LORRAINE MOTEL & NATIONAL CIVIL RIGHTS MUSEUM

The current museum was completed in 2014. It includes the Lorraine Motel and the museum itself. The annex building will house the entire museum until 2014.

Lorraine Motel. It was here, in this retro motel that accepted indiscriminately white and black people, that Martin Luther King had decided to stay to support the protest of the city's garbage collectors. He was murdered there on April 4, 1968 on the steps of room 306 upstairs. On the eve of his assassination, MLK, aware of the threats against him, had delivered his still famous Mountaintop Speech. He foresaw its imminent demise. Nothing's changed since the day of the murder, not the bedroom furniture or the two Cadillacs parked under the balcony. It is a place of pilgrimage and memory that cannot be ignored. An interior view of the room, behind the glass wall, is accessed from the top level of the main building of the National Civil Right Museum.

The museum. The tour begins on the ground floor with a permanent exhibition devoted to the history of slavery in the United States. It then continues with an introductory film (20 minutes in subtitled OV) on the premises of civil rights, followed by a visit to the different levels where the history of the civil rights struggle and the involvement of Martin Luther King's contemporaries in this struggle is recounted: the arrest of Rosa Parks, the burning of the Freedom Rider bus, the march from Selma to Montgomery, the Memphis garbage collectors' strike.... so many episodes narrated with reconstitution of sets and supporting documents. A great moment in American history.

The annex building of the museum. It is located in the extension of the Lorraine Motel, on the other side of Mulberry Street. It is accessed through a tunnel that leads to the house (a former boarding house) from where the fatal shot was fired upstairs. On the third floor, the museum traces the investigation that followed the murder, advancing the conspiracy theory. Indeed, for many, the shadows surrounding the assassination of the pastor by James Earl Ray remain unsolved. The second floor is dedicated to the evolution of civil rights in the United States. It also houses a photo wall of people who have been awarded a Freedom Award (a prize created in 1991 by the museum and awarded annually) for their actions in favour of civil and human rights. They include Bernard Kouchner, B.B. King, Colin Powell, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Leich Walesa, Bono (from the U2 group), Bill Clinton and Yitzhak Rabin. The last and lowest level leads to the exit via the shop.