The night before a new historical marker was unveiled outside Centenary United Methodist Church, someone walking by was curious about the marker.

When church members arrived at the Soulsville church Thursday, Nov. 20, to prepare for the afternoon ceremony, they found the black tarp that had been covering it neatly folded at the base, which was surrounded by red flowers.

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Church co-historian Marie Milam said later that whoever took the tarp off around 2 a.m. apparently couldn’t get it back on and again folded the tarp and left it at the base.

“He wanted to see what this church is all about,” Milam told those gathered in the church before the unveiling.

Thursday afternoon, Milam and her husband Thomas Milam, who is also Centenary’s other co-historian, had some trouble getting the tarp off as a crowd of about 100 watched on the 160-year-old church’s front lawn.

The church has had four locations since its founding in 1865 and has been a part of the 160-year story line of the city’s civil rights movement, starting at the end of slavery and the emancipation of those enslaved.

Marie Milam referred to the history of the church as “our remarkable journey” with “difficult periods and triumphs.”

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The church moved to its current location on East McLemore Avenue during the movement of the 1960s. Its pastor from 1961 to 1974 was Rev. James Lawson, the architect of the national movement’s strategy of nonviolent resistance, which Lawson brought to Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1950s.

It was Lawson who invited King to come to the city during the 1968 sanitation workers strike.

Centenary moved to its current location the year before.

The previous location on Mississippi Boulevard was where Lawson and others organized the 1967 “March Against Fear” through North Mississippi, which included King, after James Meredith was shot and wounded shortly after crossing the state line from Memphis into Mississippi.

Centenary was one of several churches that were strategic centers for the strike effort and whose congregations supplied and built support for the strike that made it more than a labor dispute.

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Pastor Keith Caldwell told those in the church Thursday that the timeline is more than the past.

“We know that Memphis right now is a city under siege,” he said, referring to the ongoing deployment of National Guard troops in the city, along with a surge of state and federal law enforcement agencies.

Caldwell is also executive director of the social justice group MICAH — Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action and Hope — a coalition of local churches across denominational lines.

Caldwell said the current opposition to the Memphis Safe Task Force and the detention of some by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — or ICE — agents is consistent with the congregation’s role in the Civil Rights Movement.

“I think we have been conditioned in the church to have this other worldly reality where we go to heaven or somewhere to get justice. We know that there are people who are getting justice on this side of the grave,” he told The Daily Memphian after the ceremony.

“And they usually live in Germantown and have access to resources and opportunities. So we say that we don’t have to die in order to see justice — that someone already has died and they died that we might have life and have it more abundantly through our lord Jesus Christ.”

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Deborah Smith, the metro district superintendent for the United Methodist Church and a member of the Centenary congregation, said the church remains “an inspiration” because of its history. But she also told the group that discouragement is real.

“We thought this would be the moment where our social standards would change and everybody would be walking around free. … We thought most assuredly the Civil Rights Movement would free us, would end the racism,” Smith said. “The rich are getting richer. The poor are getting poorer. Money from special interests buys elections. Racism, prejudice, sexism are all still very much a part of the story.

Thomas Milam said Centenary has “never been a one-dimensional church.”

Pastor H.B. Gibson was president of the Memphis Branch NAACP in the 1930s. The church was threatened by mob violence. Gibson led those in the church who stood watch in and around the building on Mississippi Boulevard.

In the church on McLemore Avenue on Thursday were gray-haired men who stood when Marie Milam asked for those who had been in the church’s Boy Scout troop to stand.

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Centenary has the oldest Black Boy Scout troop in the city. What is now Troop 188 was organized in 1928, when Centenary was on what is now G.E. Patterson Avenue.

Later versions of the troop met in the same church basement on McLemore Avenue where King and Lawson met to plot strategy in the 1968 strike.

Robert Lewis, a church member, was the mortician who prepared King’s body for his funeral in Atlanta following King’s assassination that April.

Milam, who was a postman before becoming a postal supervisor, recalled the church’s four addresses on streets whose names have changed several times throughout the last 160 years and no longer show up on maps of the city.

The first Centenary church, which takes its name from the denomination’s expansion on its centennial in 1865, was on Raburn Street, which is now Third Street in some parts and B.B. King Boulevard in other sections.

“We don’t want to rest on our laurels,” Milam said.