History
The first hotel on the site was the 16 room Windsor Hotel built on the northern side of the complex around 1925 which was renamed the Marquette Hotel. Walter Bailey purchased it in 1945 and renamed it for his wife Loree and the song Sweet Lorraine. During segregation it was an upscale accommodation that catered to a black clientele. He added a second floor and then drive up access for more rooms on the south side of the complex converting the name from Lorraine Hotel to Lorraine Motel. Its guests included musicians going to Stax Records including Ray Charles, Lionel Hampton, Aretha Franklin, Ethel Waters, Otis Redding, The Staple Singers and Wilson Pickett.
Following the assassination of King, Bailey left Room 306 (the room King was assassinated in front of) and the adjoining room 307 unoccupied as a memorial to King. Bailey's wife Loree, who suffered a stroke hours after the assassination, died five days after the assassination. Bailey converted the other motel rooms to single room occupancy.
Bailey worked with Chuck Scruggs, program director of WDIA and attorney D'Army Bailey, to raise funds to "Save the Lorraine" in the newly formed Martin Luther King Memorial Foundation, and bought the motel for $144,000, following foreclosure in December 1982. The name was changed to Lorraine Civil Rights Museum Foundation in 1984. The Lorraine closed as a motel on March 2, 1988, when sheriff's deputies forcibly evicted the last holdout tenant, Jacqueline Smith, in preparation for an $8.8 million overhaul. Bailey died in July 1988.Smithsonian Institution curator Benjamin Lawless created a design for saving historical aspects of the site. The Nashville, Tennessee firm McKissack and McKissack was tapped to design a modern museum on those portions of the grounds that were not directly related to the assassination.
The museum was dedicated on July 4, 1991 and officially opened to the public on Sept. 28, 1991.
In 1999 the Foundation acquired the Young and Morrow Building, and its associated vacant lot on a hill on the West side of Mulberry. A tunnel was built under the lot, connecting the building with the motel. The Foundation became the custodian of the police and evidence files associated with the assassination, including the rifle and fatal bullet, which are on display in a 12,800 sq. foot exhibit in the building. The building opened Sept. 28, 2002.
In 2012, Michigan State University Press released author Ben Kamin's oral history, 'ROOM 306: The National Story of the Lorraine Motel,' which chronicles the assassination of MLK at the Lorraine Motel site and the difficult campaign that ensued to save the motel from foreclosure or demolition and the eventual transformation of the site into the National Civil Rights Museum.
Read more about this topic: National Civil Rights Museum
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