Jerusalem Missionary Baptist Church

The landmark suit of this kind is Pigford v. Glickman. Filed in 1997 by Timothy Pigford and about 400 other Black farmers, it charged the Department of Agriculture with discriminating in loans and assistance from 1981 to 1996 and with ignoring their complaints. A consent decree in April 1999 offered $50,000 awards plus loan forgiveness; of 22,505 applications decided, 13,348 were approved. About $995 million had been paid or credited by 2009, and Congress appropriated roughly $1.2 billion in 2010 for a second round.

What the plaque says

Jerusalem Missionary Baptist Church Jerusalem Missionary Baptist Church, established in 1899, shaped religious and cultural life in Memphis, from its original West Dodd Street site and later from its present site on West Shelby Drive, built in the 1950s. Members marched in the 1968 Sanitation Workers' Strike and attended the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Mountaintop" speech at Mason Temple. Pastor Gifton H. Jones Jr., and Deacon Eddie Smith supported the 1990s landmark lawsuit of African American farmers against discriminatory practices by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Decades of spiritual leadership and social empowerment have left lasting changes in the community.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa — 2.9 mi
  A National Historic Landmark Mississippian mound town on a bluff over the Mississippi, with a university museum, a replica house and a nature trail inside T. O. Fuller State Park.
• Graceland — 5.8 mi
  Elvis Presley's 1939 limestone house in Whitehaven, bought in 1957 and opened as a ticketed museum in 1982, with his grave in the Meditation Garden and a commercial visitor campus around it.
• Stax Museum of American Soul Music — 8.4 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.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 8.6 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

• Chucalissa Indian — 2.9 mi
• Ernest C. Withers House — 3.9 mi
• Elvis Presley's Circle G Ranch — 4.3 mi
• Memphis Minnie — 4.9 mi