, in 2007, a head injury from a mountain biking accident led him to re-evaluate his life. He got rid of the jet, sold his mansion and moved into a high-end 1,000-square-foot trailer in Malibu. Around this time, he started teaching storytelling to college students in Memphis, where his family had roots. In 1962, his father, D.C. lawyer Richard Shadyac, had helped actor Danny Thomas open St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which offers free care to sick children. “Nothing has been more powerful in my life than watching a free hospital get built,” Shadyac says. “There’s a power there that doesn’t exist in other places.”

How Memphis Rox Pays It Forward

Shadyac, now 60, has wavy, shoulder-length hair, and often wears a black stocking cap and a T-shirt. From his perch at Cafe Eclectic, a favorite hangout near the University of Memphis, Shadyac recounted for me how a bunch of disparate passions came together to create Memphis Rox. He got into rock climbing a few years ago to clear his head. “It is virtually impossible to think about anything else when you’re on the wall,” he says. While he was reaching for handholds and planting his feet, his stress melted away. But the closest outdoor climbing was a two-hour drive from Memphis. And while most cities its size had three or four dedicated climbing gyms. Memphis had none.

Shadyac was also intrigued by the Soulsville neighborhood that surrounded LeMoyne-Owen College, the small, historically black school where he’d been teaching. Shadyac had been arms-length aware of the problems young black men and women face, he said, but hadn’t witnessed it up close until one night, when he was riding in a car with one of his students. Behind him, blue lights kicked on. “I saw the fear of God in his face,” Shadyac said.

Tom Shadyac, a film director and founder of Memphis Rox. Shadyac's family connections brought him to Memphis, where he taught classes at Lemoyne-Owen college in Soulsville before deciding to open the rock-climbing facility. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine

Memphis is the second poorest metropolitan area in the United States, where roughly one in four children lives in poverty, and the median income for black people is $25,000 lower than for whites. The history of Soulsville charts the larger city’s decline, as well as its promise. It was a middle-class African-American neighborhood when public housing projects began to open in the 1940s. A streetcar stopped running here in the 1960s, and Interstate 240 cut the neighborhood in half. Stax Records, which opened here in 1957, was one of the few bright spots. Soon, a company that was founded to put out country albums became the epicenter of the soul scene. Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, and Isaac Hayes cut records there. Aretha Franklin was born around the corner. Stax was an integrated studio in the still-segregated South.

Stax closed in 1975, but some hoped that music would give the neighborhood life once again. In 2003, the nonprofit Soulsville Foundation built a replica of Stax Records on its former site and turned it into a soul music museum, where Isaac Hayes’ baby blue, gold-rimmed Cadillac is on display. The site is now also home to the Soulsville Charter School and the Stax Music Academy. In 2008, the University of Memphis helped renovate the former home of musician Memphis Slim, turning it into a place that could help musicians cut demos and learn the business. “[The neighborhood] changed drastically,” said Tonya Dyson, director of the Memphis Slim Collaboratory, “but it’s still an impoverished neighborhood.”

On a lark, Shadyac paid $1.85 million in 2015 for two empty buildings across from the charter school. Both were built in 2009 to house retail development and a grocery store. But the shops and store never materialized, and the project went bankrupt. Tom figured he could use them to help the neighborhood, but he didn’t know exactly how. And then, one day, at Cafe Eclectic, it hit him. What if I opened a climbing gym in Soulsville?

Scenes from Soulsville, the lower-income Memphis neighborhood where the Memphis Rox gym is located. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine

Part of Shadyac’s plan was to give the people in Soulsville access to something that could empower them. But another goal was to bring outsiders closer to a community they had largely ignored. At the beginning, if you lived in Memphis and wanted to climb, you had to come to Soulsville.

All of this, Shadyac felt, would bring a new energy into the neighborhood, but he didn’t want to be seen as a profit-driven gentrifier or someone interested in drive-by charity. “They normally call people like me ‘turkey people’,” he said. “We come, we bring a turkey at Thanksgiving. And we then we drop it off, and we leave. So, they don’t get close to turkey people. They thought I might be a turkey person. But we all have stayed.”

