During your visit to the National Civil Rights Museum, explore exhibits that concentrate on the civil rights struggles relating to African Americans in the Lorraine Motel and the Legacy Building. The National Right Museum Store sells gifts and keepsakes you can take home to remember your time at the Memphis museum.
Permanent Exhibits
A Culture of Resistance
Learn about the global impact of slavery in A Culture of Resistance. Exhibit highlights include a floor map of North and South America, Europe and Africa with illuminating channels that provide statistics and additional information about the Atlantic slave trade.
Standing Up By Sitting Down
Discover the courageous story of the Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-In. Standing Up By Sitting Down features the original lunch counter that freshman students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro sat at. Behind the counter a film about the protest is played. Interactive displays explore boycott stories across the country.
The Year They Walked
Experience one of the pivotal moments in Civil Rights history as you step onto a replica of the bus that Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of. Figures stood outside the bus are positioned to indicate the significance of the women of Montgomery who sustained the boycott.
We Are Prepared To Die
Learn about the events that followed the Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in bus and train terminals. Additionally, We Are Prepared To Die explores the little support the Kennedy administration gave to the conflict during the Cold War period.
What Do We Want? Black Power
Journey from the rise to the fall of one of the most influential movements in the civil rights struggle, the Black Power movement. The exhibit interprets the Black Power movement as a continuation of the Civil Rights Movement rather than a radical new movement.
The Legacy Building
The American Civil Rights Movement Timeline
Located in the tunnel of the Museum’s Legacy Building (the boarding house from where the assassin’s shot was allegedly fired), the American Civil Rights Movement Timeline chronicles the history leading up to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. The timeline highlights the final days of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and King’s assassin, James Earl Ray.
Shop the National Civil Rights Museum Store
Be sure to stop by the National Civil Rights Museum Store. Caps, educational books and DVDs, mugs, totes, motivational framed prints, posters, scrolls, apparel and other gifts and keepsakes that support the National Civil Rights Museum are available to purchase.
- The National Civil Rights Museum is ADA compliant.
- Catch, We Want to be Free, an eight-minute video presentation that highlights the human rights movements of South Africa, China, Russia and America.