TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/080591/0805600.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.4 KB | 112 lines

                                                                                HISTORY, Page 56

The Glory and the Glitz


The new National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis is a classic
jumble of laudable intentions and bad taste

By WALTER SHAPIRO/MEMPHIS


    As soon as a tourist steps onto the replica of a
Montgomery bus, a pre recorded voice will emanate from the
vicinity of the mannequin behind the wheel. "All right, you
folks, I want those two seats," the facsimile driver will say.
"Y'all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those
two seats.'' In the middle of the bus, a plaster of Paris
simulacrum of Rosa Parks will just sit there, a mute symbol of
the incident that sparked the epic Montgomery bus boycott.
"Look, woman, I told you I wanted the seat!" the mock voice of
the bus driver will continue. "Are you going to stand up?" The
plaster statue of Parks will remain motionless.

    This historical exhibit is typical of the aggressive
multimedia style that will characterize the National Civil
Rights Museum when it opens its doors in Memphis at the end of
August. Here the sit-in movement will be commemorated by four
mannequins seated at a Southern lunch counter as the wall behind
them broadcasts footage of the taunts and attacks of an actual
white segregationist mob. Will these exhibits be inspiring,
living history or a parody of the Disney style? What is one to
make of a museum whose board chairman, Tennessee Circuit Judge
D'Army Bailey, says seriously that "I wanted not only sirens and
barking dogs, but I even envisioned a whiff of tear gas"?

    The sights and sounds of the civil rights era will surely
all be there, but Bailey's olfactory mementos have fortunately
proved impractical. Still, this state- and locally funded museum
will push the barriers of good taste in its quest to create a
sense of historical immediacy and emotional context for a jaded
theme-park generation. "We estimate that 60% of those coming to
the Civil Rights Museum will not have been old enough to
remember the 1960s," explains exhibit designer Gerard
Eisterhold. "We are trying in the exhibits to give them a You
Are There feeling."

    The there is part of the taste problem: the museum has
been constructed within the rebuilt shell of Memphis' Lorraine
Motel, site of the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
At first King's family dissociated themselves from the museum
because of this macabre legacy, though Coretta Scott King
relented and appeared at the dedication ceremonies in early
July, receiving a $15,000 honorarium. Yet there remains
something troubling about turning the Lorraine into a tourist
attraction.

    Visitors to the museum will be invited to peer through
glass walls at two meticulously preserved bedrooms from the old
Lorraine -- Room 307, where King often stayed, and Room 306,
where he conferred with his lieutenants moments before he was
shot on the adjoining balcony. "There was some discussion of
populating Room 306 with figures," Eisterhold recalls but
acknowledges that this seemed close to blasphemy. Nevertheless,
he defends the decision to re-create King's last supper
(catfish) with a room-service tray and dirty dishes, as well as
to leave a copy of the April 4, 1968, Memphis Press-Scimitar
open on the bed. "It seemed," Eisterhold argues, "that we had
to indicate some evidence of habitation."

    The genesis of the Civil Rights Museum is entwined with
the Lorraine Motel in a classic American jumble of laudable
intentions, questionable aesthetic judgment, outside experts and
civic boosterism. In 1982 a small group of Memphis black leaders
bought the threadbare Lorraine just minutes before a bankruptcy
auction and possible demolition. Their original notion was to
create some sort of King memorial, but an attorney for the King
Center in Atlanta asked that they not use the King name. Instead
the group obtained government funding for a civil rights museum.

    All they lacked was a plan. That came in 1986, courtesy of
Benjamin Lawless, the retired exhibition director of the
Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington,
who had originally gone to Memphis as a consultant to the not
exactly understated monument to Elvis Presley at Graceland.

    Lawless, an unabashed showman, likens the opening of the
Civil Rights Museum to "putting on a film or theater." His most
provocative artistic concept was to construct a laser beam that
would follow the flight path of assassin James Earl Ray's bullet
from his vantage point in a window across the street to the
balcony of the Lorraine, from which it would be reflected
heavenward. This notion prevailed even after the museum was
unable to get permission to use the window where Ray stood. Now
the laser beam will start roughly at the point where the bullet
entered the motel grounds. "I got all the historians working on
the exhibits betting that the laser is the worst idea in the
world," Lawless concedes. "But if that's the case, we can turn
it off and just use it in the sound-and-light show."

    Sound-and-light show indeed. What could be more
historically apt for a moral crusade that uplifted the nation
than a bit of son et lumiere? Those who are offended by the
well-intentioned effort may take some comfort: it could have
been worse. No one in Memphis has suggested building bumper cars
to commemorate the Freedom Riders. At least, not yet.