In 1957, Stax Records was opened in Soulsville, Memphis. The legendary record label soon became synonymous with soul music, known for its big-name artists, including Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes and Booker T. & the M.G.’s. In 2003, a museum was built on the site of the studio. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine

Shadyac also knew he’d had to earn the trust of people who didn’t seem to oppose what he was doing but were still skeptical. So he did his homework. First, he wanted to find out if kids from here might even be interested in rock climbing. So he flew 18 of them to Boulder, Colorado, to do some actual climbing in the mountains; he asked them if they’d want an opportunity to do something like this close to home. Yes, they said. Next, he and his team attended more than a dozen neighborhood meetings. Mostly, people in Soulsville wanted to know: How is this going to work?

The answer to that question looks a lot like Johnathan “Malik” Martin.

Johnathan "Malik" Martin, 30, is the staff photographer at Memphis Rox. He grew up in Soulsville and serves as a mentor to young people who come to the gym. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine

***

When he was growing up in Soulsville, Martin was a runner. Cross-country wasn’t a sport that many of his friends did. In fact, Martin was the brunt of some good-natured teasing. But success in high school led to a running career at Arkansas State University. When he moved back to Memphis in 2017, he took some freelance writing and photography work for the Tri-State Defender, a black newspaper, and one day, an editor sent him out to interview Chris Dean. Dean was also from Soulsville and had grown up in the large Foote Homes housing project. Dean had been in a film that explored life in the projects, and it had inspired President Barack Obama to come and visit. Now, Dean was working with Shadyac on his climbing gym. That’s all Martin, 30, knew when he walked into Memphis Rox last year.

“I was like, ‘When did this get here?’”

At the time, the gym was a work in progress. Parts of the ceiling had been raised up to accommodate some of the taller, 45-foot climbing walls. But only a handful of routes had been set. Dean invited Martin to test them out. Martin was not a climber, but he made it to the top. He’d been scared of heights before, but with a rope attached to his harness, he felt safe. “I tell myself there’s a difference between fear and danger. Fear’s a useless emotion,” he said. “When you realize someone’s got you, there’s no reason to be scared.”

After school gets out on weekday afternoons, Memphis Rox fills up with students like 13-year-old Aiden Conrad (top). | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine

The top-rope style of climbing, where the climber is attached to a rope while a second person secures him or her from below, is about teamwork and trust. If you fall, someone has your back. The tallest top-rope courses reach four stories high at Memphis Rox, but the shorter, “bouldering” sections, which top out at 13 feet, can be tougher. Bouldering requires no ropes, just a pair of shoes and a strong grip. If you fall, you fall to the padded mat below. “Bouldering,” said Jon Hawk, the gym’s director of operations, “is more about power.”

The mix of empowerment and teamwork was seductive to Martin. He found himself coming to Memphis Rox every day. A staffer said he might as well work there. He began behind the front desk, then started documenting the gym’s evolving story as the staff photographer. The gym’s unusual vibe was obvious: investment bankers climbing next to 13-year-old kids from the neighborhood. The barriers between people were down. “It removes your title of importance,” he said. “People who are scared of the ‘hood come in there, meet the people from that neighborhood, and realize, man, these are just kids.”

Martin also wanted to be a mentor. That role began when he broke up a fight near the gym and pulled one of the kids aside. “I saw myself in him,” Martin said. “He was a young hothead. He’s got his own stuff going on his life.” Martin asked the boy his name. Demond, the kid told him. “I was just trying to let him know you can have whatever you want to have. I know sometimes coming from this neighborhood it seems like you can never climb out. But I told him, ‘I grew up two streets over. I’m from here just like you are.’”

Memphis Rox offers lessons for climbers so they can learn how to use the equipment. Many people who come to the gym have never tried rock climbing before. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine

***

On a recent afternoon, two young women were getting ready for their first class. Anna Blount, 20, said they had seen friends posting shots from the gym on social media, which inspired them to make a trip to “a random part of town.” Their instructor, Siron Muhammad, quickly explained the nonprofit mission and the reason why it was located here. “Cool!” Blount said. On the other side of the gym, Mylisa Weir watched her 7-year-old son Terrence Jones giggle as he tried and failed to scramble up a tough route on the bouldering wall. Terrence insisted he had some prior experience. “I’ve been climbing before,” he said, “on my mama’s wall.”

When the gym is full on a weekday afternoon, it’s easy to see its success as a given. But there was definitely some anxiety among the staff going in.

“I was nervous,” said Justin Casey, the director of finance for the gym. For one, there was a concern about how the gym would create a safe space without making the security overbearing. Casey, 35, grew up in Little Rock, where gang problems led to metal detectors in many schools. At Memphis Rox, the security is there in the form of cameras, lighting and a guard, but all of it fades into the background. “We don’t want [people] to walk in and automatically feel they’re being judged,” he said.

