Jump On It Organizer NOOK Turner’s 30-Year Fight to Preserve Eastside Black Culture

Charles “NOOK Turner” Byrd’s signature dark shades can’t block the decades of disappointment and frustration underscoring an atypically short response from him: “Nah, it’s gone.”

Blink within city limits and you’ll hear some account of Old Austin’s superiority, but the Eastside’s continued gentrification and its rippling effect on this city’s Black population is indisputable. A proud native of 78702, the rapper/promoter/activist has relentlessly fought for nearly three decades to preserve some of what he calls “the heart of the city” and help foster a stronger Black culture in Austin.

“It’s not a community anymore,” Byrd adds to his previous statement, with a head shake riddled with disgust. “The people are not here, the culture’s not here, the love is not here.

“There’s really no camaraderie. Everything over here now you can tell is about business.” So much so, he contemplates moving away to raise his children “around kids they can relate to,” and boldly suggests dogs receive better treatment than Black people in the once predominantly Black Eastside.

These concerns from one of the Eastside’s most persistent advocates aren’t new. Nor is his refusal to mince words. From frequently speaking before City Council as a teenager in support of building the Millennium Youth Entertainment Complex to organizing his enduring Jump On It event series, he’s done his fair share to try to cultivate a hub for Black youth in Austin. Jump On It, now in its third year as an eight-day affair rather than a weekly summer concert series, will occur June 1-8 across an almost entirely East Austin set of locales. A traditional, full-scale Jump On It event was originally scheduled to emanate from the pavilion at iconic Rosewood Park for the first time since 2002, but late discovery of a noise ordinance forced a last-minute pivot not even 36 hours before this story’s publication. It’ll take more than one unforeseen roadblock to deter the festival in its make-or-break year.

“Jump On It is one of the last standing programs that originated in East Austin,” he says during an exhaustive sit-down inside Austin Public Library’s Carver Branch. “I don’t know of any that started in the Nineties that are still alive and kicking. It’s like, if Jump On It is gone, that’s the final nail in the coffin. That’s why it means so much to me because I don’t wanna let go and I don’t wanna see us lose like that.”

Rebel With a Cause

Born in 1979 on the precipice of the crack epidemic, NOOK and his mother, Sharon Ellerby, moved to the north side Thurmond Heights projects after a car accident severely injured her. She claims her only child, initially nicknamed NOOK in reference to the NUK brand of pacifiers, began reading and writing at age 3. When he tested above level and wasn’t accepted into an Austin ISD preschool, Ellerby used all of her Aid to Families With Dependent Children federal assistance to enroll him in a private school. It both heightened a young Charles Byrd’s intellect and exposed him to racial discrimination. He remembers a teacher kicking him out of class after he spoke up against an adaptation of Othello, which was originally performed by white actors in Blackface.

“When I was in private school, [my mama] bought a book collection of all the Black heroes,” he says. “She made sure that even though I went to private school for the time I went, I was never gonna lose who I was as a Black kid.”

One historical figure in particular resonated with the self-professed “rebellious” individual: Nat Turner. “When I first read his story, it just touched me – that’s who I am,” he says. NOOK became an acronym for “Never Outcasting Our Kind,” and he added Turner to his stage name after Barnes & Noble introduced their NOOK line of tablets in 2009.

Poverty-stricken and separated from his Eastside-based family, NOOK would perform skits when relatives visited him to keep them around as long as possible. When he was an 8-year-old, he loosely joked with his cousin about writing a rap for her wedding. His mom made him follow through on his promise, and the two of them then co-authored his first rap: “Kelly and Stanley.” That watershed moment eventually led to his lifelong bond with hip-hop. “That’s what really let me know that people would listen to me,” he says. “It was just me and my mama, so I was trying to figure out how to have a voice. When I performed and I seen the reception, I was like, 'Yeah, I can do this.’”

Witnessing family members suffer from crack usage and imprisonment, and a CBS special on gun violence in schools, inspired later raps. The compositions proved fruitful for NOOK and his mother: Ellerby eventually transitioned from a resident of the Thurmond Heights projects to managing not just Thurmond Heights, but multiple apartment complexes in Austin. According to NOOK, she cleaned up Meadowbrook Apartments – then nicknamed “Murderbrook” – and other crime-ridden properties. Despite his youthful age, NOOK was brought into several of those properties to perform raps with positive messaging.

