One of the highlights of the trip was our time at the National Civil Rights Museum that is located in Memphis, TN at The Lorraine Hotel. Having seen countless images of the hotel it was quite surreal to be standing outside the balcony where Dr. King was shot.
The museum itself was fascinating and its placement on our itinerary, on our last afternoon together, was perfect: the first two days were fairly tightly scheduled and full of heavy content; the third day was all about rock ‘n’ roll and the students had plenty of free-time; by the fourth day the students had had a break from the denser content and had blown off some steam. As we walked through the museum at our own pace the students asked the adults some really insightful questions and we had impromptu discussions in small groups that showed the students had begun to process all that they had seen. You could tell that they felt good about knowing some of the names and stories they saw in the exhibits and it seemed like they really felt ownership over the material.
But there’s something else going on at The Lorraine Motel: there is Jacqueline Smith.
Ms. Smith has been protesting the existence of Civil Rights Museum since 1988 when she was removed for her home in The Lorraine Motel where she was the last tenant. She is protesting the existence of a museum that is “dedicated to the past” in the place where she thinks a homeless shelter or clinic or educational outreach center should be. She is protesting gentrification and commerce that she feels go against the ideals for which Martin Luther King Jr. died. In speaking with her though, as our guides encouraged us to do, it was hard not to see that most of her protest stemmed from her personal beef – she had been kicked out of her home and she was mad. She offered her services to the museum, she was rebuffed and she was mad. Some of our students were moved by her protest; others were saddened by the futility of it. I was hurt.
When she was talking about the need for an education center one of our students mentioned to her that the museum did have an education program and likened it to the Holocaust museum in Israel where he had participated in an educational program that had made an extremely positive impact on him. She clearly wasn’t talking about that kind of education program: she wanted job training, she wanted reading and writing help, she wanted the poor of Memphis to be lifted up (just as Dr. King had wanted). Her point was that Dr. King didn’t come to The Lorraine Motel to be shot – he came to The Lorraine Motel to help sanitation workers live a better life and it was her contention that that was the kind of work that should still be taking place at the site. But I think our student’s point was spot on: a job readiness center might help a few thousand, maybe tens of thousand of Memphis locals, but a museum education center that is visited by people from all over the world has the possibility of carrying Dr. King’s message and methods into the next generation. I couldn’t help myself, I asked her about that.
“What if someone comes here and is changed by it – changed enough to go on and change the world?” I asked, maybe not as eloquently as that, but something like it.
“What if, what if, what if?” she parroted back, “I can’t see ‘what if,’ can you see ‘what if?’”
It was a pat response and one I’m sure she had given a million times but it really hurt my heart, there’s no other way to describe it. We had just taken 90 16-year-olds on a journey throughout the south in an effort to show them how small actions of the people who came before them had had huge ramifications. Our journey was meant to inspire them to take actions in their own lives that would positively impact those around them and those who came after them. And here was a woman, claiming to represent the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, claiming to be more authentic than the educators and historians who put together the museum, telling our students and telling me that “what if” doesn’t matter. As an administrator who spent years providing arts education to New York City school children, I can tell you, sometimes “What if” is the only thing that matters.
No comments:
Post a Comment