Real' racism focus of civil rights museum

By By Sid Salter
March 20, 2002
MEMPHIS During spring break, my sister and I took my daughter and two nieces to the National Civil Rights Museum which incorporates the scene of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968 the Lorraine Motel at 450 Mulberry St.
King was shot on the motel balcony in front of Room 306 at 6 p.m. that fateful day as he prepared to go to dinner with friends after taking a break from mediating the Memphis garbage strike. Investigators concluded that James Earl Ray shot King once in the head from a sniper's perch in the bathroom of Room 5B in the Bessie Brewer boarding house across the street at 422 1/2 South Main.
Assassin couldn't miss
As a hunter, I could not escape the obvious reality of the short distance between the elevated sniper's lair and the motel balcony across the street for a man aiming a .30-06 rifle with a Redfield scope. King's assassin had the minister in a killing field as soon as he stepped outside. Even a moron crouching in a bathtub couldn't miss and Ray didn't.
I can't say the museum visit was fun for I take no pleasure in seeing a recreation of racial violence, social ignorance and constitutional havoc. But I'm glad I went and glad my family saw it with me.
Opened in 1991 after the motel property was rescued from foreclosure, the 27,000 sq. ft. museum chronicles the history of the civil rights movement from slavery to the King assassination. A $9 million expansion set to conclude within weeks will incorporate the sniper's lair, forensic evidence and prosecutorial records into the museum's holdings.
Every child in America should tour this museum. Wouldn't hurt the adults of my generation, either. In disturbing detail like a first mirror offered to a knife-attack victim the museum forces visitors to revisit the South's painful civil rights whistlestops: Little Rock, Oxford, Philadelphia, Jackson, Selma, Birmingham and Montgomery.
The names echo across the decades Turner, Roberts, Tubman, Truth, Douglass, Garrison, Brown, Washington, Till, Parks, Evers, Schwerner, Goodman, Chaney, Meredith and King.
Nothing contrived here
The racism depicted in this museum is not the made-for-press conference, contrived racism that is played in modern politics today like a prized trump card. No, the racism depicted here is the racism of my childhood in Mississippi raw, violent, dangerous and snarling like a rabid dog on a long chain in a small yard.
My daughter and my nieces know nothing of those days, for their lives have been lived in the better days of racial reconciliation, established school integration and shared public accommodations. They know more of Rodney King than of the late Rev. King, but they're learning.
Racism is the sad legacy of the South. As a people, we must be vigilant to build a new legacy of inclusion and respect. But too often, racism is used as a pawn in politics by those cynical few who see it not as an abiding evil, but as a political tool.
It was ironic that my visit to the Civil Rights Museum came a day after U.S. District Judge Charles Pickering was the victim of a political lynching on Capitol Hill. The refusal of Senate Democrats to send his nomination to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to the full Senate was based on contrived, manufactured allegations of racism and religious intolerance emanating from groups and individuals comprised in great measure of people who as Charles Evers observed "make a living off of keeping strife up between black and white in Mississippi."
Pickering a good, moral, decent man without a racist bone in his body was pilloried as a racist for political purposes by those who have apparently forgotten what real racism is or worse, by those who never really knew.