National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, Memphis, TN

People Get Ready by the Impressions--for Gillie, this was reminiscent of King's Mountaintop speech: get ready, good things are coming, but I may not see them with you.





and, since we drove through Mississippi today and because this song captures a lot of anger

The museum is in the former Lorraine Motel building – where Martin Luther King Jr was shot.  As you approach, you see the original motel sign – it’s a really cool, neon sign and you feel like you are back in that era!  You can see the car he drove up in and balcony where he was assassinated.  It was weird at first, kind of eery but really cool – then you start to think about how you are standing close to where an important leader in our history stood and was murdered.

The museum is really great – it doesn't just capture Selma or Montgomery and Martin Luther King Jr. – it captures many eras of the Black experience in America from slavery to today: capture, slavery, slave revolts, voting rights, bus desegregation, desegregation of restaurants, gaining the overall rights of people and then, of course, MLK Jr.’s death.  The museum experience really starts with an exhibit on slavery, followed by a film to get us ready.  When the film ends, the screen lifts and you join a silhouette of marchers and enter the main exhibits. 

At this museum you can sit by Rosa Parks on a bus, see a burned Greyhound bus from the Freedom Rides and even a garbage truck from the Memphis Sanitation strike.  You could go inside MLK Jr.’s Birmingham Jail cell and see many informational videos.  We saw Black Panther outfits and sat in a recreated Mississippi Freedom Summer schoolroom. 

That's Jennie in the blue sweater.

As we think about the museum, we all feel like part of what was so cool was how they made you feel like you were there.  In every big exhibit room there would be statues as if you were on the street. By the Montgomery bus there were 3 women walking, as if they were walking in the boycott, there was a bus driver yelling at you and the bus itself had all the ads that would have been on it the day Rosa rode. 

We all agree that this was one of the best museums we've ever been in.

MLK's room at the Lorraine