The Memphis motel where Dr. Martin Luther King was killed in 1968, along with the rooming house from where James Earl Ray shot him, have been converted to the National Civil Rights Museum.  Inside the buildings compelling, expertly-compiled displays give accounts of the civil rights movement, the work of King and his followers, and the killing itself. 

The museum is educational, inspiring, and morbid.  The entire site has been preserved as it was the moment of the assassination.  The interiors of King’s motel room have been recreated, as have Ray’s bedroom and the bathroom from which he fired the fatal shot.  The museum is undergoing an expansion now, and when I visited there were construction workers and equipment crowding one end of the parking lot.  Two huge vintage cars there, part of the recreation, were wrapped in protective shrouds.  Their muffled forms expressed a sadness that was entirely missing from the museum displays.