Photographs by Andrea Morales.
“We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.”
— Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., from Where Do We Go From Here
“When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.”
— Maya Angelou, “A Brave and Startling Truth”
Morning light shines clear and bright on the former Lorraine Motel. The first visitors of the day approach the entrance of the building that now houses the National Civil Rights Museum. A couple with out-of-town plates emerge from their sedan, still bleary-eyed at 10 a.m., and strap cloth face masks over their noses and mouths. Crossing the parking lot past the main entrance and over to an anterior building that contains the museum’s administrative offices, where I’ll meet museum president Terri Lee Freeman, my feet crunching on fallen leaves, I step over a discarded blue face mask: clear signifier of 2020, this year of illness, pain, upheaval, and hope besides.
Freeman, a veteran foundation leader with roots in Chicago, Detroit, Washington, and Baltimore, was appointed by the museum’s board in 2014 to the role of president of the National Civil Rights Museum previously held by Beverly Robertson. For her work guiding this singular place, arguably the most essential to understanding Memphis, for her dedication to driving forward the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., for her commitment to providing a space where Memphians can gather to learn, to grow, and to understand, and for finding new ways to build community even amid a global pandemic, Terri Lee Freeman is this magazine’s choice for 2020 Memphian of the Year.
Memphis, my hometown, doesn’t get everything right. We know this about ourselves. Our history is complex and convoluted, our culture defined by strife, suffering, and also, always, momentum as powerful as the churn of the Mississippi River. We’re famous the world over for Elvis, but the Blues are our hearts’ song. We lost our charter in 1879 after outbreaks of yellow fever bankrupted the city and depleted its population. Black Memphians were instrumental in buying back the charter, in 1893, and setting things on a better course.
Freeman points to the story of the city’s charter when asked what sets Memphis apart, how it might serve as a model for other places; she notes “the strength of Black people in making Memphis what it is.” Fortifying and illuminating though it is, this chapter of Memphis history is one that most kids don’t encounter in history class. As Freeman says, “Black folks are not taught that much more about Black folks than white folks are. We get a little bit more just through the stories that people pass on — but it has not been institutionalized.”
Enter, then, the National Civil Rights Museum: At this moment, in this place, here is a spot where people of all backgrounds can learn history, yes, but just as importantly, learn how to use history as a guide, and how to contextualize our own experiences within a broader, clearer expanse. Memphis has much to teach other communities — not in spite of, but because of our troubled history. “Memphis,” Freeman says, “has been in this place before … and can demonstrate how action can actually occur.”
The National Civil Rights Museum opened its doors in Memphis in 1991 on the site where, 23 years earlier, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Think of it: In 1991, King’s 1968 murder was no more distant a memory than events of 1997 are today. For those of us born in the Eighties or Nineties, we might think of King’s time as history, and it is, but history that remains very, very fresh. This year, as the museum nears its 30th anniversary, our city and our nation have experienced new awakenings as Black and brown lives continue to be undervalued and endangered far too often.
Even as the museum was closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it served as an outdoor gathering place for protests organized in response to a spate of police killings of Black people including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. With its doors locked, the museum — site of tragedy, education, and healing in one — continued to fulfill its mission in those impossibly difficult days. Freeman sees her mission, at its core, as continuing to advance Dr. King’s dream and to keep his legacy alive. She’s found ways to do that even, or especially, through this adjective-resistant year, by expanding the museum’s digital outreach, by holding space for the community’s needs, and by reopening as quickly and safely as possible, recognizing that this place is as essential as any museum can be.
Freeman was born and raised in Chicago. Her parents divorced when she was very young, and she lived mostly with her mother, Barbara Lee Chaney. Barbara was a dancer, and eventually a dance teacher who ran a dance school; she died earlier this year. Freeman describes her mother as “a really, really hard worker,” and someone who was “very arts-focused.” An only child, Freeman comes from a small, close-knit family from whom she received attention and encouragement. “The message they always gave me,” she recalls, “was: Always do your best.” Alongside that message was another one: “I did grow up with what a lot of Black kids grow up with: You have to be twice as good to get half as far.”
She also comes from people determined to pursue their own dreams in spite of obstacles. Her grandfather, George Lee, taught her by example that “you’re going to run into adversity in your lifetime, but you’re just going to have to keep pressing.” Lee was an artist who spent his professional career working for the post office as a clerk. He did his artwork on the side, and “when he retired,” Freeman remembers, “he decided to self-publish some books. So he self-published and then he was syndicated in black newspapers across the country” — including the Tri-State Defender here in Memphis. In his syndicated column, “Interesting People,” which was later collected into a book of the same name, Lee focused on influential Black people — from world leaders to athletes. Lee’s wife, Freeman’s grandmother, taught school. In fact, she was one of four sisters, all of whom taught in Chicago public schools.
