The bronze-figure technique was also especially powerful in the gallery about the sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. Visitors to the museum could take a seat at the counter alongside the statues, while footage from actual protests played behind them.
After our sojourn in Mississippi, our Tent: the South group traveled to Memphis for the final day of our program. We spent the morning at the National Civil Rights Museum. The museum is housed in the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated by a sniper. The area of the motel where King was staying has been preserved so that today’s visitors can see his room and the balcony as it was on April 4th, 1968.
The Museum recently underwent a renovation, which is evident in the high-quality exhibitions and innovative audience engagement strategies that bring history to life. Much like the Maltz Museum, the National Civil Rights Museum uses a blend of text, audio, video, interactives and historical objects to help tell their story.
One bold aspect of their presentation is the inclusion of bronze, life-sized statues. For example, the gallery sharing Rosa Parks’ story included a bus that visitors could climb aboard with a bronze Rosa seated up front. Other bronze figures outside were shown “walking to work,” representing those who refused to ride. Although they were monochromatic metal, the statues were so lifelike that amidst the crowded galleries I found myself bumping into them and starting to apologize before realizing they weren’t real. (If that’s not bringing history to life, I don’t know what is!) The technique underlined the humanity of these events. Although some of the bronze statues represented famous figures who have since been canonized in our collective historical memory, many others were anonymous people, serving as a reminder that these movements were made up of thousands of nameless individuals who made the choice to stand up for what was right.
After the Museum we visited the Center for Southern Folklore and had a tour of the city with its co-founder, Judy Peiser. Having grown up in the Memphis Jewish community, Judy took us through the historically Jewish neighborhood known as the Pinch. Today, the Pinch is no longer distinct from the areas surrounding it, as Memphis’s approximately 8,000 Jews have spread out all across the city.
Over a dinner of Memphis barbeque that night, Tent participants shared their reflections of the past week. Many spoke about how moved they were to see how Jewish congregations throughout the South had maintained their communities despite dwindling numbers and a lack of access to resources. Several members of the group shared a renewed pride in their own Jewish heritage and a desire to carry out tikkun olam, or repairing the world. For me, the experience was a diverse and complicated mix of aspects relevant to my work at the Maltz. My experiences gave me a toolbox of new models of learning, a program of comparative museum studies, socio-cultural immersion and a renewed call for social justice. In the coming months, I look forward to paring down these ideas into real action items that we can use here at the Maltz Museum to continue to engage new audiences, explore questions of identity and culture maintain our commitment to helping to end hate in all its forms.
Read about Part One and Part Two of Laura’s journey as part of Tent: The South, organized by the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life.
See all of the photos from her trip here.
