National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel

The National Civil Rights Museum occupies the Lorraine Motel on Mulberry Street in downtown Memphis. Room three zero six, where Martin Luther King Jr. was standing when he was shot on April fourth, nineteen sixty-eight, is frozen in time: the curtains unchanged, the car in the parking lot below still there, a wreath on the balcony rail where he fell. The museum was built around that room, and everything else radiates outward from it.

The Lorraine Motel was a Black-owned establishment that became the lodging of choice for African American travelers in Memphis during segregation. King stayed there on multiple visits to the city, which was in the middle of a sanitation workers' strike when he returned in April of nineteen sixty-eight. The strike had begun in February after two Black workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death in a malfunctioning garbage compactor and the city of Memphis refused to compensate their families. Workers marched with signs reading "I AM A MAN." King had come to support them.

At six oh one in the evening on April fourth, King stepped onto the second-floor balcony. A shot fired from the rooming house across Mulberry Street struck him in the jaw, severing his spinal cord. He was pronounced dead at Saint Joseph's Hospital one hour later. James Earl Ray, a fugitive from Missouri State Penitentiary, was arrested in London sixty-five days later and pleaded guilty to the murder in nineteen sixty-nine.

The museum, which opened in nineteen ninety-one and underwent a major expansion completed in two thousand fourteen, presents the full arc of the American Civil Rights Movement from slavery through the present. Exhibits include a Montgomery bus, a Greensboro lunch counter, and a detailed reconstruction of the Mason Temple address King delivered the night before his death. Hundreds of thousands of visitors arrive each year. The building does not let you treat history as a settled matter.