National Civil Rights Museum

Our family likes to travel right after Christmas, and this year one of the places we stopped was Memphis, Tennessee, and there we visited the National Civil Rights Museum. It was a moving experience to walk through a long timeline oriented exhibit that narrated the experience of African American persons in America.


The museum itself is located in the Loraine Motel, the site of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Something that I did not know before this visit is that this motel was Black owned, and
thus the place that leaders such as King commonly stayed. So a would be killer could make a good guess that he would be there at this location.

It is always interesting and a little disconcerting to talk about history that has taken place in one's own lifetime. One of my minister colleagues from California, Rev. James Lawson, was one of the leaders with King who was prominent in the pictures and quotations on the walls.

We walked through a bus of that era and saw the life sized figures of Rosa Parks and the bus driver, and read about the confrontation that began the Montgomery bus boycott. Details on the wall also outlined that she had been trained at the Highlander Center and was prepared mentally and spiritually for this moment when it came. Often when we hear about it in the media it is presented as though she was just especially tired and fed up on this day and decided not to move on an impulse. This is certainly not the whole story. Rosa Parks was also a trained organizer, and part of a group.



A heart stopping exhibit was a bus that had been bombed that was in the museum. The aluminum that was stretched and blown open was a dramatic example of the force. And I was reminded of how much the current terrorists who blow things up have in common with the racist terrorists in the American South. The combination of murders, intimidation, arrests, jailing, police dogs, beatings, bombings, fire hoses - it was something pretty powerful to address. And to do so with non-violence.

I had not thought about this era for some time. The museum also elicited a good conversation with our daughters.


Over dinner I shared with them that although it all seems so clearly cut and dried, good and bad, just and unjust, at the time all of this was controversial. It was not so clear cut in the media or in politics.


I also shared with them the analysis that prior to Presidency of John Kennedy that the Democratic Party could depend on the "solid south" to deliver lots of votes for President in national elections. And after President Kennedy's efforts, and those of his brother Bobby Kennedy during this era, and especially after the Voting Rights Act passed by congress and signed by Lyndon Johnson, the south is now solidly Republican. The Republican party has taken up the mantle of White resentment.

I found it sorrowful that the museum seemed to stop the narrative around 1968. Sometimes it feels like there has not been so much progress since that time.