The civil rights enterprise

On our trip to Atlanta, Selma, Montgomery and Memphis, we visited a number of civil rights shrines. Here's the executive summary of Memphis:


The National Civil Rights Museum, in Memphis, Tennessee. This is the site of the assination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is a monument to the civil rights movement, albeit with a steep admission price. This was the last museum we visited on our trip, and we had museum fatigue and did not actually go in. Rather, we looked at the balcony where MLK was standing when he was shot. We admired the 1968 cars parked in front of the motel. And we wondered about the makeshift tent across the street, where a women has lived for the last 20 years, protesting the gentrifiction of a still pretty gritty neighborhood and the desecration of King's memory by the museum. Jacqueline Smith was the last resident of the Loraine Motel before it was foreclosed in 1982. She advocates for spending the corporate dollars directed toward the museum on homeless women and their children, using the Loraine Motel as a shelter.

When we parked in a very close-in spot in the parking lot, an attendant came rushing out, asking us to move the car. The reason, we were told, was that it was a bad neighborhood and she couldn't watch our car properly unless it was in her sightlines from her perch under the eaves of the museum. The whole thing was somewhat surreal. We did not go to Graceland.