Our final stop on our Civil Rights tour was at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, TN. The museum was at the infamous Lorraine Hotel where MLK Jr. was killed. We learned a plethora of information which included the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Sanitation Strike, Sit ins, the March on Washington, the assassination of MLK Jr. and fascinating information regarding his assassin, James Earl Ray.
Sit ins 1960
Above drinks and condiments are being poured on the heads of African American participating in Sit ins.
The lunch counter of 1960 was the equivalent of fast-food restaurants today. Hamburger chains were just beginning to appear on the American landscape. Ray Kroc had opened his first McDonald's about five years earlier; Burger King had gone national just the year before. People wanting a sandwich or a hamburger popped over to the lunch counter of department stores, drugstores and five-and-dime stores to have a bite.
Except black people.
State and local ordinances known as Jim Crow laws in at least 11 Southern states prohibited interracial interaction in most areas of public life — restaurants, schools, courtrooms, buses and trains, movie theaters, even reform schools.
Starting 50 years ago Monday, students across the South decided to change that.
The tactic they chose was simple: They sat at lunch counters and waited to be served. The stores refused to serve them, and the students were arrested and hauled off to jail, sometimes after being beaten and spat on by white mobs.
The tactic became known as sit-ins, and in 1960, tens of thousands of students across the South were doing it — protesting racial discrimination that had scarred their parents, risking their futures to try to ensure a better one for their children.
Perhaps 100,000 students participated in sit-ins, says historian Clayborne Carson; 3,000 were arrested in 1960 alone. (Info obtained here)
The March on Washington took place on August 28, 1963. It was the site of MLK JR's famous "I Have a Dream" speech. It was held at the Lincoln Memorial and was one of the largest political rallies for human rights in our history.
Memphis Sanitation Strike 1968
The night before his assassination in April 1968, Martin Luther King told a group of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee: “We’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point in Memphis. We’ve got to see it through” (King, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” 217). King believed the struggle in Memphis exposed the need for economic equality and social justice that he hoped his Poor People’s Campaign would highlight nationally.
On 1 February 1968, two Memphis garbage collectors, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death by a malfunctioning truck. Twelve days later, frustrated by the city’s response to the latest event in a long pattern of neglect and abuse of its black employees, 1,300 black men from the Memphis Department of Public Works went on strike. Sanitation workers, led by garbage-collector-turned-union-organizer, T. O. Jones, and supported by the president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), Jerry Wurf, demanded recognition of their union, better safety standards, and a decent wage.
Above information obtained here
The wreath is hanging by room 306, MLK's door. He was shot outside his hotel room on April 4th, 1968 by James Earl Ray.
Above is a picture of the room where James Earl Ray was staying across the street from the Lorraine Hotel.
This is a picture of the bathroom where James Earl Ray shot MLK. Below you can see the view of the Lorraine Hotel from the bathroom.
"Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it"-Poet/Philosopher George Santayana, 1905
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