Sara Roberta Church 1914-1995

Roberta Church took up a fight her family had lost. In 1940 the Crump organization pushed her father, Robert R. Church Jr., out of Republican leadership and seized his property. After he died in 1952 she ran in his place and became the first African American woman on the Republican State Executive Committee. Eisenhower appointed her Minority Groups Consultant at the Labor Department in 1953, working with companies on fair employment practices, and Nixon named her to the President's Advisory Council on Adult Education in 1970. She later co-wrote histories of her family and of Memphis families of color.

What the plaque says

Sara Roberta Church 1914-1995 In 1952, Roberta Church became the first black woman in Memphis to be elected to public office and to the Tennessee Republican State Executive Committee. She served as an official in the administrations of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon. In 1987, Church was the first woman and the first Black named Senior Citizen of the Year by the Kiwanis Club of Memphis. The daughter of Republican leader Robert R. Church, Jr., and the granddaughter of Robert R. Church, Sr., her death ended three generations of Churches who were economically, politically and socially active in Memphis.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beale Street — 0.2 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 — 0.6 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 — 0.6 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 — 0.7 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

• Church Park — steps away
• Mary Church Terrell — steps away
• Nat D. Williams — steps away
• Rufus Thomas, Jr. — steps away