Some years ago, my father and I ventured over to Memphis. My parents moved to Jackson, Tennessee–a little over an hour’s drive on I-40 from Memphis–when I was almost a teenager. We traveled to the big city to shop, for band competitions, and to show visiting family members the jungle room at Graceland. But I’ve never really known much about the history and heart of Memphis.
It was Tuesday, and my father wasn’t teaching. He wanted to show me the National Civil Rights Museum, which had impressed him and my mother. “You can see the bathtub the man stood in when he shot Martin Luther King. It’s powerful.”
He meant that it was powerful in a sad way, an important way, a “moment that forever changed the course of history” kind of way. Like when I was a teenager and we went to see a basketball tournament in Dallas, and my parents made sure we visited the Book Depository where Lee Harvey Oswald opened fire on President Kennedy’s motorcade.
Okay, I’m realizing now that it may sound like my parents have a thing for assassinations. They do not–I think it’s more that those events are ones that changed not just their nation but their own lives. They lived through those important moments and remember where they were when they occurred.
My mother recalls hearing about JFK’s death while at school. My father remembers hearing that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr had been killed over the radio and rushing to tell his parents. My grandfather–a white South Carolina native–said, “Well, that’s an answer to a prayer.”
The fact that my grandfather, an Independent Baptist preacher, prayed for the death of King, does not surprise me. He was racist and really liked to pray. What is surprising is that my father, not even a teenager at the time, knew in that moment that his father was wrong. Score one for progress.
So my father was taking me on this Tuesday to see the place where King was shot–the Lorraine Motel. Reimagined in 1991 as a museum, the motel is a state historic site and on the national record of historic places. It’s also a part of the African American Civil Rights Network overseen by the US National Park Service.
The exterior of the motel is maintained as it was back in 1968. Metal railings skirt the balcony where King stood when he was shot; a large, swooping sign permanently declares his initials and message: “I have a dream.” There are period-appropriate cars–massive and elegant–parked out front. A wreath hangs outside of Room 306.
All of these visuals moved me as we stood outside–I snapped photos and prepared myself emotionally for a journey of tragedy and hope. We approached the doors.
Which were locked. The museum, like many museums, was closed on Tuesdays, something we had not researched before heading to the city.
We laughed, shrugged, and took ourselves to another Memphis institution–the Pyramid down by the river, once an entertainment venue but that day a recently opened, gargantuan Bass Pro Shop. (There are no words to describe such a place; you will need to Google it.)
My next visit to the National Civil Rights Museum was more recent and more successful, mainly because I didn’t go on a Tuesday–having learned an important lesson. Unfortunately though the building from which James Earl Ray aimed his shot was under renovation and closed to visitors. My father was disappointed when he heard–”The bathtub!” But what I did see was worth the trip.
Unlike its outside, the interior of the Lorraine Motel is modern, except for two rooms at the top, preserved just as they were the evening King and his colleagues and friends lounged in them.
The journey to these final rooms is just as emotional as I had anticipated. It begins in slavery–with crowded ships and violence and shackles. The rooms of the museum move forward in time, guiding visitors through the dehumanization of enslavement, then the short-lived hope following the Civil War and emancipation.
After that the museum really digs into its story, detailing segregation laws, anti-voting laws, and lynchings. Daily and lifelong injustices, as well as the sometimes deadly penalties meted out for being born Black.
Did you know that in some states under Jim Crow it was illegal for a Black person and white person to play cards or chess together? That a Black baseball team wasn’t allowed to play or practice within a certain number of feet from a white one? That white schools were forbidden from sharing books with Black ones?
The racism in the South, but also in other parts of the United States, was systemic, baked into the laws and institutions that governed the nation. And that is why the Civil Rights movement had to begin and be buoyed by court cases. The laws and institutions themselves had to change.
A courtroom and short film in the museum depict these victories, like Brown v. Board of Education. But even after racist laws and policies were dismantled by the nation’s top court, the enactment of new policies and laws would take time. And activists.
The bulk of the National Civil Rights Museum is, unsurprisingly, focused on this next fight. The protestors had backing from the courts and eventually the U.S. government, but in order to change the way things had always been they would have to do more than change laws–they would have to change people’s minds. And this meant subjecting themselves to public violence and abuse.
Some leaders of the movement–like King–were inspired by the non-violent teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. One room in the museum is devoted to peaceful protest, with a screen displaying film of a practice session for sit-ins versus the violence of a real sit-in.
The laughing, practicing protestors, congratulating one another for not reacting when shoved, contrasts sharply with scenes of the real sit-ins–young people beaten, dragged from their seats, kicked in the head. It twists your stomach.
Non-violence was only practiced by the protestors, not their opponents.
In room after room, the museum explains the marches, the boycotts, the sit-ins. The protestors, thousands of them–including in one instance hundreds of children–were arrested, beaten, killed.
The intentional design of the space depicting the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama makes it one of the most impactful moments in the museum. Visitors join the march, walking with historic activists through inclined hallways, hearing the sounds and seeing the images the protesters would have seen along the way.
The batons and guns, the busted skull of John Lewis, the blown-apart car that once shuttled protestors. The museum allows guests to walk alongside the marchers, inviting them to feel what these men and women felt. A journey of brutality and fear. But also a journey that would lead to better days ahead.
The next section of museum covers the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, its successes and how it is ongoing. And then comes the shock that we all knew was coming. Room 306.
The Memphis sanitation workers’ strike was an extension of the larger Civil Rights Movement. Yes, by the end of the 1960s African Americans had desegregated institutions across the nation. Many of them had been able to register to vote for the first time and had seen many of their rights enshrined into law. But plenty of their day-to-day injustices remained.
Unsafe working conditions, low wages, and lack of job opportunities plagued African American communities. In Memphis, two sanitation workers were crushed to death in the back of a garbage truck, and the other workers decided they had had enough. They went on strike. And King came to town to help them.
Perhaps you have seen the images of African American men in a line, holding signs that declare “I Am A Man.” Those images are from this Memphis strike. The next stage of changing minds required white Americans to see African Americans as human beings.
Dehumanizing humans is the first step toward harming them. It is chilling to see men have to hold up signs labeling themselves as people in order for the world to see them as people.
But we know what happened in Memphis after those men held up their signs. And we know what has happened more recently when Black Americans have tried to remind the world that their lives matter. This work is ongoing.
These truths that should be universal–that Black people are people and that their lives matter–still need to be said out loud.
I sat and watched King’s final speech to the sanitation workers just outside the room where he spent his final moments. Then I stood up and walked past his glass-enclosed bedroom, the bed carefully made, a white blanket, white walls, white tables and chairs–a room encased in white.
I looked out at the balcony where King was struck in the head by a bullet and lost consciousness. The balcony view was not spectacular–I could only see the construction zone where the renovations for the opposing building, the one where the shooter stood in a bathtub, were taking place. But there is something uplifting about a scene of reconstruction.
The hotel is now a monument to the people and ideas that won. The winners of that historical moment were not the racists who prayed for King to die or the one who carried it out. I didn’t need to see the bathtub where he stood to know that even if this man accomplished his goal, he failed at his mission. The journey may be ongoing, but this museum is a signpost, reminding us how far we’ve come.
As King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
I stepped out of the Lorraine Motel into a chilly rain and biting wind. I opened my eyes to Memphis and its people, both of which I felt I knew a bit better now.
I snapped one last photo of the bright sign battling the gray sky, proclaiming to all the world that one man had a dream.