“I saw this in him and I really can’t explain other than I felt like this was something God was moving – that it was something he needed to do,” Ellerby, who is now a teacher, says over the phone. “If you would just see his face when he was rapping, it was a force that came with that. It wasn’t just this kid onstage rapping words. He embodied what he was actually rapping about.”

A lot of that passionate tone still glows when her son speaks today. “My message has always been, there’s gotta be something different for us than shit that’s leading us to the graveyard or into prison,” he says. “I would come up with these songs that were anti-drugs, anti-crime, anti-gang violence. I had to learn how to make them relatable because nobody wants to hear an 11-year-old talking about crime, violence, and drugs. I learned how to frame the songs and my speeches to where people didn’t feel like they were ostracized.” According to NOOK, his positivity-pushing rhymes even led to a tour with McGruff the Crime Dog.

NOOK and his mother moved back to the Eastside when he was in eighth grade. While attending Reagan (now Northeast Early College) High School, he played point guard for the basketball team until he lost his love for the game his junior year. He and his cousin, Da’Shade Moonbeam, were also a part of a Raiders generation featuring the likes of fellow Austin rap veterans Anastasia Hera and CasinoATX. He and Moonbeam helped usher in a lunchtime cypher session at the school called Freestyle Fellowship.

Reclaim Our Thang

Deep history and generations of memories run through 2300 Rosewood Avenue’s 13.9 acres. The city of Austin purchased the Bertram-Huppertz homestead in 1928 as part of its master plan to institutionally segregate the Texas capital, with Black people relegated to east of I-35. Rosewood Avenue Park and Playground for the Colored opened a year later as Austin’s first public space for Black people. Dating back to 1930, Rosewood Park has hosted the annual Central Texas Juneteenth Festival.

In response to increasing crime rates in the Nineties, promoter/musician Lloyd Ellison organized the third edition of his Turn Your Back on Violence event at Doris Miller Auditorium, located on the park grounds, in July 1996. Nearly 30 years later, Ellison shows off the event’s original, slightly faded yellow flyer to highlight two key details: “N.O.O.K.” performed, and prominent local civil rights activist Dorothy Turner (no relation) was in attendance as a special guest. Ellison hoped some of the event’s entertainers would connect with community leaders, and it’s at this occasion that Dorothy Turner gave her citywide call for jurisdiction over Rosewood Park. Dorothy Turner, nicknamed “Miss T” by NOOK, recognized gentrification’s effect early on Black activity and sought to rekindle it at the park. According to NOOK, the call also came not too long after the park’s Juneteenth celebration was canceled one year. Ellerby says she and her son were the only ones who responded to her call.

“When Juneteenth didn’t happen, I was gutted, because that’s what I [would] look forward to the whole year,” NOOK says – the celebration allowed him to connect with his friends from the other side of town. “Before my time, there was an event here called Jam City. It used to be filmed on public access and all the teenagers and [kids] used to go to Jam City and dance, like Austin Soul Train. My mom used to always be like, 'It’d be live to bring Jam City back [at] Rosewood.’ I used to always be like, 'It’d be dope if we could make Rosewood packed like Juneteenth used to be.’ When Dorothy Turner put out the call, I was so quick to talk to her and say, 'Hey, I want to do something,’ because I had a few years of seeds planted of me wanting to see Rosewood back how it was.”

Heading into his senior year of high school, he started working alongside his mentor on what would eventually become the Jump On It summer concert series. His mom coined the “Jump On It” name as a rally “to jump on the bandwagon of reclaiming your community.” The Reagan alum says Dorothy Turner, known for her unrelenting and at times polarizing nature, helped make the event’s first year happen by camping out at the city manager’s office until IOUs were paid. Her handling of legal matters allowed him to focus on community outreach and gathering together his friends to perform at the concert series. For 12 Wednesdays during the summer of 1997, NOOK and a committee of buddies curated free concerts at Rosewood Park’s pavilion. When attendance ballooned into the thousands after the first year, the event moved to the park’s baseball field.

Mindful of his Never Outcasting Our Kind name, he didn’t want his event to come across as a super conscious, preachy type of occasion. Instead, he wanted Black people of all backgrounds to come and feel like their authentic selves at a centralized location, a concept he says is still rare in Austin today. At the time, he defended his decision to book rappers with explicit subject matter because those were the type of artists much of the youth listened to. Sets were curse-free, with performers often engaging in meet-and-greets and Q&As to give the youthful audience some “game” to walk home with. During Jump On It’s early years, NOOK was able to attract Southern hip-hop artists such as E.S.G., Ying Yang Twins, Yukmouth, and Z-Ro to Rosewood Park. Plies, Trae Tha Truth, Trina, and Webbie performed in later eras, and raunchy rapper Sukihana headlined the night concert at last year’s Lake Festival, which is now Jump On It Week’s main ticketed music experience.

