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On May 1-2, 1866, Memphis suffered its worst race riot in history. Some forty-six African Americans and two whites died during the riot. A Joint Congressional Committee reported seventy-five persons injured, one hundred persons robbed, five women raped, ninety-one homes…

The newest music museum in Tennessee, the Memphis Rock 'n' Soul Museum, opened in 2000. Located in the Beale Street Entertainment District on the second floor of the Gibson Guitar Factory, the museum features six galleries. The primary installation is…

When African American sanitation workers in Memphis began a strike on February 12, 1968, few then suspected the walkout would escalate into one of the climactic struggles of the civil rights and labor movements of the 1960s. By the time…

The Memphis University School dates to September 1893, when E. S. Werts and J. W. S. Rhea founded the school with seven students and high hopes. The school opened in a city recovering from successive bouts of yellow fever and…

Launched in 1931 by the Southern Newspaper Syndicate as a tri-weekly under the editorial direction of Lewis O. Swingler (1906-1962), the World later claimed to be the "South's Oldest and Leading Colored Semi-Weekly Newspaper." Though the World emphasized racial pride,…

As soon as the first proposal to build a transcontinental railroad reached Congress in 1845, Memphis area leaders launched a campaign to become the Mississippi terminus. Their city was neither as old nor as powerful as New Orleans or St.…

Though the two groups of Mennonites in Tennessee share a religious background, only one functions as a distinct cultural and ethnic community. As Anabaptists, they trace their roots to the radical wing of the Protestant Reformation, and nearly all are…

The Meriwether Lewis National Monument, located along the Natchez Trace Parkway in Lewis County, was designated in 1925 by the federal government to mark the grave of Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809), a Virginian who was one of the coleaders of the…

Tennessee suffragist, temperance activist, publisher, and author Elizabeth Avery Meriwether was born in Bolivar on January 19, 1824. Her father Nathan Avery was a physician and farmer, while her mother Rebecca Rivers Avery was the daughter of a Virginia planter.…

A leader of the first generation of southern feminists and social activists, Lide Smith Meriwether was president of the Tennessee Woman's Christian Temperance Union, serving from 1884 until 1897, and then as honorary president for life. Having organized the first…

In 1788 North Carolina established a Superior Court district to serve the Cumberland frontier. The district was named in honor of the Spanish governor of Louisiana, Esteban Rodrigues Miro, who had served with Spanish troops assisting the Americans during the…

John A. Merritt, one of Tennessee's most successful football coaches, was born on January 26, 1926, in Falmouth, Kentucky, the son of a stonemason, Bradley Merritt and his wife, Grace. After completing grade school, he moved to Louisville to live…

Tennessee's eighth largest private employer, with 7,900 workers in the Memphis area and West Tennessee, Methodist Health Care, Memphis, is headquartered on Union Avenue in downtown Memphis. Founded by John M. Sherard in 1918, the Methodist Hospital in Memphis has…

The Metropolitan Government of Nashville/Davidson County created the Metropolitan Human Relations Commission in 1965 during a period of heightened racial tensions in the community and the nation. Composed of fifteen persons representative of the various social, economic, religious, cultural, ethnic,…

In 1846 the United States went to war with Mexico as a result of a boundary dispute fueled by an American expansionist desire to control the entire North American continent. With an army of fewer than 9,000, a number wholly…

Located in Murfreesboro, Middle Tennessee State University was created by the General Education Bill of 1909 and dedicated on September 11, 1911, as Middle Tennessee State Normal School. Many local residents joined President Robert L. Jones, the faculty, staff, and…

Born in Memphis on July 4, 1942, the Reverend Harold Middlebrook was a friend of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. and an active member of the civil rights movement. Middlebrook received his bachelor’s degree from Atlanta’s Morehouse College…

This important munitions facility was created in October 1945 by the combination of the Wolf Creek Ordnance Plant and the Milan Ordnance Depot. The combined physical plant of the two installations includes 88 miles of railroad track and 231 miles…

Emma Bell Miles, artist, naturalist, and author of The Spirit of the Mountains (1905) as well as poems, stories, and essays, was born in Evansville, Indiana, on October 19, 1879, to schoolteachers Benjamin Franklin and Martha Ann Mirick Bell. She…

The builder of Milky Way Farm, Franklin C. Mars, was the founder of Mars Candies Incorporated, maker of the famous Milky Way candy bar for which the estate was named. Mars and his wife, Ethel V. Mars, came to Tennessee…