National Civil Rights Museum
Museum at the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr was killed in 1968.
The museum occupies the former Lorraine Motel, the lodging house where Martin Luther King Jr was shot on 4 April 1968 while supporting striking sanitation workers in Memphis. After the motel closed, a local campaign led by Judge D'Army Bailey secured the site, and a purpose-built museum wrapped around the surviving facade opened in 1991 to the designs of the Nashville firm McKissack & McKissack. Rooms 306 and 307 are preserved, and the balcony outside them is visible from the courtyard.
Displays trace African American history from the transatlantic slave trade through Reconstruction, segregation, the Montgomery bus boycott, the student sit-ins, the Freedom Rides and the Poor People's Campaign, closing with movements since 1968. A major reinterpretation completed in 2014 added film, oral testimony and reconstructed settings, including a Montgomery bus and a lunch counter. Across Mulberry Street, the former boarding house from which the shot was fired holds the Legacy Building's account of the investigation and its aftermath.
Highlights
- Preserved motel rooms 306 and 307 and the balcony outside them
- Reconstructed Montgomery bus and Woolworth lunch counter settings
- 'A Culture of Resistance: Slavery in America 1619-1861' gallery
- Legacy Building account of the assassination investigation
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