National Center for Civil and Human Rights
Atlanta
The Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta isn’t a museum; it’s a “360-degree sensory experience where you will see, hear and feel what it would have been like to be part of these experiences,” said Kristie Raymer, vice president of marketing and sales for the National Center for Civil and Human Rights.
Visitors can sit at the lunch counter display and put on headphonesthrough which they will hear people yelling or whispering racial slurs as the chairs lurch and buck beneath them.
“It really is a life-changing experience,” Raymer said. “And not only did it happen, it happened for four hours, not a minute and a half.”
The re-enactment of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom features excerpts of chants, songs and speeches. In front of them, guests see the result — the peaceful protest; behind them are “all the components that went into executing that one day,” Raymer said.
The center also explores global human rights. In the “Who Like Me” exhibit, visitors choose a noun, such as “female,” “activist” or “artist,” and then look in a mirror and see their face reflected in the face of a person whose human rights have been violated.
The center will also rotate displays of its Martin Luther King Jr. papers and memorabilia throughout the year to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his assassination.
In addition to guided group tours, the center can arrange diversity and inclusion training programs.
National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel
Memphis, Tennessee
The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, wraps around the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
The museum held its grand reopening ceremony 46 years later following a $27-million renovation of its exhibits that kept iconic elements and artifacts, such as a sit-in counter, a Freedom Rider bus and a Memphis Sanitation truck, but updated them with interactive video, audio and touch screens.
“You get pulled into the history and the stories being told,” said Faith Morris, chief marketing and external affairs officer.
Visitors can crouch down in a slave ship and hear slaves chanting and moaning, listen to the music of the Black Power/Black Pride era and watch history-makers tell their stories in the “Acts of Courage” videos.
The Montgomery city bus isn’t new, but the museum added life-size statues of women walking to illustrate how the boycott “almost broke the bus system,” Morris said.
The “I Am a Man” exhibit tells how King came to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers. The two rooms where King would usually stay “were not changed; those are preserved,” Morris said. Guests can see into the rooms and through to the balcony where he was shot.
“When they come to the King rooms, it’s an emotional experience,” she said.
National Voting Rights Museum and Institute
Selma, Alabama
The National Voting Rights Museum and Institute in Selma, Alabama, sits at the foot of the infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge, where peaceful protestors marching for voting rights were beaten on March 7, 1965, also known as Bloody Sunday.
The museum’s exhibits highlight memorabilia, photos and artifacts from Selma’s past — from before the Reconstruction Era through President Barack Obama’s candidacy — and its role in efforts to register black voters in the South.
As images of protestors being violently beaten on Bloody Sunday spread across the nation, thousands of supporters flocked to Selma, where two weeks later, Martin Luther King Jr. successfully led the five-day march to the Capitol in Montgomery. The Selma marches played a pivotal role in the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that outlawed discriminatory voting policies and practices.
Throughout the museum, visitors will see footprint casts of “foot soldiers” who marched and protested. Other exhibits include a women’s suffrage gallery, a voting booth machine and a re-created jail cell sharing the stories of demonstrators who were arrested and imprisoned.
