The Story of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis
The Windsor Hotel, at the corner of Mulberry Street and Huling Avenue near downtown Memphis, opened in the 1920s. Walter and Loree Bailey purchased the Windsor in 1942 and re-named it the Lorraine Hotel.
In the days of legal segregation, the Windsor / Lorraine was one of the few hotels in Memphis open to black guests. Its location, walking distance from Beale Street, the main street of Memphis’ black community, made it attractive to visiting celebrities. When Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan, or Nat Cole, came to town, they stayed at the Lorraine.
Later, an annex, typical in design of motels built along America’s new Interstates in the 1960s, was added behind the original mustard-yellow brick hotel.
In March 1968, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King visited Memphis to support the city’s striking garbage collectors. He checked into the Lorraine, and led a march that, despite his policy of non-violence. turned violent. A second march was then planned.
On April 3, in a speech at Memphis Mason Temple, Dr. King said “We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountain top. I won’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life.”
Dr. King was assassinated at the Lorraine the next night, as he stood on the balcony outside room 306, on the motel’s second floor.
The official account of the shooting named a single assassin, James Earl Ray, who fired one shot from the top floor of a rooming house whose rear windows overlooked the motel.
Many believed that Dr. King was the victim of a conspiracy involving the Memphis police department, the FBI, and the U.S. Army. His opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam war, and plans for massive protests, in the name of his Poor People’s Campaign, calling attention to poverty in America, have been cited as reasons.
Dr. King’s family eventually filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Memphis. The case was heard in November and December 1999. Loyd Jowers, owner of a restaurant in the building next to the rooming house, was found guilty of conspiring “with government agencies” to plan the murder and fined a symbolic one hundred dollars; the family’s goal being the truth and not compensation.
On the morning after the shooting, city workers were ordered to clear a low hillside between the rooming house and the Lorraine Motel, thus disturbing a crime scene. This fueled the conspiracy rumors. At least one witness claims the shot was fired from a spot closer to ground level and nearer the motel.
In this June 1996 picture, taken below and in front of Room 306, looking in the direction of the shot, the trees have re-grown and are in full leaf. Trees whose branches are bare, as they would have been in April, would still obscure the view of the motel from the rooming house’s top floor.
The Lorraine became a residential motel Walter Bailey, who still owned it, operated at a loss. He declared bankruptcy in 1982, and the motel was ordered sold. The possibility of losing the historic buildings to developers grew. On the morning of the auction, a group of Memphis businessmen came up with enough in checks and pledges to buy the motel. The planned to remodel it and open a museum.
Jacqueline Smith, the Lorraine’s last resident, refused to leave. She was forcibly removed in 1988, and then maintained a permanent vigil of protest on the sidewalk across Mulberry Street. She had a couple old sofas and some bedsheet signs, and claimed that money used to turn the motel into a tourist attraction could have been better spent on converting it to public housing.
The National Civil Rights Museum opened in 1992. Jacqueline Smith was at her post when I was there four years later. I didn’t photograph her because I was a tourist, and then she would be a tourist attraction, and I thought the motel’s value as a historic site and memorial to the civil rights movement exceeded its value as a residence. Dr. King’s legacy would be tarnished, I felt, if the room in which he spent the last hours of his life became someone’s apartment.
Room 306 is marked with a wreath. Inside, it’s as it was on the evening of April 4, 1968. The 1959 Dodge and 1968 Cadillac
under it are identical to the cars, in the same parking spaces, appearing in photographs taken moments after the shooting.
In 2002, the museum acquired the rooming house from where the fatal shot may have come, and opened exhibits on its top floor.
From the corner of Second and Beale Streets, where tourist Beale begins, walk one block west to Mulberry and five blocks south to Huling. From downtown, take the Main Street Line trolley to the Huling Street stop. The rooming house is on that corner. The main museum is one block east.