Eventually, Jump On It became a community tradition. NOOK vividly remembers a group of men staging a funeral for him because he had to cancel one week. “The rumors started that [I] died because that’s the only thing people could imagine, that something had to [have happened to me],” he says. He even went to the venue. “It was fucked up for me, just sitting in the car and looking at that shit,” he recalls. “Had a flyer out and everything.”

By the early Aughts, NOOK was on his own. Dorothy Turner passed away from cancer in April 2005, and most of the friends who helped him present the weekly concert series stepped away long before that after realizing how much work and politicking it required.

“When [Dorothy] passed, I realized I had to focus on the fight and keeping this shit alive... It’ll kill you,” he says, motioning to his stomach. “That’s why I don’t look like I played basketball. Every year after Jump On It ended, I was rushed to the hospital. Every year. Asthma attacks, steroids, medical issues. I really gave my life basically to keep this stuff going. It’s been an uphill situation, and we still in an uphill situation where we got this huge event we’re promoting and every year we still have monetary deficits. I always have to go all the way down to the wire.”

Around 2002, NOOK alleges the city attempted to sabotage him with a rogue assistant before putting him under a “bullshit investigation” when two companies claimed he failed to pay them for their services. The investigation led not only to a forfeiture of a grant expected to help fund the following year’s event, but forcible displacement from Rosewood Park. He alleges that the same assistant put in place to disrupt him then received a mini-grant to run the “Rosewood at the Park” series in its place. Once concertgoers realized the ChatGPT-sounding imitation was missing much of the beloved programming synonymous with Jump On It, attendance plummeted.

NOOK doesn’t give a concrete reason for why this questionable chain of events happened, but concedes his style of conflict resolution – similar to killing an ant with a sledgehammer – understandably ruffled some feathers. He says the investigation ultimately found no wrongdoing.

(Author’s note: The Chronicle couldn’t reach the alleged assistant in question for comment on this story.)

A sliver of Jump On It’s venue history since 2003 reveals just how scattershot it’s been since it left its first home. Long-shuttered Red River nightclub Spiros hosted the full summer series in 2003, then one-off concerts from 2006-2008 occurred at three different locations. Givens Park hosted a well-attended full series in 2016 and 2017, and NOOK ventured as far as New Braunfels in 2022 to launch the Fat Gator Weekend at Texas Ski Ranch. He’s only failed to host a Jump On It-promoted event of some kind in just two years during its loosely connected run: 2009 and 2011. He claims attendance in its first years at Rosewood unfathomably hovered between 3,000 and 5,000 on average, with a peak of 10,000. The reimagined Jump On It Week has averaged roughly 1,000 attendees during its first two iterations.

Black Culture 360

NOOK reformatted the festival into its current eight-day format in 2023, championing a “Black Culture 360” motto to encompass more than music. Its first two years suffered from confusing promotion on top of Austin’s declining Black population, but this year he’s put more effort into making its overall structure more clear.

The She a Pro Conference, hosted by longtime Love & Hip-Hop: Atlanta star Rasheeda, sets the tone for Jump On It Week 2025 on June 1. In lieu of standard panels, the conference features an awards show and a private luncheon with Rasheeda and Austin-based female entrepreneurs. By offering everyday women the chance to connect with professional businesswomen, NOOK says the event furthers his original mission of bringing people from different worlds together.

“I wanna do something for the females that gives them [empowerment],” he says. “I didn’t want to ostracize the ones who may not do what you say is conventional. I ain’t here to judge you. I’m just saying whatever you do, be the best at what you do and be a better you.”

NOOK says the festival unexpectedly lost roughly $60,000 in anticipated funding from organizations impacted by DEI-related budget cuts, with one major sponsor reducing their support by $40,000 just this month. Suddenly in a greater-than-expected deficit just days before the festival, NOOK and his board opted in a May 27 meeting to cancel a free event planned around further conceptualizing an Austin Black Embassy, which the city vowed to invest in in 2021, and a citywide scavenger hunt for information on local Black history. The Embassy discussion and scavenger hunt are being rescheduled for Aug. 6, which falls on the last day of the city-proclaimed Jump On It Week (awarded for July 31 - August 6, 2023).

