MLK, the Forgotten and the Forgetting
By John Krull, TheStatehouseFile.com
MEMPHIS, Tennessee—The wreath of mourning is still there, hanging on the rail in front of the spot where his body fell.
I’m just outside the National Civil Rights Museum, contemplating the place where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. died. Other museumgoers stand with me, trying to absorb a moment that altered the arc of American history, their eyes aimed at the wreath marking the spot, the rail, the preserved motel room doors, the nearly 60-year-old cars parked below.
I first came here more than 40 years ago, when I was still a young buck trying to make my way in the world. I rode my motorcycle down from St. Louis, where I attended graduate school, for a conference.
There was no museum here then. The building was still the Lorraine Motel, a local business straining to keep its doors open surrounded by a neighborhood straining to get back on its feet.
King had come to Memphis in the spring of 1968 to help the city’s sanitation workers with a strike. He also was in the midst of organizing a massive poor people’s march in the nation’s capital.
As was usually the case, he was trying to help those forgotten in American society by prodding those doing the forgetting to pay attention.
He stayed at the Lorraine because it historically, even during the worst days of racial segregation, had provided accommodations for Black Americans.
When the assassin’s shot that killed him rang out, King had been wrestling his way through a bout of depression. The battle to secure equal rights for all Americans had consumed more than a third of his life and there seemed to be no end in sight.
He was 39, and he was exhausted.
On that first visit here all those years ago, I stopped inside the motel office to chat with the people working there. They said that someone stopped by almost every day to pay his or her respects, but the mourners didn’t help the motel keep its doors open.
It was a hint, so I left a couple of dollars—all I could afford at the time—and headed out, pondering how such an ordinary place could be home to such an extraordinary turning point in history.
Now, the museum on the same site is far from shabby. Elegantly designed and beautifully curated, it walks visitors through our nation’s tortured history of racial bigotry and oppression.
We see the artifacts from and the evidence of the slave trade and the infamous Middle Passage, the centuries-long exploitation and degradation of other human beings, the rebellions launched by enslaved human beings to secure their freedom in a land that was already supposed to be a haven of human freedom, the Civil War that almost split the nation apart, the long campaign waged against institutionalized and legally sanctioned segregation, the ongoing attempts to end more subtle and yet insidious forms of prejudice and oppression.
It can be overwhelming just to contemplate, much less contend with.
The museum tour ends outside the rooms where King and his aides stayed on the April day that he died in 1968. The rooms have been restored to the way they looked when King stepped out onto the balcony where tragedy awaited him.
The sound system plays Mahalia Jackson singing a stunning version of “Precious Lord,” the hymn she would sing at King’s memorial service in Atlanta a few days after he died.
As she sings in an endless loop, museum goers move slowly past the place where an American hero—an American martyr—spent his last moments alive, their heads bowed, more than a few of them in tears.
Outside, as I leave the museum, I stop once more to contemplate the wreath on the railing and the way a single moment can affect all eternity.
Two Black women stop beside me to look at the spot where Martin Luther King Jr. fell. They, too, have just left the museum.
“So much struggle,” one woman says to the other.
She pauses, and then shakes her head.
“And it’s still going on,” she says to her companion.
Sad.
But true.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College.
