MID-SOUTH MEMORIES
25 years ago — 1995
Rev. Nancy Hastings Sehested, the first woman to lead a Southern Baptist church in Tennessee, is leaving the pulpit to write. Her last sermon as pastor of Prescott Memorial Baptist Church will be Aug. 27. Sehested will become a writer in residence at an interfaith retreat center in North Carolina. Sehested’s hiring eight years ago gained national attention and denominational scorn. Prescott was expelled from the Shelby Baptist Association and later left the denomination. Prescott was one of only a handful of 40,000 Southern Baptist churches to have hired a woman pastor.
50 years ago — 1970
New York – Time magazine in an announcement published Sunday said Martin Luther King toned down his criticism of the FBI after FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover confronted him with wiretap transcriptions revealing extramarital activities by King. Time said the King-hoover meeting occurred in 1964, about four years before King was assassinated in Memphis.
75 years ago — 1945
Senator Mckellar is all for keeping secrets of harnessing the atom for America and America alone. “I am reliably informed that only America has any interest in this invention,” he said. “I devoutly pray that neither Lendlease nor the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration will ever touch it.”
100 years ago — 1920
Hyde Park, N.Y. – Before a crowd of several thousand persons, who stood for nearly two hours under a sweltering August sun, Franklin D. Roosevelt gave an address formally accepting the Democratic nomination for vice president. He urged ratification of the peace treaty, “which to make it a real treaty for a real peace must include a league of nations.”
125 years ago — 1895
The Irishmen of Memphis have taken hold of the project to secure for Memphis the national convention to consider the political needs of Ireland, and The Commercial Appeal hopes they will succeed. More power to ’em.