Qualla: Memphis Tennessee Garrison House

Memphis Tennessee Garrison House: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Her parents named her Memphis Tennessee Carter after the city in Tennessee - a name likely tied to family connections in Memphis, where her aunt worked as a teacher. She would carry that name through 97 years of life. Memphis Tennessee Garrison was born in 1890 and died in 1988, having lived through the full arc of American twentieth-century civil rights history from Plessy v. Ferguson through Brown v. Board of Education to the Voting Rights Act and beyond. For the last forty years of her life she lived in a modest two-story frame house at 1701 10th Avenue in Huntington, West Virginia. The house still stands. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2017 and is in the process of being converted into a museum honoring her work.

Memphis Tennessee Garrison House: The Name That Was the Story

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

Memphis Tennessee Garrison House: The NAACP Work

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 civi...

Memphis Tennessee Garrison House: Teaching as Activism

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 bot...

Memphis Tennessee Garrison House: The House on 10th Avenue

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 teach...

Memphis Tennessee Garrison House: Museum to Come

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 organizat...