All artwork courtesy of the U.S. Civil Rights Trail
State officials will be in Memphis Wednesday to announce sites in Tennessee to be part of the newly launched U.S. Civil Rights Trail.
Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, Tourism Commissioner Kevin Triplett, and Kevin Kane, president and CEO of the Memphis Convention and Visitors Bureau, will join Terri Freeman, president of the National Civil Rights Museum, at the Civil Rights Museum to announce 10 sites that will be part of the federally sanctioned trail.
The trail is a “a collection of churches, courthouses, schools, museums and other landmarks, primarily in the Southern states, where activists challenged segregation in the 1950s and 1960s to advance social justice,” according to the Civil Rights Trail website.
The trail was announced earlier this year. It was established after former National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis encouraged historians to identify surviving landmarks where major events of the civil rights era occurred. Georgia State University found 60 sites. Then, Southern state tourism directors added more than 40 secondary sites and announced the trail in 2018.
In Memphis, sites along the trail include Clayborn Temple, headquarters for the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike; Mason Temple Church of God in Christ, where Martin Luther King, Jr. Gave his “Mountaintop” sermon, and the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, where King was assassinated.
