Elizabeth Avery Meriwether

Her suffrage work sat beside a harder record. After the war her husband Minor, who had served under Nathan Bedford Forrest, worked with Forrest to establish the Ku Klux Klan in Memphis, and an early organizational meeting took place in Elizabeth's kitchen. She called an earlier sale of land to free the family's slaves her abolitionist stand, though she later accepted a household slave as a gift from her brother. She used that claim to win back her seized girlhood home and so to register to vote in 1872. Her books idealized the Confederate cause.

What the plaque says

Elizabeth Avery Meriwether 1824-1917 Born in Bolivar, Elizabeth Meriwether spent much of her life in Memphis. A noted author, her more famous works include The Master of Red Leaf, Black and White, and Recollections of 92 Years. Mrs. Meriwether toured many states lecturing in support of woman suffrage and was granted the right to vote in the election of 1872.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beale Street — 0.5 mi
  The street that became the center of Black Memphis after the Civil War, home to Church's Park, W. C. Handy, Ida B. Wells and the blues, now a National Historic Landmark district.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 0.9 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.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 1.0 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.
• Sun Studio — 1.1 mi
  The small Union Avenue room where Sam Phillips recorded Rocket 88, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and the Million Dollar Quartet, now a National Historic Landmark.

More markers nearby

• Virginia ("Ginnie") Bethel Moon 1844-1926 — steps away
• The Sultana Disaster — steps away
• The Memphis Daily Appeal — steps away
• Piggly Wiggly — steps away