Yesterday we transferred from Arkansas to Tennessee, staying in a cottage outside Memphis. We have a small cottage within the grounds of a large house, called the Lake House. This is relatively luxury for us with two bedrooms, a living room and a full kitchen …. feels like home.
Our plan for today was to visit the National Civil Rights Museum in downtown Memphis. This museum is built around the old Lorraine Hotel in Memphis which is poignant as this is the hotel on which balcony Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. As you round the corner you see the frontage of the hotel which seems to me most familiar having seen this numerous times in photographs and film footage. The outside of the building of the hotel displays a wreath which has been a permanent presence since the assassination. Inside the museum follows the trail of the civil rights movement in the US from the time of slavery, introducing the main protagonists in the movement – including John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Abraham Lincoln and Booker T Washington. Through this period Black people got equality, at least on paper, through the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments but in reality there was little equality, particularly in the Southern States. There was still segregation in schools, public transport, restaurants, public places and even things like drinking fountains were segregated. The museum’s main exhibits focus on the seminal moments in the civil rights movement of the 20th century that started to break down segregation and introduce equal rights. Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education and the nine students at Little Rock started to break down segregation in schools, numerous sit-ins in segregated restaurants and the Montgomery bus protests focusing on segregated transport started to attack the systematic discrimination against Black people. Following on from these events activists like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X started to build upon this momentum and mobilised more people into action. The museum has some large exhibits such as the Montgomery bus that succinctly depicts the unfairness of the segregation on public transport and how the actions of Rosa Parks changed this. The final exhibit on the main site takes you into rooms 306 and 307 of the Lorraine hotel which have been reconstructed to be as they were on April 4th 1968 when Martin Luther King was assassinated. You can look out on the balcony where he fell, the blood stained section of concrete has been removed but you can see where it sat. This was a moving experience for all of us Hoblets.After this we moved across to another building on the opposite side of the road, where there are other exhibits. This is the former guest house from which the deadly shot was fired, again they have recreated the seedy bathroom from forensic photographs and you can see the view that the assassin would have had of the Lorraine Hotel’s balcony. In this section they present the story around the assassination including profiles of James Earl Ray, the convicted felon, the physical evidence and the various conspiracy theories. All very interesting.
We were all moved by this experience but our day was not done as we had bought combo tickets for the STAX museum. This museum covers the development of Soul Music and is found south of Memphis’ downtown on the site of the old STAX recording studio. The museum generally covers the history of soul music but inevitably focuses on the STAX record label which was a leading light in the soul music scene in the 1960s and early 1970s with artists such as Otis Redding, Booker T and the MGs and Isaac Hayes. Jack and Emily were a little bored by this as they had not heard of any of these strange people but for the parents this was wonderful nostalgia. On leaving the museum we turned down some of the side streets trying to find the birth home of Aretha Franklin you get a real sense of this neighbourhood which is very poor and depressed. Guess these are the conditions that breed great soul and blues artists – still sad to see.
To finish the day we head into downtown and go to Beale Street which is where most of the music scene hangs out in the numerous clubs, restaurants and bars. We sit down and listen to a couple of blues bands playing out on the street, the atmosphere was fantastic and we had a wonderful time.
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