Memphis Tennessee Carter's parents had been enslaved in Virginia before making their way to West Virginia, where her father became a coal miner in the Southern coalfields. They named their daughter for the city they had left, an act of memory that turned a place of suffering into a personal genealogy carried in their daughter's name throughout her life. The name was unusual enough that it stuck in people's minds. Memphis Tennessee Carter eventually became Memphis Tennessee Garrison through marriage. She was a fierce educator who taught generations of African American students in West Virginia schools during the segregated era, when teaching itself was a form of activism. She helped found the West Virginia State Teachers Association branch and became its first female officer.

Garrison led the Huntington branch of the NAACP during decades when that role meant constant work, occasional danger, and minimal institutional support. The NAACP organized voter registration, legal cases against discrimination, anti-lynching campaigns, and the slow, patient civil rights work that built toward the larger national movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Branch leaders like Garrison did the grinding daily organizing that kept the national organization viable. She was personally connected to the broader civil rights leadership of her era. The Cancer Crusade campaign that she helped pioneer in 1932 became a national model for fundraising within Black communities. Her work earned her the NAACP's Madame C. J. Walker Gold Medal.

Garrison taught at Gary High School in McDowell County and at the Douglass High School in Huntington - the segregated institution where the future NBA Hall of Famer Hal Greer would later study. Teaching Black students in West Virginia in the early-to-mid twentieth century was both vocation and resistance. Per-pupil funding for Black schools was a fraction of what white schools received. Textbooks were often hand-me-downs or worse. The American Teachers Association, where Garrison served as vice-president, brought together teachers from segregated schools across the country to advocate for their students, share resources, and form professional networks that operated outside the all-white National Education Association. Her work positioned her at the intersection of education, civil rights, and the broader effort to make American democracy actually function for Black citizens.

Garrison moved into the modest two-story frame house at 1701 10th Avenue around 1948, when she was 58. She lived there until her death forty years later, in 1988, at age 97. The house was not grand. It was the home of a Black professional woman who had spent her career as a teacher, and it reflects that economic reality. What gives the building its historical significance is not its architecture but its association with Garrison's life and work during the post-war decades when her activism continued well into her seventies and eighties. Visiting civil rights leaders and local organizers passed through. Letters were written. Meetings were held. The mundane infrastructure of long-running activist work occupied these rooms for decades.

The Memphis Tennessee Garrison House was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2017, formally recognizing its significance for the African American history of West Virginia. The plan to convert it into a museum honoring Garrison is in progress, with local organizations working to preserve the structure and develop interpretive exhibits about her life and work. When complete, the museum will join the small but growing number of preserved sites honoring Black women's contributions to American civil rights. Garrison was not Rosa Parks. She was not Fannie Lou Hamer. She was a steady, decades-long local leader whose work made the broader movement possible. The house preserves that local-level history at the place where so much of it happened.