Last weekend I was invited to tour the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis at the Country Cares St. Jude Radio Seminar. On the Sunday after it was over I had about 6 hours to fill before my afternoon flight. All along I had planned to visit the National Civil Rights Museum which was built at the site of the Lorraine Motel, the place where civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. took his last breath. I took a trolley from downtown Memphis to Main St. and Huling Ave. As I walked down the hill toward the Lorraine Motel the balcony in front of Room 306 (the room Dr. King was staying in) came into view and I was overcome with emotion.
I’ve seen that balcony in black and white documentary films but seeing it in person was surreal. There was a wreath affixed to the spot Dr. King was standing and knowing I was so close the where he was standing 50 years before when he succumbed to an assassin’s bullet made my eyes well up. There is a plaque dedicated in his honor and if you do a 360 you can see the spot James Earl Ray took the shot from which is closer than you might imagine. Mulberry Street, which separates the Lorraine Motel and the boarding house James Earl Ray was rooming in, is quite narrow and the balcony of room 306 is only set back about 20 feet from the street. The shot traveled about 80 feet by my estimation give or take 20 feet. The trajectory of the bullet is marked in the street leading up to the commemorative plaque in cement.
Today the inside of the Lorraine Motel (with the exception of the rooms Dr. King and his associates were staying in, along with a few others) has been gutted and rebuilt as the National Civil right museum. The boarding house across the street is also part of the tour.
The Martin Luther King assassination is obviously the major focus of the museum however it also documents the history of the African American struggle for freedom and then equality in the United States. Below I’ve enclosed some photos from my trip and, as best as I can, I’ll attempt to offer some context. I got my start at the museum later than I would have liked on my last day in Memphis and was only able to spend about an hour and fifteen minutes there. I plan on going back someday and bringing my daughter because I think it’s an experience every American could and should learn from. I feel so lucky to have been able to visit it on MLK weekend.
The stain of freedom and segregation threatened to undermine everything our country said it stood for during our first 185 years as a nation. This museum reminds us that it wasn’t so long ago that our brothers and sisters were treated like second class citizens, if not dogs and that it must never happen again.
The room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis (Room 306) that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was staying in at the time of his death on April 4th, 1968
A depiction at the National Civil Rights Museum of sanitation workers in the city of Memphis protesting low pay and working conditions holding up their iconic “I Am A Man” signs. Their strike was the reason Dr. King was in Memphis.
A Greyhound Bus that carried freedom riders from the early 1960’s that was torched. White supremacist gangs violently attacked the ‘freedom riders’ who rode side by side, one white rider with one black rider, to protest white seating preference, separate black and white waiting rooms and bus stations, as well as separate bathrooms and drinking fountains.
