Malcolm Rice Patterson

Patterson is remembered as one of the most controversial governors in Tennessee history, and one pardon explains why. In November 1908 his adviser Duncan Cooper, editor of the Nashville American, and Cooper's son Robin met the prohibitionist editor Edward Ward Carmack on a Nashville street, and Robin killed Carmack in the gunfight. In 1910 Patterson pardoned both Coopers. Prohibitionists accused him of conspiracy, the Democratic Party split, and he declined a third term. Earlier, in 1909, he had put down the Night Riders of Reelfoot Lake.

What the plaque says

Malcolm Rice Patterson 1865-1935 A native of Somerville, Alabama, Patterson moved to Memphis with his parents in 1872. Educated at Christian Brothers College and Vanderbilt University, he was admitted to the bar in 1883. From 1894 to 1900 he served as attorney-general for Shelby County. A three-term congressman from the old Tenth District, he was the state's third governor from West Tennessee, serving two terms (1907- 11), and was from 1923 until 1934 judge of Division of the Circuit Court of Memphis.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beale Street — 0.6 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.
• 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.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 1.1 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 — 1.1 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

• Eugene Magevney — steps away
• Forrest's Early Home — steps away
• Josiah T. Settle 1850-1915 — steps away
• Piggly Wiggly — steps away