The Glory and the Glitz

By WALTER SHAPIRO/MEMPHIS

As soon as a tourist steps onto the replica of a Montgomery bus, a prerecorded voice will emanate from the vicinity of the mannequin behind the wheel. "All right, you folks, I want those two seats," the facsimile driver will say. "Y'all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those two seats." In the middle of the bus, a plaster of Paris simulacrum of Rosa Parks will just sit there, a mute symbol of the incident that sparked the epic Montgomery bus boycott. "Look, woman, I told you I wanted the seat!" the mock voice of the bus driver will continue. "Are you going to stand up?" The plaster statue of Parks will remain motionless.

This historical exhibit is typical of the aggressive multimedia style that will characterize the National Civil Rights Museum when it opens its doors in Memphis at the end of August. Here the sit-in movement will be commemorated by four mannequins seated at a Southern lunch counter as the wall behind them broadcasts footage of the taunts and attacks of an actual white segregationist mob. Will these exhibits be inspiring, living history or a parody of the Disney style? What is one to make of a museum whose board chairman, Tennessee Circuit Judge D'Army Bailey, says seriously that "I wanted not only sirens and barking dogs, but I even envisioned a whiff of tear gas"?

The sights and sounds of the civil rights era will surely all be there, but Bailey's olfactory mementos have fortunately proved impractical. Still, this state- and locally funded museum will push the barriers of good taste in its quest to create a sense of historical immediacy and emotional context for a jaded theme-park generation. "We estimate that 60% of those coming to the Civil Rights Museum will not have been old enough to remember the 1960s," explains exhibit designer Gerard Eisterhold. "We are trying in the exhibits to give them a You Are There feeling."

The there is part of the taste problem: the museum has been constructed within the rebuilt shell of Memphis' Lorraine Motel, site of the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. At first King's family dissociated themselves from the museum because of this macabre legacy, though Coretta Scott King relented and appeared at the dedication ceremonies in early July, receiving a $15,000 honorarium. Yet there remains something troubling about turning the Lorraine into a tourist attraction.

Visitors to the museum will be invited to peer through glass walls at two meticulously preserved bedrooms from the old Lorraine -- Room 307, where King often stayed, and Room 306, where he conferred with his lieutenants moments before he was shot on the adjoining balcony. "There was some discussion of populating Room 306 with figures," Eisterhold recalls but acknowledges that this seemed close to blasphemy. Nevertheless, he defends the decision to re- % create King's last supper (catfish) with a room-service tray and dirty dishes, as well as to leave a copy of the April 4, 1968, Memphis Press- Scimitar open on the bed. "It seemed," Eisterhold argues, "that we had to indicate some evidence of habitation."

The genesis of the Civil Rights Museum is entwined with the Lorraine Motel in a classic American jumble of laudable intentions, questionable aesthetic judgment, outside experts and civic boosterism. In 1982 a small group of Memphis black leaders bought the threadbare Lorraine just minutes before a bankruptcy auction and possible demolition. Their original notion was to create some sort of King memorial, but an attorney for the King Center in Atlanta asked that they not use the King name. Instead the group obtained government funding for a civil rights museum.

All they lacked was a plan. That came in 1986, courtesy of Benjamin Lawless, the retired exhibition director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, who had originally gone to Memphis as a consultant to the not exactly understated monument to Elvis Presley at Graceland.

Lawless, an unabashed showman, likens the opening of the Civil Rights Museum to "putting on a film or theater." His most provocative artistic concept was to construct a laser beam that would follow the flight path of assassin James Earl Ray's bullet from his vantage point in a window across the street to the balcony of the Lorraine, from which it would be reflected heavenward. This notion prevailed even after the museum was unable to get permission to use the window where Ray stood. Now the laser beam will start roughly at the point where the bullet entered the motel grounds. "I got all the historians working on the exhibits betting that the laser is the worst idea in the world," Lawless concedes. "But if that's the case, we can turn it off and just use it in the sound-and-light show."

Sound-and-light show indeed. What could be more historically apt for a moral crusade that uplifted the nation than a bit of son et lumiere? Those who are offended by the well-intentioned effort may take some comfort: it could have been worse. No one in Memphis has suggested building bumper cars to commemorate the Freedom Riders. At least, not yet.