We docked in Memphis early this morning and said goodbye to the American Splendor. There was one final excursion included in our tour, a trip to the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel.

The Lorraine Motel, of course, is where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated; there is a memorial plaque outside, and a wreath is always hung on the door of Room 306. He was shot on the balcony just outside the room.

The bullet came from the rooming house across the street; the small window is where the killer shot King. James Earl Ray was convicted for the murder and died in prison, but there are those (including the King family) who have other theories about the identity of the murderer.

I wasn’t surprised that we had to go through metal detectors to get into the museum. We saw a short film about the history of slavery and discrimination in North America, and then we were able to tour the collections. There was a lot of information, with many news videos from the 1960s, and recreations of scenes like Rosa Parks on the bus, the Woolworth Sit-in, and the “I AM A MAN” march of the striking Memphis sanitation workers. King made several trips to Memphis to support the sanitation workers before being killed.

There were also reproductions of significant documents related to the Civil Rights Movement, like this one urging compliance with the Birmingham Campaign’s boycott of merchants who supported segregation.

Our excursion included lunch at Central BBQ; it was quite tasty. During lunch, our guest speaker, Charles McKinney of Rhodes College here in Memphis answered questions about the Civil Rights movement, discrimination, and the current state of affairs. After lunch, they took us to the Peabody Hotel where we’ll be spending the next two nights. We checked in and looked around.

We walked back to the museum, passing MLK Reflection Park with its mountaintop statue and the old signs for the hotel along the way.

Most of the rooms in the hotel have been remodeled and turned into modern exhibit space; they recreated Room 306 to match its appearance when King went out on the balcony that last time.

When we left the museum, we saw a protest table across the street; the protestor, Jacqueline Smith, lived at the Lorraine until 1988, when the hotel was closed to be converted into the museum. She thinks that the space used by the museum would be better if it housed people like it did before the conversion.

The museum disagrees.

We returned to the Peabody to see the afternoon Duck Parade, which features the Duckmaster appointing some kids to be temporary Duckmasters to help him get the ducks out of the fountain, onto the red carpet, and into the elevator which takes them up to the Duck Palace. It was a lot of fun, but hard to photograph because of the huge crowd!

We had dinner at Kooky Canuck across the street from the hotel.

Soon after we sat down, there was a commotion as they brought a 7-pound hamburger to a guest who had accepted the Kookamonga Challenge.

To win the challenge (and get the burger for free), he had to finish it within one hour.

He failed. Our server told us that he hadn’t quite finished half the burger before giving up.

Dinner was good; we had ordered salads with fish. Diane had salmon atop her salad. I felt hungry and ordered fish and chips to go with mine. My portion wasn’t as big as the burger we saw, but half of what they brought out filled me up nicely and I stopped.

We walked down to Beale Street to enjoy the atmosphere.

We came back to the hotel and explored for a while; we even went up to the skywalk level to see the ducks.

I’ve been reading Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi on this trip; last night, I read this passage just before putting the book down for the night:

I had myself called with the four o’clock watch, mornings, for one cannot see too many summer sunrises on the Mississippi. They are enchanting…. The dawn creeps in stealthily; the solid walls of black forest soften to gray, and vast stretches of the river open up and reveal themselves; the water is glass-smooth, gives off spectral little wreaths of white mist, there is not the faintest breath of wind, nor stir of leaf; the tranquillity is profound and infinitely satisfying…. When the light has become a little stronger, you have one of the fairest and softest pictures imaginable. You have the intense green of the massed and crowded foliage near by; you see it paling shade by shade in front of you; upon the next projecting cape, a mile off or more, the tint has lightened to the tender young green of spring; the cape beyond that one has almost lost color, and the furthest one, miles away under the horizon, sleeps upon the water a mere dim vapor, and hardly separable from the sky above it and about it. And all this stretch of river is a mirror, and you have the shadowy reflections of the leafage and the curving shores and the receding capes pictured in it. Well, that is all beautiful; soft and rich and beautiful; and when the sun gets well up, and distributes a pink flush here and a powder of gold yonder and a purple haze where it will yield the best effect, you grant that you have seen something that is worth remembering.

I didn’t have myself called with the four o’clock watch to see sunrise, but there it was anyway when I woke up.

We’ve been steaming towards Memphis all day; there hasn’t been a lot of development along the riverbanks. About the biggest settlement I saw was this one, which I think is a collection of vacation cabins around river mile 579. The cabins are on the Arkansas side of the river, but they’re actually in Mississippi because the river has moved since the state boundaries were established.

The first speaker today was our Riverlorian, Curt Lietz, who has been paddling down the Mississippi for years and is about 2/3 of the way through (he paddles about one week per year). His talk was titled “From Source to Sea”; he talked about people who’ve written journals about their paddling trips down the river and what he’s learned during his trip so far. I wish he’d been with the ship the entire trip; it would have been great to hear more from him.

The second speaker was Andy Flory from Carleton; this time, he was talking about Memphis Soul music. It was a very good talk with great music to back it up.

And then it was time for our farewell reception and sunset.