Religion

Thomas O. Fuller, prominent African American church and civic leader and author in early twentieth-century Memphis, was born in Franklinton, North Carolina, on October 25, 1867. His father, J. Henderson Fuller, was a carpenter who bought his freedom from slavery…

Episcopal bishop Thomas F. Gailor was born at Jackson, Mississippi, the son of Frank Marion Gailor and Charlotte Moffett. He graduated from Racine College, Wisconsin, in 1876, and then entered the General Theological Seminary, New York City. Gailor received his…

James R. Graves, Southern Baptist preacher, editor, and publisher, was the dominant leader of Landmarkism, a movement whose advocates asserted the sole validity and unbroken succession of Baptist churches from the New Testament era. Born into a Congregational family in…

Reverend Sutton E. Griggs, minister, writer, and community leader, was born in Chatfield, Texas, in 1882. He was the son of Allen R. Griggs, a former slave and Baptist minister. He attended public schools in Dallas, Texas, before attending Bishop…

Ann Rogers Grundy was born December 8, 1779, in Lunenberg County, Virginia, to John and Sarah Dougherty Rodgers. She married lawyer Felix Grundy on May 11, 1797, in Springfield, Kentucky. In 1808 she and her husband moved from Bardstown, Kentucky,…

Hiwassee College is a two-year coeducational liberal arts institution located near Madisonville in Monroe County. Originally a Methodist campground school known as Bat Creek, the college was established in 1850 as one of Tennessee's oldest educational facilities. A typical school…

The Holston Conference is the organization of nearly one thousand United Methodist churches in thirty-three East Tennessee counties, seventeen southwest Virginia counties, a county and portions of two others in northwest Georgia, and one church each in Alabama and West…

The Johnson Bible College was founded as the "School of the Evangelists" in 1893 by Ashley S. Johnson at Kimberlin Heights (approximately twelve miles southeast of Knoxville). Johnson, a Knox County native and successful evangelist, author, and educator, transformed his…

A flamboyant Methodist evangelist, Samuel Jones came to Nashville in 1885 as the result of a boast he made in Memphis that no church in the "city of churches" would be able to contain the crowds he would attract. When…

Marshall Keeble, born in Rutherford County in 1878, became the best-known African American leader in the Churches of Christ of the twentieth century. In May 2000 The Christian Chronicle named Keeble as its person for the decade 1940 to 1950…

The Holston Presbytery founded King College in 1867 in Bristol and named the school for James King, an eighteenth-century settler in the region. Both the acreage and physical plant of the college have more than doubled in 130 years. The…

Internationally acclaimed spokesman of the Civil Rights movement Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. King was in Memphis in an attempt to raise awareness of and support for a strike…

On December 2, 1843, the Memphis Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church received a charter from the Tennessee General Assembly authorizing the establishment of a young women's preparatory school and college to be named the Memphis Conference Female Institute (MCFI).…

Landmarkism was a nineteenth-century Baptist movement arising in the South, west of the Appalachians, which asserted the sole validity and unbroken succession of Baptist churches from the New Testament era. This exclusivistic ecclesiology promoted the idea that the term "church"…

In 1882 Lane College, then the "C.M.E. High School," was founded by the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (now Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, CME) in America. Initially Bishop William Henry Miles, the first bishop of the CME Church, presided over the…

Fourth bishop of the Colored (Christian) Methodist Episcopal Church, Isaac Lane was born March 4, 1834, in Madison County. Lane grew to manhood as a slave on the plantation of Cullen Lane. At age nineteen Isaac Lane married Frances Ann…

James E. Lawson Jr. made a significant mark on the history of the Civil Rights movement in Tennessee and in the South. He is best known in Tennessee history as the Vanderbilt Divinity School student who was expelled in 1960…

On January 1, 1918, 12 students from four states met with Nora Chambers in an upstairs room of the Church of God Publishing House in Cleveland, Tennessee. This first class meeting of the Church of God's Bible Training School (BTS)…

John B. Lindsley was a significant nineteenth-century educator, physician, Presbyterian minister, author, and civic leader in Nashville. He was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and came to Tennessee with his family at the age of two when his father, Philip…

Philip Lindsley, an educator, Presbyterian minister, and classical scholar, was born in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. He was educated at private academies and at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) and joined the faculty as Latin and Greek…