HIGHWAY TO FREEDOM
Follow Martin Luther King’s life and legacy on a poignant U.S. road trip
THERE’S nothing immediately striking about room 306. Faded apricot sheets are tucked neatly around twin beds. Between them stands a small round table, topped with a brown telephone. Yet this bedroom in Memphis’s Lorraine Motel either silences visitors or makes them sob. This is where Martin Luther King Jr was staying when, on April 4, 1968, he was shot dead on the balcony. Now the room is a poignant exhibit in the National Civil Rights Museum, housed in the motel’s original building. With the 50th anniversary of King’s death coming up next year, the people and places associated with the civil rights movement he led are being remembered anew. Tour agency Travel South USA launches a Civil Rights Trail in January, mapping sites throughout America, while car rental company Hertz is adding a civil rights route to its internet Road Trip Planner so you can follow King’s life from his birthplace in Atlanta, Georgia, on and up through Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi. I pick it up in Memphis, staying at stylish Hotel Napoleon seconds from brightly lit Beale Street, home of the Delta blues. Music is the heart and soul of this Tennessee city, drifting from its bars and rising from the muddy banks of the Mississippi River. When America’s South was racially segregated and marred by violence, the music played on regardless. At Stax Records, in south Memphis, artists were judged on two criteria — whether they could make music and whether they had soul. A tour of the studios, which recorded Otis Redding, reveals how King’s assassination altered that dynamic. For the first time, said Steve Cropper of house band Booker T & The MGs, there was a division between black and white artists. Driving south through Mississippi, I pass trees stretching from swampland and maroon fields tufted with cotton. U.S. Route 61 — the Great River Road — runs parallel to the wide, wiggly Mississippi. I stop in Clarksdale, where the impressive Delta Blues Museum tells more musical history. Exhibits include Muddy Waters’s ramshackle timber cabin, where he lived as a sharecropper before becoming a huge blues star. Next door, Ground Zero Blues Club, co-owned by actor Morgan Freeman, serves crispy fried catfish and burgers alongside local craft brews. A guitar signed by John Lee Hooker sits above the bar while the tablecloths, chairs and walls are covered with visitors’ scrawls. I have to use a rickety stool, placed precariously on the bar, to reach an empty spot and sign my name.
AFEW hours’ south in Jackson, the Fairview Inn’s thickly carpeted corridors lead to grand rooms with four-poster beds, whirlpool baths and fireplaces. The city also witnessed key moments in the civil rights struggle. The movement’s Mississippi leader, Medgar Evers, was assassinated outside his Jackson home in June 1963, shot by a lone Klansman. On a tour of the ranch- style building, now a museum, I run my fingers over a bullet hole that pierces the wall between the living room and kitchen. Faded pink patches stain the driveway where Evers’s blood soaked into the flagstones. It was also in Jackson that anti- segregation Freedom Riders, arriving on Greyhound buses in May 1961, were rounded up, beaten and thrown in jail. The city’s new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum records such events unflinchingly. It opened this month alongside the Museum of Mississippi History, ahead of the state’s bicentennial in 2018. That the two share a lobby is no coincidence — this is the civil rights movement in context. Everyone walks in together. Exhibits include the flaking, whitewashed doors of Bryant Grocery from Money, Mississippi, where, in August 1955 Emmett Till, a 14-year- old visiting from Chicago, was accused of wolfwhistling at the white shopkeeper. His brutal torture and murder four days later galvanised the civil rights movement. There’s a wall of Freedom Riders’ mugshots and the singed door of a pickup truck belonging to Vernon Dahmer, a civil rights leader murdered by the Klan. Monoliths, listing the names and crimes of lynching victims in Mississippi, loom menacingly in each gallery. Relief comes in a central, circular space called This Little Light Of Mine, where photos of civil rights heroes line the walls and a light sculpture sends tendrils creeping into the surrounding galleries. The song, a civil rights anthem, plays constantly in the background. As more people gather, the sculpture brightens and the tune swells in volume — a testament to those whose light, even in the darkest moments, could not be dimmed.