Lucie Eddie Campbell

Campbell's beginnings were unusual. She was born in a railroad caboose at Duck Hill, Mississippi, the youngest of eleven children by one account, and her father, a railroad worker, died in a train accident less than two years later, after which her mother brought the family to Memphis. At fourteen she began teaching at Carnes Grammar School, and she taught at Kortrecht, later Booker T. Washington High, for 44 years. She was the first woman of any race on the federal grand jury in Memphis, and she accompanied Marian Anderson and introduced her to the National Baptist Convention.

What the plaque says

Lucie Eddie Campbell, Educator and Activist (1885-1963) Front: Born in Duck Hill, Mississippi, in 1885, the youngest of seven children, Lucie E. Campbell moved to Memphis and was educated in the Memphis public schools. She graduated as valedictorian from Kortrecht High School (later Booker T. Washington) where she taught for many years. Campbell earned degrees from Rust College and Tennessee AandI State College. A civil justice activist, Campbell also fought to redress the pay scale and benefit inequities for African-American teachers. She became President of the Tennessee Teachers Association and was a long-time leader of the National Baptist Choral Society. Back: As Music Director of the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc., she auditioned Mahalia Jackson and Thomas Dorsey. She was the first woman among early great" African-American gospel music composers, composing Something Within Me in 1919. She composed more than 100 such songs, including He'll Understand and Say Well Done (1933) and In the Upper Room (1947). Campbell died in Nashville on January 3, 1963. Her remains were buried in Memphis' Mount Carmel Cemetery.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 0.8 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 — 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.
• Sun Studio — 0.9 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.
• 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.

More markers nearby

• Martin Stadium — 0.2 mi
• The Mount Nebo Baptist Church — 0.5 mi
• Bishop Charles Harrison Mason — 0.5 mi
• St. John Baptist Church — 0.5 mi