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A wreath marks the spot where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death on the second floor of the Lorraine Motel, now part of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis
The Memphis sanitation workers’ strike began as a local story. It was overshadowed by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. Five days later, when Dr. King was buried, the strike was still going on but the attention had shifted to Atlanta.
Time magazine reported in its April 19, 1968, issue:
“The march King led in death through Atlanta proved grander — both in attendance and dedication to his ideals — than any he had led in life. Fully 200,000 Americans, black and white, walked the sun-beaten streets of the Peach State’s capital.”
After the funeral at his Ebenezer Baptist Church, King’s body was taken on a four-mile march to another service at his alma mater Morehouse College, “on a sharecropper’s cart drawn by a brace of mules,” Time reported.
Georgia’s Gov. Lester Maddox had refused to close schools on the day of the funeral, and later protested the lowering of the flag to half-staff.
Two days later, on April 11, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which outlawed discrimination in the sale, rental or financing of housing. The Fair Housing Act, as it was also known, followed 1964′s landmark legislation that outlawed segregation in the U.S. schools and public places.
With Johnson’s Undersecretary of Labor James Reynolds in charge of mediating the Memphis strike, the city and union officials reach an agreement. On April 16, the strikers voted to accept it and the strike was over.
Though the fight for civil rights is still going on, our nation has come a long way since those days in the spring of 1968.
Today, the Lorraine Motel stands as a memorial to the civil rights movement and serves as a physical legacy of King’s works. The National Civil Rights Museum takes visitors through the fear, anger and hatred of the era. As you wind through the exhibits of photos, documents and newspaper clippings, you see videos of violence against (mostly) black Americans involved in marches and sit-ins. You walk by a haunting display of a Birmingham bus with the voice of a driver telling you to go to the back. If you never experienced the violence of the times, the displays give you only small samples of what it was like. Then, you go up a ramp and find yourself peering through a window into the room in which Dr. King was staying when he was shot. The room, No. 306, stands today much like it must have been on April 4. Half-filled glasses and coffee cups are on the tables, the ashtrays are full of cigarette butts, the beds are unmade. The silence outside the room is deafening. The air is thick with somber emotion.
The Lorraine Motel has not only been preserved as a place to mourn a great American, it’s a place to learn from the past. The lessons it teaches about humanity must never be forgotten.