The Memphis Daily Appeal

The Appeal that fled Memphis in 1862 was a Confederate paper, and its editor Benjamin Dill was among the war's most wanted Confederates. Its successor, the Commercial Appeal, won a 1923 Pulitzer Prize for its stand against the Ku Klux Klan. The record is mixed. In 1868 the paper ran Albert Pike's article that criticized the Klan's methods but praised its aim of white supremacy, and in 1917 it published the scheduled time and place of the lynching of Ell Persons.

What the plaque says

The Memphis Daily Appeal From this spot press and type of the Appeal were loaded on a freight car at Main & Madison in early morning, June 6, 1862, just before a naval battle. This paper kept the journalistic flag of the Confederacy flying from Grenada, Miss., then Jackson, Meridian, Atlanta & Montgomery until Apr. 6, 1865, when Federal Troops destroyed the type at Columbus, Ga. The press was hidden and used here again, Nov. 5, 1865.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beale Street — 0.4 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.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 0.8 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 — 0.9 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.
• Sun Studio — 1.0 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.

More markers nearby

• Elizabeth Avery Meriwether — steps away
• First Tennessee Bank — steps away
• Virginia ("Ginnie") Bethel Moon 1844-1926 — steps away
• WDIA: The Goodwill Station — steps away