Memorial Agon: An interpretive tour of the national civil rights museum

Abstract

In 1991, the Lorraine Motel—infamous site of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination—reopened to the public under a refurbished name and identity: the National Civil Rights Museum. Although the remodeled interior looks nothing like it did in 1968, the balcony and motel rooms where the assassination took place have been preserved as a shrine to Dr. King. This essay explores the symbolic tension between the museum and Jacqueline Smith, a former resident of the Lorraine Motel who has protested the museums appropriation of King's memory since her eviction in 1988. Although Smith disrupts the community constituted in the museum, this disruption opens a space that encourages a more critical approach to King's memory and the museum's discourse. As a representation of African American heritage and identity, the National Civil Rights Museum underscores the rhetorical complexity of public memorializing when the distinction between official and vernacular cultural expression is obscured.

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