I got up at 7:00, but Terry didn't make it out of bed until after 10:00. Hey, we were on vacation. I passed the time with crossword puzzles.
For breakfast, we dined graciously on a muffin and a banana from Circle K, and then we went to see the National Civil Rights Museum (w) :
...which is housed in the former Lorraine motel, where Martin Luther King was killed. A wreath hangs on the balcony outside of the room he was staying in:
...and the vintage cars in the parking lot are of the style that would have been there that day.
In the courtyard, there were several listening stations playing audio and video telling about the sanitation worker's strike that had brought King to Memphis. They pointed out something interesting that I hadn't known. The night before his death, King made a speech in support of the strike. The speech has come to be known as the "Ive Been To The Mountaintop" speech (w). Here's an excerpt:
Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live – a long life; longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.
It was almost as if he predicted his death the next day. I recognized the quote from, of all places, a U2 concert video. In the song "Pride (In The Name Of Love)," which is U2's tribute to Dr. King, they included a video clip of that portion of King's speech. Across the street from the motel, there was a large metal sculpture incorporating the quote. I read it to Terry, and surprised myself by choking up when I got to last couple of lines.
Also across the street from the museum, a woman had set up a table on the corner, covered with signs and banners protesting the museum's existence. I found out later that the woman is Jacqueline Smith, the last resident of the motel before it closed down. She feels that the museum focuses too much on King's death and not enough on his life and work, and that the money spent on the museum could have been better spent on programs to help the poor. She also claims that the museum contributes to the gentrification of the neighborhood, pushing out the very people King was fighting for. Apparently, this woman has been camped out on that corner for more than 30 years. You can read more about her in the Wikipedia article (w).
The museum offers an extremely comprehensive history of civil rights in the U.S., from slavery, through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Brown v. Board of Education, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Selma march, the Woolworth lunch counter sit-ins, etc. I didn't take many pictures, but here are a few:
A slave auction
A slave ship
African kente cloth (w)
Woolwoth lunch counter
Museums like this often create a dilemma for me, especially if they contain large amounts of text to read, as this one did. I started out reading, if not everything, at least enough to give Terry the general idea. But as we progressed through the museum, going through room after room, looking at one exhibit after another, I found myself reading less and less, until by the end, I was hardly reading anything. It just got to be overwhelming.
The museum featured a number of audio clips, including a reading from Martin Luther King's Letter From Birmingham Jail, and songs by The Freedom Singers (w), a quartet of young black singers (including Bernice Johnson Reagon, who later founded the a capella group Sweet Honey In The Rock), whose music was very influential in the Civil Rights Movement of the sixties. Terry was so impresed by what we heard that later, she asked me to find their album on Apple Music.
After leaving the museum, we went for a little drive. I stopped and took a short walk in a park alongside the banks of the Mississippi River. Living in L.A., where rivers are concrete ditches that may or may not have any water in them, I'm always impressed to visit places where they have real rivers. And the Mississippi is as real as it gets.
The park was called Tom Lee Park (w), and I found this monument explaining who Mr. Lee was and why he has a park named for him. For the sake of my visually impaired readers, I'll reproduce the text of the monument here:
TOM LEE MEMORIAL
A very worthy Negro
Tom Lee with his boat "Zev" saved thirty-two lives when the steamer U.S. Norman sank about twenty miles below Memphis May 8, 1925. But he has a finer monument than this - an invisble one - a monument of kindliness, generosity, courage and bigness of heart. His good deeds were scattered everywhere that day and into eternity.
This monument erected by the grateful people of Memphis.
Well and good, but I thought the words of praise were somewhat offset by the "very worthy Negro" comment. Oh well, the monument was erected in 1954... it was a different time.
When Terry was a little girl, her family moved to Arkansas, and lived there for about a year. Since Arkansas is right across the river from Memphis, she wanted to drive over and say hello - although actually, they lived in Little Rock, about a two hour drive away. So we drove over the river on this bridge:
...drove around for a while, and came back over the river on this bridge:
Back at the BnB, Beth dropped by to offer Kettle some food - some ground pork and several chunks of watermelon. Of course, we politely refused. We then spent some time dithering about where to have dinner. We finally decided on a place back over the river in Arkansas, that we found on the Internet and thought it looked good. Alas, when we got there, we found it closed. So we looked around for an alternative, and ended up at a very good Japanese restaurant a couple of blocks away.
When we first discussed going to Memphis, we thought we might go to visit Graceland. However, neither one of us are huge Elvis fans, and Graceland is rather expensive. So we decided to just drive by and wave. So after dinner, we drove back into Memphis and went to find Graceland. We found a large complex of buidings - a museum, a theater, etc. - but couldn't see the house. I asked a passing security guard, "Is the house itself not visible from the road?" He answered, "It's across the street!"
Oops. So we went across the street - and a little ways up the block - and there it was:
...surrounded by a stone wall, every square centimeter of which was covered with people's names and dates of visits and love letters to Elvis:
I declined to make my own contribution to the cacaphony, but I was amused to notice that some thoughful soul - or maybe a Graceland employee, I don't know - had left a Sharpie on top of the wall for future visitors:
And that was it for the day. Here's a map:
In the upper left corner, the green strip along the river, near the Civil Rights Museum, is Tom Lee Park. The two bridges we drove across were Interstate 55 (Tennessee to Arkansas) and Interstate 40 (Arkansas to Tennessee).