Memphis

Using my last few vacation days of the year I was able to spend a few days in Memphis celebrating NILK's graduation from the U of Memphis.  That celebration occurred last Saturday evening.  Since I arrived on Thursday evening, I had quite a bit of time to spend doing other things.  One of the "other things" I decided to do was visit the National Civil Rights Museum in downtown Memphis.


The trip included NILB, NILK and FILN.  The four of us headed downtown, and started with a lunch at Gus's Fried Chicken (it's World Famous!) just a few blocks from the museum.  Gus's Chicken is a soul-food establishment with a limited menu - spicy chicken.  You can order it white, dark, or as strips, but it all comes out white and spicy.

While Gus claims to serve soul food, the patrons were overwhelmingly pasty white even though the restaurant is located in a predominately black neighborhood.   The chicken was tender and juicy, just like you get at KFC.  It was a little spicy, but not too much, just enough to get your attention.  Would I go back.?  Probably so, if I was in the mood for spicy chicken.

After lunch we were off to the museum.  I did not go immediately into the museum as a call from a boss at work delayed me.  I loitered outside as I took the call.  Seeing me as easy prey, a fairly aggressive panhandler approached.  His first comment was that he knew I was not prejudiced because, well,  I was here at the Civil Rights Museum wasn't I?  Memphis has some of the most thoughtful and intellectual pan handlers I have ever encountered.  After disposing of him without losing a cent (my personal policy), I entered the museum where I garnered my first ever senior discount.  At 55, I was entitled to a $2 discount over the normal $13 price of admission.  I could get used to this!

The museum is laid out chronologically, beginning with the early slave trade that included many of the founding fathers.  It moved on to Lincoln and the emancipation, followed by KKK, lynchings, and the WW1 and WW2 eras.  Most of the information presented dealt with the 50's and 60's and the struggle to force an unwilling south to abide by equal employment and civil rights laws enforced at the federal level.

Images from this period were especially powerful to me.  As a boy, I did not see "Whites Only" signs in my Kansas hometown.  They weren't there because the local population was 100% white.  But that doesn't mean there was no overt racism.  There was.  The news footage of blacks being literally washed off the streets with water cannons brought back distinct memories of comments I heard back then, such as "they should machine gun those niggers down".  Johnson County Kansas was no different than Selma Alabama in those days.  There just wasn't as much opportunity to notice.

The first half of the museum was much like others I have visited - far more information than can possibly be absorbed without spending days there.  I quickly found myself "driving by" most of the exhibits, stopping occasionally to spend time with something that caught my attention.  The second half of  the museum contained the most memorable items.  This is where the National Civil Rights museum acquired and restored the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King was murdered, and the boarding house across the street from where Jame Earl Ray shot him.  I can only express the experience of seeing (and remembering) the news footage and pictures from 1968 while standing on the same spot 43 years later, as especially powerful.  These are the memories I will retain.

The museum's content also brought back memories of that night in 1968.  While much of my family remember the night vividly since they were in Memphis, I remember the night because I and a friend "slept out" in my backyard.  We had seen the scenes of rioting coming out of Memphis and other cities.  There was a curfew in Kansas City that night, although rioting was minor.  But my friend and I wondered if blacks would begin burning the town down.  In my small town suburbia, it never happened.  A few nights later, a couple of arson instances were committed in Kansas City, but Shawnee Kansas emerged unscathed after the assassination of Martin Luther King.

Unscathed, but not unchanged.  In my lifetime, civil rights have progressed more that what my father could have ever imagined.  I remember when there was only a couple of black families who lived in the "colored holler" of Merriam, and when a single black kid began attending the same school as I did.  Now, blacks represent 5% of the local population.  I work with blacks every day.  They no longer are maids, custodians and bus boys, but can be found in just about any profession.  I believe most are seen as people first, and blacks second.  No matter what I hear from the "blacks are victims" charlatanism coming from Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, I know that we have all come a long way in one generation.