My Pilgrimage to the National Civil Rights Museum: The Lorraine Motel – Memphis, Tennessee (original) (raw)
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Legacy of the Lorraine Motel and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr
Journal of Unconventional Parks Tourism Recreation Research, 2012
Motel. This tragic event cast a bright light globally on the civil rights movement in the United States. The Lorraine Motel was later transformed into the National Civil Rights Museum (NCRM). This case study examines the NCRM as a dark tourism site and its impact on visitors. Content analysis was conducted on 70 web postings about visits to the NCRM obtained from TripAdvisor. Four key themes were identified based on the analysis of the data: remembering the assassination of Dr. King; immersion into the "aura" of death at the Lorraine Motel site; the conveyance of history related to the civil rights movement in the U.S.; and the transformative power
Doing public history at the National Civil Rights Museum: A conversation with Juanita Moore
The Public Historian, 1995
, dashed many people's hopes for peaceful change in the United States. Twenty-five years later, on the April 4, 1993 anniversary of King's death, thousands gathered at Mason Temple, the site of his last speech, singing and preaching about regeneration and hope. Posters announcing three days of commemorative events, which included a two-day symposium evaluating the King legacy, graced the city's buses. Professor Cornell West opened the events with a keynote address linking King to African-American freedom struggles in the past and present. Young people gathered to learn about King but also to discuss their own pressing concerns with older activists from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Talk shows discussed the significance of King and the movement he led; clergy, union leaders, and everyday people talked about the sanitation strike that brought King to Memphis.
Art Journal Open, 2020
Risham Majeed with Blake Bradford / May 22, 2020 / Conversations Prefatory note, in the time of COVID-19: When I started this project, it was unimaginable that museums would be shuttered inde nitely and that we would all be in self-isolation, clinging to virtual reality for sporadic shards of normalcy. As I revisited my dialogue with Blake Bradford during the editorial process, it seemed to me that our exchanges in real life, in real space, could serve as a proxy visit to these unique and vital museums and monuments. Blake and I were unable to meet in Montgomery, Alabama, which itself requires some e ort to reach from New York City and Philadelphia, and so we began our conversation, which we did not record, on the phone. Blake and I had already (separately) visited the National Museum for African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution (NMAAHC), in Washington, DC, before our respective visits to Montgomery, and so we had the NMAAHC model in mind as the looming point of comparison in the intimate and emotive spaces of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) museum and memorial. Blake and I agreed that the EJI was a powerful testament and indictment of American history, and we wanted to highlight it as a kind of critical counterpoint to the NMAAHC project in Washington, knowing full well that Montgomery would receive a small fraction of the tra c. I begin with a short topographical description of Montgomery and the EJI, which is followed by an edited transcription of the conversations that Blake and I had in Washington, walking through the galleries of NMAAHC. I invite you to come along, think with us, perhaps argue with us, and keep the conversation going.-Risham Majeed
Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement: Place, Memory, and Conflict
The Professional Geographer, 2000
Produced over the past decade, monuments and museums dedicated to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s have desegregated America's memorial landscape. Tracing a broad arc across the US South, the material elements of this landscape-historic markers, monuments, parks, registered buildings, and museums-present a distinct challenge to representations of an elite, white American past. This challenge, however, is offered in a distinctly gendered manner, inasmuch as the role of women in organizing and leading the movement is obscured. Further, the historical narratives concretized at these sites are mediated by conventions associated with civil rights historiography and the tourism development industry. The result is a complex, sometimes ironic landscape. Via the narratives they embed and the crowds they attract, these landscapes are co-constitutive with contemporary politics of representing the past in the United States. This paper offers an overview of current memorial practices and representations of the Civil Rights movement found at the country's major memorial landscapes.
During the post–Reconstruction era in the United States, white southerners marked the cultural landscape with monuments and memorials honoring the Confederate cause and its heroes. These racialized symbols enjoyed an undisputed claim to public squares and parks throughout the South. It was not until the late twentieth century that commemorations to the black freedom struggle were publicly supported. This analysis examines the institutionalization of counter-memories of the civil rights movement in Memphis, Tennessee at the Lorraine Motel, the site of the assassination of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The author draws on collective memory, cultural trauma, and social movements research as well as critical race theory to explain the creation of the National Civil Rights Museum. Using primary and secondary data sources the author examines how social memory agents, a changing political culture, and the passage of time mediated the cultural trauma of King’s assassination and influenced the institutionalization of oppositional collective memories. Relying on Derrick Bell’s interest-convergence principle, the author concludes that the creation of this major memorial museum was a result of the convergence of white and black interests, specifically the economic and political interests of white elites and the cultural and political interests of black symbolic entrepreneurs.
Civil Rights Tourism in Mississippi: Openings, Closures, Redemption and Remuneration
Unlike Georgia and Alabama which have had large civil rights museums for many years, Mississippi is just beginning to acknowledge and memorialize this part of its history. Since 2005, visitors to Neshoba County, infamous for the murder of civil rights workers Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney, have been able to obtain copies of the African-American Heritage Driving Tour which directs tourists to nine points of interest associated with the 1964 killings. In examining this development, my aim is to highlight the diverse political, economic and psychological motives underlying civil rights tourism and the formation of the Philadelphia Coalition which came together to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the murders. In specific, this paper argues that civil rights tourism rests on four convergent trends: 1) the interest of the business community in re-imaging Mississippi, 2) the formation of a fragile alliance between white conservatives and moderate African-American leaders, 3) the search for redemption among white Christians, and 4) a growing concern over who will write Mississippi’s recent history.