On April 4, 1969, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The motel is now the home of the National Civil Rights Museum. This is a very powerful museum, covering the civil rights movement through audio phones, videos, photographs, buses, soda fountain replicas, and other exhibits. We spent over four hours reading, listening, and viewing. There are burned out buses from the Freedom Rides, there is a bus you can sit on along with a statue of Rosa Parks, there is a soda fountain depicting the sit-ins of young adult blacks wanting to be served as whites were, there are videos of Dr. King and other civil rights leaders, there is a replica of the jail cell from which Dr. King wrote his moving Letters from a Birmingham Jail, there is a section dedicated to the Little Rock Nine. Exhibits cover the history of the civil rights struggle from days of slavery through the present. Many exhibits focus on Dr. King and his unflinching work for the equality and betterment of all of us, in the face of many death threats and jail sentences and beatings, and we saw and heard his poignant and powerful mountaintop speech, made the night before his death. It is an excellent museum and I highly recommend it. It is a history that every person from the United States should know and not forget. The exhibits culminate at the room where Dr. King was staying with Ralph Abernathy, and the veranda where he was assassinated. Across the street you can go into the boarding house and see the rooms where James Earl Ray stayed and from where the fatal shot was fired. It is impossible to do justice to this museum by mere summary.
On a lighter note, we visited the Rock 'N' Soul Museum. This museum traces music from the roots of the blues in the cotton fields to the blending of white and black musical styles to country music to rock and roll. There are all sorts of exhibits including performance costumes, waybills, guitars, records, and such. You wear earphones and there are scores of wonderful recordings to listen to. We really enjoyed our time here.
We walked back to our hotel via Beale Street, the center of Memphis' music scene. It's lined with restaurants, sidewalk cafes, bars, souvenir shops and there were even kids doing back flips in the street (with a tip jar close by). Music blares from speakers. It's a happening place.
Memphis has a nice trolley system that runs close to our hotel and down Main Street. For $1, you can ride along and get off where you want.
We had another nice sunset over the Mississippi.
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