The Lorraine Motel was never meant to be a tourist attraction. But fate had other plans. In the evening of April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot while standing on its balcony, and the shabby motel on the fringes of downtown Memphis joined Ford’s Theatre and the Texas School Book Depository as monuments of national tragedies.
In 1991 the Lorraine Motel opened as the National Civil Rights Museum, a high-tech tribute to the persons and events that led the struggle to bring equality to the races. Offers museum spokeswoman Judith Black, “I’d like visitors to make a connection between the things that happened in the (Civil Rights) Movement and the way they live their lives today. A number of people who come are familiar with the Movement while others want to bring their children to appreciate the things that have come their way. For many, their only memories are from television.”
Emmett Till, Little Rock, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Birmingham, sit-ins, freedom rides, Ole Miss–the headlines familiar to anyone over 40 are all recalled here in the form of life-sized exhibits accompanied by truly absorbing text. But the museum’s displays also predate those events. Commentary about prominent 19th Century slaves Dred Scott and Nat Turner along with a Ku Klux Klan robe and pen knife tell of the early days of black life in America. One display states that between 1882 and 1968 there were 4,743 lynchings in the United States.
It’s difficult to leave the museum without respect for the long, ponderous struggle that was the Movement and the plenitude of common people who played major roles.
Black notes, “Visitors to the museum get the impression that ordinary people can have an impact. They see people who never would have been considered special who put their lives on the line.”
For example, head to the refurbished department store lunch counter, an institutional relic straight from Main Street, U.S.A., ca. 1960, realistically decked with napkin dispensers and generic plastic yellow and red condiment containers.
Seated there are plaster figures representing four student protesters; behind them are plaster forms of a pair of white punks, one grinning smugly and smoking a cigarette, the other bearing a tough mug and folded arms.
Visitors don’t have to imagine what the hecklers would have been saying. Near the tableau are video monitors showing actual news clips in grainy black-and-white featuring sit-in participants and their harassers.
“I asked for a hamburger and a Coke,” says one black student in a vintage clip. A white waitress replies, “I’m sorry. Management does not allow us to serve niggers here.”
One white woman opines that the sit-ins violate her civil rights while a white man says of the non-violent students, doing nothing more than waiting to be served, “They looked like they were just trying to egg on a fight.”
A full-sized city bus used in the movie “A Long Walk Home” symbolizes another ordinary person who had an impact on the way future generations would live. A tired seamstress named Rosa Parks could never have known she would be making history when she refused to relinquish her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Ala., in December 1955.
A major bus boycott followed, and ultimately the United States Supreme Court declared bus segregation unconstitutional. In the ensuing years her story has assumed American legend status.
Aboard the museum bus are two plaster statues, one representing driver James T. Blake and the other, a few seats back, depicting Rosa Parks in overcoat and hat like she would have worn on a chilly December day. Her bulky shopping bag rests next to her.
On a nearby screen a videotape tells the story of the Montgomery bus incident. It’s one of many such tapes in a museum that employs video to the fullest. Segments of a 1930s documentary showing South Carolina blacks living in rickety shacks, President Dwight Eisenhower explaining his reasons for sending federal troops to Little Rock and coverage of the sanitation workers’ strike that prompted Martin Luther King’s fatal visit to Memphis are just a few of the materials available for viewing at the push of a button.
It is King who as principal figure of the Civil Rights Movement is the foremost featured player in the museum. A reproduced jail cell, small and sparse with a lonely toilet and sink, represents his residence where he wrote his famous 1963 letter from the Birmingham Jail (“I would agree with Saint Augustine that an unjust law is no law at all”) . King had been leading sit-ins, mass marches and boycotts of downtown businesses in protest of the city’s ubiquitous segregation. One display shows how Birmingham store owners who removed “Whites Only” signs from their windows were cited for “violations of the sanitary code.”
In early April 1968, King checked into the Lorraine Motel; he had come to Memphis to aid striking sanitation workers and to quell disturbances that had resulted after previous demonstrations. Room 307, where he had been staying, has been meticulously refurbished to look as it did the evening of April 4.
A peach-colored spread covers his bed, there’s an upholstered motel chair, a pair of nightstands and a table supporting a milk pitcher, creamer and a water glass, evidence of past refreshment. Room 306, where King’s associates stayed, is also decorated as it was, with empty dishes and half-filled coffee cups.
The display isn’t morbid, nor does it trivialize the events of that day. The accompanying written commentary recalls the hours before the assassination. At about 1 p.m. that day King and his brother talked with their mother on the phone. A few hours later an associate kidded King for being too fat when he had trouble fastening a shirt button. And when King couldn’t find his necktie, he playfully accused his staff of hiding it as a prank.
Outside the museum in the parking lot is a plaque inscribed with a quote from Genesis as proclaimed by King’s associate, Ralph David Abernathy: “They said to one another, behold, here cometh the dreamer. Let us slay him and we shall see what will become of his dreams.”
In what is the most controversial museum feature, a laser beam visible at night traces the path of the assassin’s bullet, then is directed heavenward as a “beacon in the sky.”
The laser beam aside, some locals are offended by the very presence of the museum, saying it commercializes the assassination of King and the Movement. Perhaps the most vocal critic is former Lorraine Motel resident and desk clerk Jacqueline Smith, who pickets regularly outside the museum on the street and doesn’t try to hide her anger.
Says Smith, “They’ve converted the motel into a showcase with this Disneyland approach to make a buck. I’d suggest they set aside maybe six rooms to honor Dr. King and make the rest of it a free city college or a senior citizen home. The motel should have been made into a facility to serve the poor and help the needy and downtrodden.”
Counters Judith Black, “The National Civil Rights Museum is an educational institution and its mission is education, first and foremost….We’ve turned a tragic issue into something that’s become very positive, something for the city to be very proud of.”
Former Executive Director Juanita Moore notes that the museum attracts a healthy mixture of young and old as well as local residents and out-of-towners. She also reports that about 40 percent of visitors are white.
Ground will soon be broken for a huge expansion. Two buildings, including the boarding house from which James Earl Ray fired the fatal bullet, will be added to the museum complex and will house a theater and exhibits about the assassination and its aftermath. Another gallery called “Movement and Momentum” will focus on other causes inspired by the American Civil Rights Movement. The expansion will not be complete until fall of 2001 at the earliest.
IF YOU GO
THE DETAILS
The National Civil Rights Museum is closed on Tuesdays. Hours are: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. (until 6 p.m. in summer) Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays; 9 a.m.-8 p.m. Thursdays; 1-5 p.m. (until 6 p.m. in summer) Sundays.
Admission: $6 adults; $5 ages 60 and over and college students with ID; $4 ages 4-17; free on Monday, 3-5.
A temporary exhibit titled “Americanos: Portrait of the Latin American Community in the United States” opens March 17 and closes June 10.
Central Memphis lodging: Best Western Benchmark, 164 Union Ave., doubles: $85-$95, 901-527-4100; Comfort Inn Downtown, 100 N. Front Street, doubles: $84-$89, 901-526-0583; Red Roof Inn Medical Center, 210 S. Pauline St., doubles: $45-$71, 901-528-0650.
Information: National Civil Rights Museum, 450 Mulberry Street, Memphis, TN 38103; 901-521-9699; www.civilrightsmuseum.org
— M.S.
