Hollis Freeman Price, Sr.

Price took over a school with abolitionist roots. In 1870 Dr. Francis Julius LeMoyne, a Pennsylvania doctor whose house had been a stop on the Underground Railroad, gave $20,000 to the American Missionary Association for a freedmen's school in Memphis. It opened October 1, 1871, on Orleans Street, and three of its small faculty died in the 1870s fever. Price, a founding member of the United Negro College Fund, became president in 1943. Owen Junior College, opened by Baptists in 1954 and named for the Rev. Samuel Augustus Owen, merged with it in 1968.

What the plaque says

Hollis Freeman Price, Sr. 1904-1982 Hollis Price was the first African-American president of LeMoyne College. In 1968, he guided the college's merger with Owen Junior College. Price was the president of the college for 27 years and upon his retirement became president emeritus. He was the first African-American national moderator of the United Church of Christ, the denomination's highest lay position. In 1975, Price was the first Black to receive the Brotherhood Award from the Memphis National Conference of Christians and Jews. He was among the first three Blacks inducted into the Memphis Rotary Club.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stax Museum of American Soul Music — 0.4 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 — 0.5 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.
• Sun Studio — 1.4 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.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 1.5 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.

More markers nearby

• The 1960 Memphis Sit-In Movement — steps away
• LeMoyne-Owen College — steps away
• People's Grocery — steps away
• Dr. Joseph Edison Walker — 0.2 mi