Centenary United Methodist Church

The pastor who arrived in 1962 had already paid for his convictions. James Lawson refused military service as a college freshman, served 13 months of a two-year sentence, then studied Gandhi's satyagraha as a missionary in India. In Nashville he trained students, among them Diane Nash and John Lewis, and Vanderbilt expelled him in March 1960 over his arrests; it apologized in 2006. In Memphis in 1968 he chaired the strike committee, helped found the Committee on the Move to Equality, and invited King to speak.

What the plaque says

Centenary United Methodist Church In 1865 Methodist Episcopal Church North established Centenary school and church in south Memphis. During the 1866 Memphis Massacre, rioters burned Centenary's frame church on South Street, but congregants rebuilt it in 1867. Pastor Dr. H. W. Key, a Union spy during the Civil War and Reconstruction era activist, raised the funds for a brick church in 1907. A new edifice was built on Mississippi Boulevard in 1921, where seven years later members formed Memphis' first African American Boy Scout troop. In 1935, Pastor Dr. H. B. Gibson, led a local fight for voting rights. Continued. Centenary was a Civil Rights Movement center, especially once leading nonviolent strategist, Dr. James M. Lawson, became pastor in 1962. He held workshops and planned marches at the church. The decision to continue James Meredith's march through Mississippi was made at this site. In 1967, the Centenary congregation moved to a new East McLemore Avenue location where Dr. Lawson led the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike and called on the Rev. Dr. Martin L. King, Jr. to assist. King's assassination in April 1968 brought national attention to Centenary.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stax Museum of American Soul Music — 0.6 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 — 0.9 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.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 1.4 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 — 1.5 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.

More markers nearby

• Archbishop James P. Lyke — 0.3 mi
• Dr. Joseph Edison Walker — 0.3 mi
• People's Grocery — 0.3 mi
• Willie Mitchell's Royal Studios — 0.4 mi