Memphis motel becomes a shrine - Lorraine Motel, National Civil Rights Museum

Ebony, April, 1992 by Lynn Norment

AN eerie ambiance prevails as one A stands on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, at the very spot where Dr. Martin Luther King jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1%8. Straight ahead to the west is the dilapidated building that provided cover for the gunman. At your feet is the concrete slab stained with Dr. King's blood. Behind you is Room 307, in which the martyred civil rights leader spent his last hours.

But today, some Z4 years later, the site of Dr. King's demise is a glorious tribute to his life and work. Last summer the Lorraine Motel was reborn as the National Civil Rights Museum.

For 14 years after the tragedy, the motel deteriorated along with the surrounding neighborhood, becoming a haven for prostitutes, pimps and drug dealers. Still, hundreds of people from around the world trekked to the 32room, L-shaped motel to take photographs, stand on the balcony and visit the modest shrine the owner had set up.

In 1982, the Lorraine was bought at a foreclosure sale for $144,000, thanks mostly to 25,000 raised by WDIA radio station, a $25,000 donation from the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees, a 50,000 loan from Tri-state Bank, and numerous individual donations. Funding for the restoration and construction came from city, county and state coffers. In total, $9.7 million were raised to turn the rundown motel into a fitting memorial to the national hero who won the respect of world leaders. "There is a continuum of strength and creativity in Black America to overcome adversity," says the museum's founder, Circuit Court judge D'Army Bailey. "This museum is a propaganda vehicle to create more soldiers and generals to carry on our fight for equality, by teaching them and showing them what we came through, who and what our leaders were. The major thrust of the museum is that the movement did not die in 1968, that others picked up Dr. King's work and carried on. "

Indeed, the exhibits, which utilize a lively interplay of graphics, light, sound, music and words, cover the entire spectrum of the Civil Rights Movement. Through photographs, audiovisual presentations and interactive exhibits, the sit-ins, marches and demonstrations that were the core of the movement are chronicled in the 10,000 square feet of exhibit space.

Beginning with the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of education of Topeka, the museum offers a wealth of data, documents and artifacts. The Montgomery Bus Boycott is made vivid as visitors walk through a'50s-era Montgomery public bus that was used in the movie, A Long Walk Home, which was about the boycott. On a front seat is a plaster statue of Rosa Parks, the heroic and dynamic woman who sparked the boycott in 1955 when she refused to move to the back of the bus. If museum visitors sit in either of the front seats, fights flash, the "driver" turns his head and a recording orders them to "move to the back of the bus."

Visitors can sit at the life-size 60s-era lunch counter and watch a videotape of the student sit-ins, and then inspect a burned-out Greyhound bus that presents a realistic retrospective on what the Freedom Riders encountered.

A re-creation of Dr. King's Birmingham jail cell, with an enlarged copy of his "Letter From Birmingham jail" (April 1963), is enhanced with a video environment" that places visitors right in the middle of the demonstrators'clash with Eugene (Bull) Connor, who ordered police to use dogs and firehoses on protesters. At the March On Washington (August 1963) exhibit, one can pause amid the crowd of placard holders to hear Dr. King's famous "I Have A Dream" speech, then cross a replica of the Edmund Pettus Bridge that was a landmark of the Selma-to-Montgomery march. The Chicago Freedom Movement exhibit illustrates how, by the mid60's, the Civil Rights Movement had begun to focus on the urban problems of poverty, hunger and poor housing.

Near the end of the comprehensive, winding exhibit are a bright orange garbage truck, a line of plaster marchers carrying signs proclaiming "I AM A MAN," and a video of news coverage that explains the tragic irony of the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike, which is the reason Dr. King was in Memphis at the time of his assassination. On the night of April 3, he made his famous "I've Been To The Mountaintop" speech, his last.

The historical climax and emotional focus of the museum are the balcony on which Dr. King was shot and the rooms in which he and his aides slept and mapped out their strategies. A glass etching of Dr. King's likeness and a recording of Mahalia jackson singing his favorite song, "Precious Lord," greet visitors as they enter the narrow, glass walled passageway that separates the small rooms, which are shown as they appeared on April 4, 1968.

Room 307, painted green, has the king-sized bed in which Dr. King slept. He had stepped out of Room 306, leaned over the balcony and said to Chicago saxophonist Ben Branch, who was in the parking lot below: Tonight I want you to play Precious Lard. " At that moment, the shot rang out and Dr. King fell to the concrete pavement.