Despite the fact that she was the first in her family to do so, there was never any question of if she would go to college and achieve a four-year degree. That was a given. She finished high school in Detroit, where she and her mother had moved from Chicago when her mother remarried. (“I said she picked the only place colder than Chicago for us to move,” Freeman laughs.) After high school, attend and graduate from a four-year college she certainly did, receiving a degree in journalism and communication from the University of Dayton.
Her grandfather — the artist and postal clerk — saved enough on his government salary to pay for private education for Freeman through college and then grad school. While she enjoyed aspects of journalism, Freeman says it felt “too structured,” and perhaps just as importantly, she realized, “I wasn’t going to make any money at it. There was this sense that this family has poured so much into me, I needed to be able to give them something back.”
She adjusted course and attended graduate school at Howard University, focusing on business communications. Howard is a Historically Black University, and Freeman felt attending an HBCU would be “a wonderful experience.” She notes with a smile that, while at Howard, she joined Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, which was founded there, and which also counts Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris as a member. (Harris received her bachelor’s degree from Howard in 1986.)
After graduate school, Freeman found a job in corporate communications at Freddie Mac, formally known as the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation. Her office was in downtown Washington, D.C., and she recalls, “I was just so thrilled because I was going to have free parking. I was making $18,000 a year, and I just thought I had hit pay dirt.” She started as an editorial assistant, a relatively low-level position, but moved up through the organization over the 13 years that she spent there.
When Freddie Mac became a publicly traded company, no longer held by the savings and loan industry, it launched a community-relations program that Freeman was tapped to run — in addition to her role as director of employee communications. She built and directed the foundation, became an officer of the company, and left in 1996 to become president of the Greater Washington Community Foundation. During her 18 years at the Community Foundation, it grew by seven- or eightfold.
After those 18 years, when an opportunity in Memphis, at the National Civil Rights Museum (where she had never been), presented itself, Freeman says she “had been thinking: 18 years is a long time. I was ready to begin to look at new opportunities, but I wasn’t pressed about the whole thing.” Then she visited here, and was impressed by the fact that the museum’s board were thinking about the museum’s relevance — wanting to ensure that the institution was evolving into its next phase. So she, her husband, and their youngest of three daughters (Corryn, Camille, and Carmen) moved to Memphis. Until the pandemic hit earlier this year, her husband, Dr. Bowyer Freeman, a pastor, continued to commute between Memphis and Baltimore, where he maintains a congregation at New Saint Mark Missionary Baptist Church.
Freeman doesn’t have a background in curating, or history. She’s a leader, a collaborator, a fundraiser, a community-relations expert. And she saw a burgeoning need for the space and lessons offered by the museum. She began leading the museum in 2014, two years after the murder of Trayvon Martin, just months after the murder of Eric Garner, and just before the shooting of Michael Brown. “Because of the access to video,” she says, “the world could see what Black people knew was happening.”
When Dr. King was assassinated, on April 4, 1968, just a hundred yards or so from the room where Freeman and I are speaking, she was 7 years old, living with her mother on Chicago’s South Side. She doesn’t remember much from that day or the tumult that followed, but she does remember the feeling she had, seeing her mother cry. “I think that was the first time I had ever seen my mother cry,” she recalls. You were very young, but what did that mean to you? I ask. “It meant that something really significant had happened,” she says. “And that this person must have been a really important person to have my mother crying like that.”
Freeman is now arguably one of the singular people most responsible for sustaining and continuing Dr. King’s dream. Through the museum — and its reach not only within the city of Memphis, but throughout the world — she wants to help others to understand the work he had planned for the years following his brutal and untimely death. King was preparing for what he knew would be difficult but necessary days, organizing the Poor People’s Campaign, and expanding outwards from civil rights to fight for human rights.
The way Freeman sees it, the needs King focused on in his later years were the very needs we still have before us today. Indeed, in his last speech, the “Mountaintop” speech, which he delivered at Mason Temple in Memphis the night before he was killed, he enjoined the community to “strengthen Black institutions. I call upon you to take your money out of the banks Downtown and deposit your money in Tri-State Bank.” (Tri-State Bank, which is Black-owned to this day, is still going strong in Memphis in its eighth decade.)
“His legacy is that there would be access for all people, particularly Black people, that is equal and equitable to those of whites. He talked a lot about Black business development, Black banks, Black media,” Freeman says, elaborating, “As we fast-forward, we know that in certain instances, we were doing better a few decades ago than we’re doing now. So when I speak of the legacy, I’m really speaking of that legacy of human rights, that legacy of economic equity — things that are truly being highlighted now.”
