A while back, I passed on some information about the local efforts in Memphis to block white dominated, corporate interests from taking control of the Lorraine Motel, where MLK was assassinated, which has been made a National Civil Rights Museum. Gary Younge, who does excellent reporting on race issues, has picked up the story for The Nation.
Twenty years ago, the Lorraine Motel, where King was assassinated, was turned into a National Civil Rights Museum. The chair of the executive committee of its board, J.R. "Pitt" Hyde III, is a wealthy white Republican. Charged with safeguarding a vital landmark in the nation's racial history, Hyde lobbied for the defeat of Harold Ford Jr.'s bid for the vacant Senate seat from Tennessee in what was widely regarded as the most racist campaign of the 2006 election. While Hyde has been representing the civil rights museum, the company he founded, AutoZone, has been embroiled in a longstanding EEOC racial discrimination lawsuit.
The board, on which blacks are a minority, is packed with those who dedicate their lives not to civil rights but to corporate profits. And they know how to do business. Recently the board discussed exercising an option to buy the museum building from the State of Tennessee, which owns it, for $1. (Apparently they never made a formal offer, as they knew it would be rejected.) Black history on sale at bargain prices.
Younge lays out high stakes of this battle over memory and symbol.
Hyde and the corporate agenda he represents remain at the core of that "problem," which keeps one in four Memphis residents (who are mostly black) below the poverty line.
The civil rights movement made great strides in achieving integration. But that victory prompted white supremacy to become more skillful and subtle in its bid for self-preservation. Segregation was outlawed, but its economic, social and cultural legacy was left intact. Black people in Memphis now have the right to go into any restaurant they like. Unfortunately, many cannot afford anything on the menu.
Second, the story of the Lorraine museum is a brazen example of the crude but effective manner in which the right, which fought so hard to thwart the work of the civil rights movement in its heyday, has sought to buy, co-opt or otherwise manipulate the movement's most popular emblems.
Four years ago fundamentalists stood on the steps of Alabama's Supreme Court building, waving Confederate flags and singing "We Shall Overcome" as they protested the removal of the Ten Commandments from the rotunda. A few months earlier, opponents of affirmative action went to the building to protest a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment--ratified to protect the rights of freed slaves. They called on universities to judge applicants not by "the color of their skin but by the content of their character," words of course lifted from King's "I Have a Dream" speech.
"Nowadays they like the fact that they can sit down to dinner at the site of the King assassination," says Circuit Judge D'Army Bailey, a founder of the museum who was ousted from the board. "It gives them a good feeling. Corporations want to be identified with it because that kind of identification brings pacification. It's been hijacked."
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