When you first come in to the museum, you are treated to an extremely large and busy sculpture called “Movement to Overcome” in the lobby that is worth seeing. It is hard to describe, but once seen will never be forgotten. Michael Pavlovsky created a 13-foot-by-26-foot, 7,000-pound bronze sculpture that represents a collection of human figures rising from and making their way on both sides of a narrow divide. The author stated that, "It’s about the anonymous individuals that we know nothing about now that lived the civil rights struggle and participated in it. They are forgotten. But the hundreds of images of human figures on that sculpture represent those anonymous individuals."
You buy your ticket and are ushered into a large circular room that contains sculptures and curated descriptions of the timeline of American slavery. There is enough time to see most of it before they open the doors to the theater for a short film clip of the museum. After this film clip, you are free to browse thru the museum at your own pace.
There are many, many exhibits in this very well-laid out and curated museum. I will highlight the ones that spoke to me. The first was the Montgomery bus boycott. The exhibit is called "The Year They Walked."
On December 1, 1955 Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, AL and sparked the American Civil Rights movement of the 20th century. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ordered Montgomery to integrate its bus system, and one of the leaders of the boycott, a young pastor named Martin Luther King Jr., emerged as a prominent leader of the American civil rights movement. Although Parks has sometimes been depicted as a woman with no history of civil rights activism at the time of her arrest, she and her husband Raymond were, in fact, active in the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Parks served as its secretary.
The Women’s Political Council (WPC), a group of black women working for civil rights, began circulating flyers calling for a boycott of the bus system on December 5, the day Parks would be tried in municipal court. Approximately 40,000 African-American bus riders—the majority of the city’s bus riders—boycotted the system the next day, December 5. That afternoon, black leaders met to form the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). The group elected Martin Luther King Jr., the 26-year-old-pastor of Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, as its president, and decided to continue the boycott until the city met its demands. On June 5, 1956, a Montgomery federal court ruled that any law requiring racially segregated seating on buses violated the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The exhibit contains a Montgomery city bus that visitors can enter and sit down on the bus with a life-size sculpture of Rosa Parks. There is an audio program that explains the bus boycott and the roles of Rosa Parks and young Rev. Martin Luther King. Outside the bus are life-size sculptures of the anonymous Black women who walked to and from work for a year to earn the right to sit anywhere on the bus they desired. In other words, they walked to work for a year to gain human dignity and set in motion a Civil Rights movement that would grow beyond their wildest dreams and thrust both Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King into the headlines and the history books.
Human rights stuggles do not appear as if by magic in one stroke of a woman who will not give up her seat on the bus. In February of 1956, a young man named Bayard Rustin arrived in Montgomery to help Dr. King and Rosa Parks with this nacent movement. Rustin had organized the first Freedom Ride in 1947 - a ride called the Journey to Reconciliation taken by 8 Black men and 8 White men from D.C. to Louisville to take action against discrimination on interstate buses. Bayard brought with him masterful organizing and strategic capabilities that grew the movement into a national force, and a firm commitment to Gandhi's nonviolent civil disobedience. Never heard of him? Perhaps because he was a gay man - a Black gay man.
Wyatt Tee Walker, a Freedom Rider who was arrested more than 17 times for challenging segregation in the South, had become executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1961 after King called to recruit him. Walker was the most famous man that no one ever knew during the Civil Rights campaigns. The local police were always searching for him because he arrived in town before every major Martin Luther King led march to identify, measure, and target every step along the way and devise the march strategy, but they could not arrest him because they did not know what he looked like. In October of 1967, Walker was arrested with Dr. King and spent 3 days in the Birmingham jail. Walker snuck a camera into the jail cell taped to his leg and took this iconic photo of King which is displayed at the museum. What is less known is that King snapped a photo of the elusive and rarely photographed W.T. Walker that same day. This was four years after King's famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" was written.
On 1 February 1968, two Memphis garbage collectors, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death by a malfunctioning truck. Twelve days later, 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 AFSCME President Jerry Wurf, demanded recognition of their union, better safety standards, and a decent wage. Within a week, the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) passed a resolution supporting the strike. The following day, after police used mace and tear gas against nonviolent demonstrators, Memphis’s black community was galvanized. Meeting in a church basement on 24 February, 150 local ministers formed Community on the Move for Equality (COME). COME committed to the use nonviolent civil disobedience to fill Memphis’s jails and bring attention to the plight of the sanitation workers.
By the beginning of March of 1968, local high school and college students, nearly a quarter of them white, were participating alongside garbage workers in daily "I Am a Man" marches; and over one hundred people, including several ministers, had been arrested. National civil rights leaders, including Roy Wilkins and Bayard Rustin, came to rally the sanitation workers. King himself arrived on 18 March to address a crowd of about 25,000 – the largest indoor gathering the civil rights movement had ever seen. Following this speech, the Southern Christian Leaderships Conference’s (SCLC) James Bevel and Ralph Abernathy remained to help organize the protest and work stoppage. Despite some violence from a group supporting the protestors, Dr. King on 3 April was persuaded to speak to a crowd of dedicated sanitation workers who had braved another snow storm to hear him, giving them his famous "I Have Been to the Mountaintop" speech. King told them that they could not give up now and preached about his own mortality, telling the group, “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life--longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now… I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land”
At 6:01 pm on April 4, 1968, as Dr. King stepped out on the balcony outside Room 306 of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, he was shot by James Earl Ray with a high powered rifle from the apartment building across the street. Dr. King had been preparing for an evening event in support of the garbage workers' strike. Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson, Hosea Williams, William Campbell, and musician Ben Branch were with him that evening. King was taken to St. Joseph's Hospital where he was pronounced dead at 7:05 pm, never having regained consciousness.
The museum tour ends at a very average 1960s-era motel room identified as Room 306. I thought it was a re-creation, as many of the items in the museum are. But no. This is the actual Room 306 that Dr. Martin Luther King was staying in that night and the room they pulled him back into after he was shot. It took my breath away. I was not expecting to have history thrust in my face quite so starkly. This was a powerful exhibit, but so exquisitely simple. It is difficult to describe all the feelings it brings up. The last photo is of the now-famous balcony. The wreath is a permanent fixture (probably not always done up in Christmas design, but a wreath is always there), as are the historically accurate 1960s era cars.
