On Saturday we drove north from Money, Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee. There we visited the National Civil Rights Museum and the site of the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King was assassinated.

I had seen the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham, Alabama, which is across from Kelley Ingram Park and connected with the 16th Street Baptist Church (which was bombed in 1963, killing four young girls who were preparing for the church service on Sunday morning).

I had more time in the Birmingham site -- went through it twice, actually. I spent a much shorter time in the Memphis Museum, but found it equally informative and moving.

My impression from seeing both Museums is that the one in Birmingham focuses more particularly on the Civil Rights Movement (though it certainly contains other elements, as well), while the Memphis site speaks to the whole of the African American experience in America.

One photo on this page (if, indeed, I was actually able to get it on the page!) you will surely recognize. It is the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King was shot in 1967.

A part of the Museum is across the street -- the boarding house from where his assassin fired the shot.

The other photograph you may not recognize: it is part of a huge wall, in three or four parts, and is in the entrance of the Memphis museum. The wall depicts hundreds of bodies, climbing upward -- up a mountain? "I have been to the mountaintop . . . " Up From Slavery? The sculpture is beautiful and so moving -- and I wasn't supposed to be taking photographs of it. Before entering the museum proper I made the mistake of asking if I could take photographs, and the answer was (understandably) "NO." So I recommend that you travel to Memphis and see the Museum yourself. In it you will see thousands of images, so you'd better plan to stay weeks instead of hours. In it you will see exhibits about -- among other things:

The Integration of Little Rock High School

Marcus Garvey

W.E.B. DuBois

Martin Luther King (many of these)

Lunch Counter Sit-Ins

Voter Registration

Medgar Evers

Harriet Tubman

Sojourner Truth

The Scottsboro Boys

Freedom Summer

The Freedom Riders

Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman

Emmett Till and Mose Wright

The March on Washington

The Selma March

Ida B. Wells

Gandhi

Nelson Mandela

Letter from Birmingham Jail

And There's MORE!!!!!!!!!!

You name it: If it is about Civil Rights (in American or around the world), it is in there. Plan to spend five weeks, eight hours a day. And walk slowly.