Friday, October 23, 2020
Day two in Memphis. Today was museum and history day. We went to the Civil Rights Museum which is housed in the Lorraine Hotel where Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated. It followed civil rights events starting with the slave trading that occurred over 400 years ago.
This museum trip was particularly poignant, sad and moving in light of the continued struggles the Black population is still dealing with this very year with police brutality. The museum traveled through the civil rights movements and ended in the room and balcony where Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated. Then it continued to the hotel room where James Earl Ray supposedly fired the shot. It covered the events and evidence that was collected regarding the murder.
The pictures below will be eerily familiar to anyone who lived through that time period. It was for me.
Balcony where MLK was standing with friends when he was shot.
Turning around with your back to the Lorraine Hotel you can see the boarding house where the shot came from. THis is now part of the Civil Rights Museum and you continue across the street to enter into this section to continue the story.
On closer inspection as you are looking at the boarding house you can see the glassed in portion where they believe the assassin stood. The following picture is taken from that glass enclosure looking back over to the Lorraine Hotel.
We ended up spending 3.5 hours at this museum. well worth the time.
To lighten the mood we decided to have some BBQ and went to Central City BBQ just a block walk away. That turned out to be a great choice (as recommended by many other eaters)
So, around 3:30 we made our way to the Rock n Soul Museum also close by. I was thinking that this would really be entertaining to Bob who loves music but it turned out to be equally interesting to me as well. All this music has it origins in the itinerant farmers - blacks (blues and jazz) and whites (Hillbilly) entertaining themselves after a hard days work in the fields.
One thing that was fun to me was the variety of Juke Boxes. Jukeboxes were most popular from the 1940s through the mid-1960s, particularly during the 1950s. By the middle of the 1940s, three-quarters of the records produced in America went into jukeboxes. They acted as coin-operated phonographs in bars and restaurants.
1928 - Player piano manufacturer Justus P. Seeburg melds an electrostatic speaker with a coin-operated record player, creating the Audiophone. The machine featured eight separate turntables on a Ferris-wheel-type device, allowing listeners to choose between eight records.
1959 AMI
The Wurlitzer Bubbler: the video shows the bubbling in the lite tubes.
One other notable structure in the same area (just a block over from Beale Street) was the FedEx Forum where the Memphis Grizzlies (NBA basketball team) play.
Lynne your blog is fantastic, I love hate the pages show up as a picture, dialogue and read more, that is so different than just the date as when I blogged. I am sorry we missed the museums, your discriptions and pictures were fascinating! Keep them coming, our prayers for safety during your travels.
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