“We want to find some land and basically build an embassy there and we own it,” NOOK says. “I told [City Manager T.C. Broadnax] my thing is, the community has to own it. We have a board, a development company, all that. We’re just waiting for the city to allocate the funding and land for it.” He hopes Broadnax, who earlier this month reached one year into his tenure as just the second ever Black Austin city manager, will help actualize his ambitious Black Embassy vision once he better familiarizes himself with this city’s history.

(Author’s note: The Chronicle couldn’t reach City Manager T.C. Broadnax for comment on this story.)

City of Austin noise ordinances pertaining to outdoor events within 600 feet of a residential property stipulate an 8pm cutoff for amplified sound Sunday through Thursday. That cutoff is extended to 10pm on Fridays and Saturdays. Unaware of those regulations, NOOK booked the free, all-ages Community Day On June 4 at Rosewood Park’s pavilion with a desire to channel some of Jump On It’s classic, summertime Wednesday night energy. He says the city just emailed him last week to warn about the ordinance despite consistently expressing clear intentions to operate until 10pm, thus forcing a makeshift hybrid event utilizing the park’s outdoor space and Doris Miller Auditorium. This ordeal concludes another episode in the long-running soap opera starring Charles Byrd and the city of Austin’s ensemble cast.

“When we apply for something, they won’t notify us if there’s any changes until the last minute,” he says during a May 27 phone call. “If they’d told us [about the ordinance] upfront, we would’ve just went to the Millennium like we did last year. We thought 10[pm] was good, they signed off on it. All that stuff was supposed to be good, and then it wasn’t. That’s a recurrence of what I’ve always dealt with.”

Sacramento-based rapper OMB Peezy headlines inside the gymnasium, with support from Austin’s most-streamed rapper Quin NFN and NOOK himself. Vendors and previously planned activities like free barbecue will be available outside across the park. He won’t pack the pavilion like old times, but still hopes – and expects – to send a message by filling Rosewood Park’s grounds with Black activity outside of a holiday.

“I really want white people in particular to see that we not going nowhere,” he says back at the library. “We gonna figure out how to build and we gotta figure out how to coexist. You realize you’re moving into where we were? I’m tired of us being a relic or a ghost. When it comes to Black people on the Eastside, it’s always 'Black people were here.’ We always 'were the past.’ I don’t wanna be the past. I wanna say that we still here.”

Huston-Tillotson University will host a free Austin vs. Killeen celebrity basketball game MC’d by comedian Omar Gooding on June 5. Fat Gator Weekend then rounds out the festival. Held on June 7 at Northeast Austin’s Walter E. Long Park, Dallas rapper Dorrough (“Ice Cream Paint Job”) kicks off the Louisiana and Texas-themed Fat Gator Lake Festival with a “sneakers & slabs” afternoon car show, followed by a pool party with Texas rappers Big Jade and Erica Banks. Baton Rouge MC Fredo Bang (“Top”) – who headlined the first, sold-out Fat Gator Music Festival in 2022 at Texas Ski Ranch – headlines the Lake Festival’s night concert, with support again coming from Quin NFN and NOOK himself. For Quin NFN, it’s a performance on the biggest stage in his backyard of 78724.

Passes for all ticketed events can either be purchased individually via the official Jump On It website, or attendees can buy a festival pass covering every ticketed event sans the She a Pro private luncheon. Tickets for the private luncheon, which run for $150, must be purchased separately from the full festival pass.

Bread City Hustle

Festivals put together by rappers close to their stomping grounds have become commonplace in the last decade, from J. Cole’s Dreamville Fest in Raleigh to Lil Wayne’s Lil Weezyana in New Orleans to Tyler, the Creator’s Camp Flog Gnaw in Los Angeles. All of those artists are revered local heroes whose music blew up years before starting their own events. There was no template on artist-curated festivals in 1997, way before the 2023 Austin Hip Hop Honors Awards recognized NOOK’s contributions to the local hip-hop scene. Jump On It was one of the first of its kind. NOOK says he put his music on the back burner and avoided collaborating with the artists he brought to town – most of whom only knew him as “Charles” from their contract – to avoid looking selfish. An eye-opening conversation with the late BeatKing in 2022 made him truly understand he was operating incorrectly.

