Bishop Charles Harrison Mason

Mason's church grew out of a quarrel. He and Charles Price Jones began as partners in a Holiness association, but after Mason visited the interracial Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles in 1907 and came home believing in speaking in tongues, Jones and J. A. Jeter excommunicated him. Court fights over the Church of God in Christ name ran from 1908 to 1911. In September 1907 Mason and his allies met in Memphis and organized a Pentecostal denomination, with Mason as general overseer. White ministers were ordained until a group left in 1914 to form the Assemblies of God.

What the plaque says

Bishop Charles Harrison Mason 1862-1961 Bishop C.H. Mason founded the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) in the late 1890s. Born a slave near Bartlett, Tennessee, Mason served as Senior Bishop of the denomination from 1907 until his death in 1961. By the time of his death, COGIC had become one of the largest African-American denominations in the world with churches all over the United States, in Africa, Mexico, Bermuda, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Mason is entombed in Mason Temple in Memphis.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 0.9 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 1.0 mi
  The Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968, kept as a museum of the civil rights movement from the nineteenth century to today.
• Stax Museum of American Soul Music — 1.1 mi
  A rebuilt Stax studio on the site of the old Capitol Theatre, with a replica of the sloped-floor Studio A, Isaac Hayes's Cadillac and the story of an integrated soul label.
• Elmwood Cemetery — 1.2 mi
  Memphis's oldest active cemetery, a rural garden cemetery of about 1,500 trees opened in 1852, with Black civic leaders, yellow fever victims and the city's whole history in its lots.

More markers nearby

• Martin Stadium — 0.3 mi
• Lucie Eddie Campbell — 0.5 mi
• Centenary United Methodist Church — 0.5 mi
• People's Grocery — 0.6 mi