National Civil Rights Museum

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Motel where Rev. King was assassinated, now the site of the National Civil Rights Museum

The National Civil Rights Museum is in Memphis, Tennessee, USA. It is built around the former Lorraine Motel at 450 Mulberry Street, where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

The Lorraine Motel remained open following King's assassination until it was foreclosed in 1982. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Foundation purchased the property at auction in December of that year. In 1987 construction of the museum started, opening its doors to visitors on September 28, 1991. The exhibits of the museum tell the story of the struggle for African American civil rights from the arrival of the first Africans in the British colonies in 1619 to the assassination of King in 1968.

An expansion project in 2001 added the Young and Morrow Building -- the former rooming house at 418 South Main Street where James Earl Ray fired the shots that killed King -- to the Museum. The exhibits in the Rooming House relate the events of the assassination, the Poor People's Campaign, and the legacy of the civil rights movement.