“He’s like, 'Man, what are you doing?’” he remembers the Houstonian asking him. “'You’re supposed to blow your music up and then make your festival around you. Then you don’t have to worry about trying to get money and stuff because they already rock with you.’ So he kind of planted that seed.”

NOOK’s wife and co-organizer, Breanna, chuckles when her husband smirks after hearing that he went more than a decade without dropping a studio album. Last year he released The Hustle, his first full-length since 2012 release Million Dollar Grind. The Hustle contains features from Day 1s (Moonbeam, MsDemeanor) and previous Jump On It guests (Boosie Badazz, MO3, Big Jade) alike. It offers a mixed bag of themes: a catchy Longhorn rallying cry (“Texas Baby”) some will prematurely suggest copies BigXthaPlug’s “Texas,” an Auto-Tune-heavy song about avoiding the law (“On One”), and a go-getter cut encapsulating his current economics-driven mindset featuring the aforementioned Badazz (“Make Money”). NOOK says the project’s two standout tracks, “Amazing” and “Overnight Success,” still make him tear up because of their messaging.

“Amazing” contains a couple controversial lines about Black people being enslaved to capitalism and the need to understand the meaning of true freedom. The track ends with an outro in which he pays respect to “all the fallen soldiers in every city around the world that deal with white supremacy.” “I just feel like we’ve been lied to as people and it’s one thing to be lied to, but it’s another thing to buy the lie, live by the lie, and die by the lie,” he clarifies. “If we walk around here like we free and it’s all good, we just have rude awakenings all the time. George Floyd shouldn’t have been a rude awakening, but it was. Everything is a rude awakening because we walk around like we’re on a different level than what we are instead of actually getting to that level. I just feel like we’re at the point where we gotta stop complaining and being shocked when evil people do evil shit. I think we have to start preparing and learning how to move in a proactive, positive manner.”

“Police been putting their knee in our necks. They been beating our ass. But now it’s on national news.”

“Overnight Success,” employing a pensive piano melody, features the most personal storytelling of NOOK’s entire career. He says all of the track’s claims are true: his father relatively gave “all he had” even though his mother raised him, he gained local popularity for music while in high school, the 9/11 terrorist attacks ruined meetings with four record labels in Los Angeles, and MO3’s tragic death occurred one week before the Dallas MC could record his verse to their “Put Ya Hustle 1st” collaboration.

The Hustle introduces the concept of Bread City, a far cry from repping the “Crooked A” on his earlier mixtapes. To him, Bread City represents a place of financial freedom where its residents are metaphorically fed with ease of mind. “I’m trying to get people in a frame of mind of whatever you’re doing in your personal life, make it to whatever your definition of Bread City is,” he says. “Like Nat Turner led people to freedom for that little short period of time, I’m trying to do an insurrection against not necessarily white people, but against the things that keep Black people from thriving. My insurrection is more of, we gonna destroy everything that keeps us from having a high quality of life.”

Still Thriving ... and Surviving

Despite his unpleasant history dealing with the city of Austin government over the years, the city has financially supported Jump On It to varying extents – though no more than 70%, he says – since its inception. This year marks the second time he’s received the city-issued Thrive grant, which provides between $85,000 and $150,000 per year for a two-year contract – to the alleged envy of some of his Black peers, “because we gotta fight for the crumbs.” Still, he says that $100,000 grant didn’t cover even half of the 2025 event’s initial budget. He’s personally in the hole for tens of thousands with Jump On It, and it’s once again a mad-dash scramble to raise the requisite money to make this year’s event happen.

NOOK stayed up until 6am the night before this sit-down attempting to work Meta Pixel. If you’ve seen a yard sign promoting Jump On It Week somewhere out east these past two months, he personally put those up in the wee hours of the night while his street team – yes, a street team in 2025 – was out of town. As preposterous as this seems, he claims he and his wife each spend 80-100 hours weekly making Jump On It a reality. During this revelatory, comprehensive April conversation, totaling almost four hours, battle wounds repeatedly reopen because they’ve never had a chance to fully heal.

Yet when plainly asked to recount his favorite memory of Jump On It throughout its entire run, NOOK offers another surprisingly succinct answer:

“It’s more positive than negative because when you stand onstage and you see a sea of people that look like you and they’re all enjoying themselves, it makes it all worth it.”

Simple as that?

“Yeah.”

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Jump On It returns to venues throughout Austin June 1-8.