Sometimes, Freeman observes, “people like to keep [King] in that ‘I Have a Dream’ space. But he was so much more than that. And that’s not taking anything away from ‘I Have a Dream.’” So many of us remember the Dr. King we learned about as children, the beneficent message, the sonorous voice, the focus on nonviolence. When Bernice King accepted the Freedom Award at the Civil Rights Museum in 2018, Dr. King’s daughter “said that in 1968, her father was the most hated man in America,” Freeman points out. “We like to romanticize that everyone loved Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Everyone did not.”
No one needs reminding that 2020 has been a tough year. For Freeman, the difficulty began back in January, when COVID-19 was in the news but not yet in our community, before she had had to grapple with closing the museum’s doors. On January 15th — Dr. King’s birthday, she notes — she was in a nasty car accident that forced her to stay off her feet for several months. So by the time shutdowns began, she had already been sheltering at home for some time.
The museum was closed for several months, beginning in March. The closure took its toll on the institution in terms of the absence of visitors and the revenue that comes with them, both through ticket sales and museum-store purchases. And, Freeman says, they did have to make the always nauseating decision to furlough some employees. They have not been able to bring back all those furloughed employees yet, because, she says, there’s still not enough volume.
“My hat’s off to anyone who has to lead an organization in the time of COVID-19,” Freeman remarks. “This is not easy, when the sands literally are shifting underneath you on a daily basis.”
While we’re talking about Dr. King’s legacy, and the civil rights movement broadly, Freeman brings up the concept of “servant leadership.” In her view, leading should be about serving others, not about accruing glory for ourselves. Schoolkids know the name ‘King’; they know a bit of Rosa Parks, Malcolm X. But, Freeman says, “The overwhelming majority of folks were just like you and me. They were not endowed with superhuman skills.” Most importantly, she says, “We all have in us what they had. It’s just a matter of whether or not we want to activate it.”
And that’s what the National Civil Rights Museum shows, at its core: not just what happened then, but how we can walk into the history that’s being made right now, every day, each in our own small, particular way. Real, lasting change can be slow, requiring patience, persistence. And it demands the involvement of more people — far more — than will ever be canonized.
Terri Freeman, for her own enactment of servant leadership, is serendipitously suited to this moment, in this city. She carries out a big, important mission at the National Civil Rights Musuem, but she does not claim ownership of that mission. She’s a visionary, but she’s just as much a steward, a shepherd.
Towards the conclusion of our interview, I pose the title of Dr. King’s Where Do We Go From Here to Freeman as a question. She responds deliberately that she would like to see “the same energy that is being brought to this election cycle being brought to community engagement in general. … People have to be as engaged on November 4th as they are leading up to November 3rd.” This pandemic year has wreaked havoc on the finances of a staggering number of American households, and intensified all sorts of existing divides between haves and have-nots. So, Freeman says, pick an area that is important to you, and find a way to help.
Freeman sees reason to hope when looking to the future, both for the museum and the broader community. During the early days of the pandemic, the museum, like so many other institutions, converted some of its programming and displays to a virtual format. The result has been that people can “visit” the National Civil Rights Museum no matter where in the world they happen to be based. “There are things that you need to come to the museum for,” she says, “but if we can just whet your appetite, and encourage you to come whenever you feel safe, then I think that’s a win for the museum.”
She also notes, gratefully, that many people felt called to do something in the wake of George Floyd’s death, and Breonna Taylor’s. A number of those people chose to give to the Civil Rights Museum, resulting in a marked increase this year in unsolicited gifts. The gift that sticks with Freeman most poignantly came from a public-safety officer in Hennepin County, Minnesota, where Floyd was murdered. The gift was in the exact amount of overtime pay the officer had received because of the death of George Floyd. He hoped that the museum would put it to good use, he said, and maybe one day organize an exhibit about Floyd.
A little more than a week after our conversation, the results of the 2020 Presidential election became clear: Joe Biden had won, and alongside him, Kamala Harris is to be the first woman, the first woman of color, and only the second person of color to serve in our nation’s top two leadership positions in all its 244 years. Freeman was clear that she didn’t want our conversation to turn political, but this moment feels like more than just politics. So I followed up with Freeman, and she shared her joy:
“Little girls and boys everywhere now see that office, as well as other opportunities to serve their country, as real possibilities. The fact that she is the first African-American woman, first Indian-American, and first Southeast Asian to reach these heights also makes me smile. And even more so, sharing with Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris being both a graduate of Howard University and a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc. makes me beam with joy. It is a historic moment that no one, regardless of political affiliations, should take for granted.”
That is where we go from here.
Editor's Note: After this story was published, Freeman announced she had been named executive director of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture in Baltimore. Her last day in Memphis will be February 3, 2021. She discusses that decision here.
