Geoff Oates sends a postcard from Memphis, Tennessee
The National Museum of Civil Rights stands next to the Lorraine Motel, now itself
a part of the museum, where Martin Luther King was murdered on April 4th 1968.
It tells the story, decade by decade, from the first movement of enslaved Africans to the North American mainland in the 17th century. The early exhibits show sketches and lithographs of slave life from old textbooks. The false
dawn of the Civil War (1861-65) brings the first grainy photographs. For the
following 100 years tension, progress and regression are chronicled (most Europeans
don't learn about this bit), and the photographs become disturbingly clear and
modern.
Suddenly you are in the video age and realise that you are seeing the events of
your own lifetime, now with shocking realism. This isn't history anymore. You
hear the thrilling rhetoric of Dr King, and the bitter irony of his words: 'I
may not get there with you, but I have seen the Promised Land'. As you visit
the site of his martyrdom, you might expect you are at the end of the tour. But
this is not the Museum of Martin Luther King. The Museum still has another 50
years of struggle to portray.
It doesn't get any more comfortable as the pictures and videos move into High Definition. They will soon, I am sure, be adding new exhibits for the 2020's. It may be a museum, but it isn't history.
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