Hardly anyone had ever really heard of Room 306, or the Lorraine Motel for that matter, until just after 6:01 P.M. on Thursday, April 4, 1968. The borderline squalid, segregated motor court and interim residence on Mulberry Street in Memphis, which had passed through a prior incarnation as a whites-only whorehouse, quietly serviced celebrity black entertainers and other notables who drew crowds along the smoky, boozy, jazz and blues strips of nearby Beale Street but who could not lodge on the more imperial, whites-only Peabody Avenue. But few had much of an awareness of the nondescript cinder-block motel thrust between...

As a squall line and harsh weather conditions engulfed Memphis during the night of November 10, 1972, the lone pilot of a Twin Comanche aircraft returning home noticed a sharp cold front flaying his plane. Struggling with massively dark clouds, pounding rain, and mounting turbulence, he flicked on all his cabin lights to avoid blinding by the bolts and flashes of lightning. As the pilot uncharacteristically neglected the altimeter, the private plane became entangled in trees and crashed into an area later known as McKellar Park.

Only the drenching rains and howling winds prevented the aircraft from exploding into a...

The governor of Kentucky, Steve Beshear, issued an official Common-wealth press release on June 19, 2010:

LOUISVILLE, Ky.—Gov. Steve Beshear, joined by Louisville and community leaders, today unveiled a new highway sign that pays tribute to Georgia Davis Powers, the first African American in the Kentucky Senate. New signs will designate a 7.5-mile section of Interstate 264 in western Louisville as the Georgia Davis Powers Expressway.

The governor referred to Powers as a “trailblazer.” He mentioned that the dedication and renaming of the highway section were approved by Kentucky House Joint Resolution 67 during the 2010 General Assembly. A...

It was one o’clock in the morning, some seven hours since the shooting of Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony outside Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel. King’s body had been transferred from St. Joseph’s Hospital to the county coroner for an autopsy and then finally to the R. S. Lewis Funeral Home. Darkness was thick in Memphis with fear, ghouls, occasional gunfire, wailing sirens, and red lights flashing in the distance. The dogwoods wept with nocturnal trepidation.

The lights were blazing in Room 306. A few of King’s disciples, still numb, still trying to recalibrate their notion of...

Maxine Smith, the ebullient and resolute executive secretary of the Memphis NAACP, was late for dinner at Gwen and Billy kyles’s home on April 4, 1968. In her car were two visiting law students from out of town—they were planning to observe the projected sanitation workers’ march on Monday, April 8, to be led by Martin King Jr. King, of course, was to be the guest of honor at dinner

The streets were emptying, now just past 6:00 P.M., and a strange of trouble and trepidation pervaded the air. Maxine noticed a police red light flashing and siren screaming,...

On April 4, 2008, the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a variety of people with assorted agendas appeared at the Lorraine Motel site. Beverly Robertson, the vivacious and proficient president and CEO of the National Civil Rights Museum, had her hands full accommodating the press; a swell of visitors; civil rights veterans who reminisced, wept, and prayed; and a bevy of Secret Service agents.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, the future secretary of state, converged upon site: she was in the thick of her still vitriolic race for the Democratic presidential nomination against Barack Obama. In pouring...

Memphis shook when Benjamin Hooks died,on April 15, 2010. The obituary in theWashington Post,while highlighting his extended leadership of the NAACP, also cited his presidency of the National Civil Rights Museum along with his receiving in 2007 the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush. Over the years, the fiery preacher-attorney had met frequently with Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel.

CBS News quoted from Hooks’s last keynote address to the NAACP, which took place in 1992: “Remember that down in the valley where crime abounds and dope proliferates . . . where babies are...

In his bookWillie Mays: The Life, the Legend,James Hirsch writes about the 1948 World Series of the Negro Leagues. For years, when Negro Leagues teams came to Memphis to play the Memphis Red Sox, the visitors generally stayed at the Lorraine Motel—including Willie Mays, who had a brief tenure with the Chattanooga Choo-Choos.

But in 1948 the Birmingham Black Barons, featuring the future New York and San Francisco Giants superstar and “Say Hey Kid,” competed against the Homestead Grays in the Negro Leagues World Series. A young, traveling photographer from Memphis named Ernest C. Withers, with a...

While the United States celebrated its 215th anniversary of independence on July 4, 1991, a ceremonial took place at the site of the former Lorraine Motel, 450 Mulberry Street, in Memphis. The hibiscus trees were basking in the heat and humidity, displaying glossy green leaves that proudly framed their strident pink, red and purple blooms. The azaleas receded even as the creeks, the rivers, and the wetlands steamed in submission.

After years, even decades, of partisan wrangling, in-community posturing, hard fund-raising, much second-guessing, but with a pervasive sense that the Lorraine Motel could not be relegated to the blood and...

Lillian Benson’s father did not want to see Martin Luther King Jr. visit Memphis in the spring of 1968. He thought King should just focus on civil rights and avoid the labor dispute in Tennessee.

Lillian, now an admired television, video, and cinema editor, and the first African American female member of the American Cinema Editors, an honorary editing society, was studying fine arts in college. Among her manifold credits, perhaps her preeminent acclaim is for editing the King episode ofEyes on the Prize 2,the multiple award–winning television series. She was only the second in her working-class...

“Oh, it was a struggle,” said the lively, middle-aged, buoyant mother of three adults who has been the president and executive director of the National Civil Rights Museum since 1997. Beverly Robertson, a clear-eyed Memphis State University graduate and veteran of the Wharton School of Business and the Getty Museum Leadership Institute, does not appear to be a person daunted by any struggle. But the “struggle” she referred to, as we sat together in her busy office at the museum, just several hundred feet from Room 306, was the effort to wrangle control of the museum’s original board—and its...

It’s not likely that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the glittering red carpet at the annual Academy Awards in Hollywood are generally associated in the same thought. King did proudly don a tuxedo for his acceptance of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway—an occasion of significant pageantry. He was there, however, for his cumulative work (and frequent imprisonments) in the name of human rights; what specifically garnered him the designation as a laureate was his now classic letter from the Birmingham city jail, which he penned on torn and tattered pieces of paper that were passed...

In the simple, almost transient-looking one-story space called Cypress Hall D, set among more marble and architecturally appealing buildings on the campus of Stanford University, sits the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Here is housed the world’s most complete collection of the reverend’s speeches, letters, papers, and published and unpublished works, as well as an ongoing documentation and collection of his life’s work in text, microfilm, and video.

In one of the hallway display cases, almost lost among the strata of clippings, photographs, old programs, book covers, and assorted magazine flaps, a familiar face and a...

“We’ve had Billy Kyles out here a number of times,” said the tall, lanky scholar who sat comfortably across from me. Clayborne Carson, historian, researcher, and international lecturer on peace reconciliation, and nonbelligerent protest, had received me office. “Kyles tells his story with power. He’s really very good.”

Carson has been the director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute located on the campus of Stanford University since 1985. He is informal, quiet in his speech, and more often than not can be found comfortably dressed in one of his trademark woolen sweaters of soft colors that...