Martin Luther King Jr. and the Shadow of the Lorraine Motel

Travel Blog  •  Eva Holland  •  04.08.08 | 1:09 PM ET

lorrainemotelPhoto by tbertor1 via Flickr, (Creative Commons).

Traveling through the South last month, I seemed to come across Martin Luther King Jr.‘s name almost everywhere I went—from the display at the old Stax Records site explaining the impact of his assassination on the collaboration between white and black soul artists, to the homeless man in Atlanta who advised me that an unspecified “they” would surely kill Barack Obama “just like Dr. King.” The King assassination cast a long shadow, and not just because the 40th anniversary of his death was looming. (It was Friday.)

So I was interested to read Kim McLarin’s Postcard from Memphis Past in The Root this week, about growing up in Memphis in the years after King’s death.

McLarin writes: “As I sit down to write about growing up in Memphis in the shadow of Martin Luther King Jr., I find it difficult, because that shadow seemed simply not to exist ... I don’t know if it was my family or Memphis or black people or America who wanted to forget the brilliant struggle and its painful aftermath during those years, but forget we seemed to.”

McLarin’s story is a compelling collection of memories and anecdotes from a time when the places that define Memphis for most people today—Beale Street, Graceland, or the Lorraine Motel, where King was assassinated—didn’t mean much of anything.

As she writes: “In the Memphis of my youth the Lorraine was a dump, and we never talked about Dr. King. But we were living him. Now we talk about him all the time.”

 

Tags: History Travel, News and Briefs

Eva Holland is co-editor of World Hum. She is a former associate editor at Up Here and Up Here Business magazines, and a contributor to Vela. She's based in Canada's Yukon territory.


3 Comments for Martin Luther King Jr. and the Shadow of the Lorraine Motel

maldita culera 04.08.08 | 4:19 PM ET

this is so kool

Ling 04.09.08 | 7:53 AM ET

Might be a bit more bearable if we understood that the fierce urgency of now is still fiercely urgent. Not necessary to be a histroy buff, but ideals and values need to filter down across generations.

Lyn 04.09.08 | 3:57 PM ET

If you spent a lot of time in the “South” then you’d live Martin Luther King’s legacy - black-on-White crime.  The real Martin Luther King does not deserve the good reputation that King has today.  As for Memphis, it could be a lot better of a place than it is.  Well, except that it also has rampant crime.  That they turned the motel into a “national” civil rights museum is a slap in the face to Whites.  Blacks don’t deserve a museum, and neither does King.

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