The Lorraine Motel in Memphis was one of the few hotels for blacks in Memphis. Famous guests included Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Nat King Cole and BB King. It was where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stayed the night he was assassinated. His trip to Memphis was to speak in support of the Memphis sanitation workers, who were protesting poor treatment, discrimination and dangerous working conditions. The front facade of the motel still stands just as it did in 1968. Behind it is the National Civil Rights Museum that tells the ugly history of slavery and discrimination in the United States.
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- The sign stands today just as it looked to King from the balcony.
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- Activists Hosea Williams, Jesse Jackson, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy on the night of King’s assassination.
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- Room 306 frozen in time, with a wreath added to the balcony.
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- Four days after King’s murder, Coretta Scott King led a completely silent march of the sanitation workers, each holding this sign.
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- Many methods were used to discourage the black vote: poll taxes, re-registration, literacy tests and outright violence.
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- Racial terrorism mapped, with red dots showing lynchings between 1900 and 1930.
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- Lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, NC led to Woolworths ending its lunch counter segregation policy in 1960.
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- The Freedom Riders were activists who rode buses into segregated states in 1961 to protest lack of enforcement of Supreme Court rulings that bus segregation was unconstitutional.
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- This conversation led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, landmark legislation that prohibits racial discrimination in voting.
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- A shocking turn of voter sentiment in one election cycle.
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- Amazing how far we’ve come, and how far we haven’t.
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- Behold her cometh the dreamer! Let us slay him and we will see what becomes of his dreams. Genesis 37: 19-20
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