Top: Shelby County Commissioner Mickell Lowery. Bottom left: Malcolm Hawkins, a waiter at Soulsville's famous soul food restaurant, The Four Way. Bottom right: Dr. Charles Santo, a University of Memphis professor who studied poverty and creativity in Soulsville, and helped start the Memphis Slim Collaboratory. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine

But there was another, deeper worry: Would this be sustainable? “You have this white guy putting all of this money into the community,” Casey said. “You never know how it’s going to be received.” And he wasn’t sure how the unusual fee model would work. There’s no pressure to pay when you walk in the front door, although staffers consider “free” to be a four-letter word. So the question isn’t: How are you going to pay? But rather: How would you like to access the gym? Some people pay full price: $12 for an adult day pass. Others give a donation. Others earn their way in by signing up to be mentors. Others volunteer their time, like the women who show up early to clean the gym, and then go on to use the workout equipment upstairs. Casey hoped to have 300 paying memberships, at $55, sold by the end of the first year. They had 500 by the third month, and are now on pace to hit 800 by their first anniversary. Casey has stopped worrying as much.

The money to cover the gym’s $1.5 million yearly operating budget won’t come from just memberships. “There’s a misconception that your founder is a movie director and you have an endless amount of money. No, we don’t,” said Reggie Davis, executive director of One Family Memphis, the nonprofit that operates the gym and handles its fundraising. That fundraising will always be a part of Memphis Rox’s revenue stream. The more the story of Memphis Rox gets out, Shadyac said, the more likely it is that people from further away will feel compelled to help. After all, it worked for St. Jude Hospital.

The gym is also putting people from the neighborhood to work, many of whom have never held a job. Workers at Memphis Rox start $12 an hour—conspicuously higher than the city’s actual $7.25 minimum wage—and many start earning more quickly. “Yes, they need Jesus,” Davis, an ordained minister, said of Soulsville’s residents. “But they also need a job.”

The band Shaw Squared is recording music at Memphis Slim House, a space for musicians across the street from the Stax Museum. The space was created in order to help reinvigorate the musical culture of Soulsville for a new generation of artists. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine

The gym is just the beginning, say Davis, Casey, and Hawk. Soon, they’ll break ground on a Best Buy Teen Tech Center a block away down McLemore Avenue, which will help kids from the neighborhood learn the skills they need for jobs in technology. One Family Memphis also plans to open a pay-as-you-can restaurant in the other building that Shadyac bought next door. A film studio is in the works there as well. “You hear more people talking about Soulsville, Soulsville, Soulsville,” says Shelby County Commissioner Mickell Lowery, who says other neighborhoods have been inspired to start creating energetic gathering places of their own.

But for now, the inside of Memphis Rox functions as Shadyac envisioned it. It’s a safe place. It gets kids thinking about what’s possible, rather than what isn’t. Memphis Rox hasn’t solved Soulsville’s biggest problems. But it’s a start. “I’m a person that believes that all stories end well,” Shadyac says. “If a story hasn’t ended well, it’s not the end of the story.”

Demond Jackson’s story didn’t end after he got shot in the aftermath of a fight at a party. Recently, he got up from a table in a relatively quiet part of a loud, busy gym, and pulled up his black polo shirt to show the small scar from the bullet. Demond had spent almost two months in the hospital, and Martin visited him regularly, bringing him books and a signed card from everybody at the gym. Most important, he stayed to talk. “Gave me love,” Demond says.

Natalie Hurst, a 36-year-old resident of Memphis, has become more familiar with Soulsville thanks to the inclusive sense of community the gym has helped to foster. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine

A group of teens practice climbing. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine

The gym also gave him climbing shoes. “First time I saw him climb, I was teary-eyed a little bit,” Martin said. “I didn’t think he was gonna walk.” Demond was soon learning to boulder as well as anyone else at the gym. He joined the climbing team. He got over the weird looks from friends who didn’t understand. “People my color, they think it’s boring.” He doesn’t care. Climbing has taken over Demond’s life. “I have no charges, anything, under my name,” he said. “I have my life. I’m gonna keep it that way.”

Recently, Demond walked over to one of the toughest routes on the bouldering wall, gave it a look, and rubbed some chalk on his hands. Then he moved, almost effortlessly, diagonally and upward, reaching up, lunging, and pushing off. Half a minute later, he reached the top, a lot quicker than anyone thought.