I took my kids to the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. They asked all of the right questions.
OPINION: I was curious how my children would process a museum dedicated to America’s dark, racist history, and they made me proud.
Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
It is family vacation time in African America. A few years back, my kids and I began an annual tradition of taking a trip to visit our family in Alabama and Georgia. This year, I added an educational element to the trip. In the middle of our week down South, we drove three hours from my parents’ home in northern Alabama to Memphis to visit the National Civil Rights Museum (NCRM) at the Lorraine Motel — where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
In January 2019, I visited the Lorraine Motel for the first time. I had never been to Memphis and there was no way I was going to be in that city and not visit that museum to see the place where Dr. King was felled. To date, it is the most emotional museum experience I’ve ever had. I was an emotional wreck once I finished the tour and had to decompress on a bench outside of the hotel. I found myself so angry and so hurt, which was surprising because there was nothing in that hotel that I didn’t already know or wasn’t already aware of. And yet, on that trip, the leadup to seeing his final hotel room and the spot where “they” killed Dr. King made me so anxious that the emotions spilled out.
I was curious how I would feel during this second trip to the museum and also how my kids would respond to it. Three of my four children are at museum-age; their schools take field trips to the various museums in Washington, D.C. My kids have been to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, but I do believe the last time they went, they were too young to truly understand and absorb what happened there. My daughter is older (15) so she also has a different perspective because of the history courses she’s taken, but my younger boys are at the stage where they do Black history programs and learn Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. died. Point is, my kids have some understanding of history, but there’s nothing like being bombarded with it.
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I can report that my second time in the NCRM was less emotional — probably because I knew what to expect — but also because I was trying to see the exhibits through the eyes of my children. It did not take very long before one of my kids started asking the kinds of questions that make America’s history sound so stupid.
We entered a room where a Ku Klux Klan robe and hood were on display, and my son asked me what that was. In a room full of people, I very loudly explained to him that there was a group of racist white people who hated him and didn’t think that he should be able to play with his friends from school or his soccer team and that in some cases, they killed Black people for doing nothing more than existing. And then the “why?” questions started coming. One of my kids started reading all of the stuff he could see on the wall. He wanted to understand how this made sense and kept asking me, “Daddy but why would anybody do that?”
A woman came up to me and said, “The kids certainly do ask all of the right questions, don’t they?”
Yes, they do. At every exhibit, from the explanation about the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the bombed-out bus exhibit about Freedom Riders, my kids were trying to make heads or tails of why exactly anybody would let these things happen and why would anybody want to stop kids from playing together. There was a specific exhibit that spoke to the schools with letters from parents about not wanting their kids to go to school with Black kids, and that especially interested and confounded one of my kids.
It was then that I started to get worried because while they might not have a full understanding of the extent of America’s racism in the 1900s, they are aware of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy. One of my children, the 8-year-old, broke down in our house one day crying because Dr. King was killed. He was particularly interested in seeing the spot where Dr. King died. That part made me nervous because I knew how I felt as an adult, but as a kid whose emotions were already wrecked, I was concerned about how he would take it.
He took in the scene, hugged me and stared at the balcony. He told me that he wanted to see the spot where the shooter was but that was closed for renovations. My kids asked all of the questions I’d want them to ask, and they all started with “Why?” and frankly, I didn’t have a worthy response to any of their questions. I have had those questions for years myself. But I was proud of them for recognizing and voicing their concerns and asking about and appreciating the history on display. My kids get it and for that, I’m happy and proud.
When we left, they asked to come back again and when they get bigger, we will return. For now, I got to share a part of American history with them that means so much to me and that is the stuff of family vacations.
The kids will be alright.
Panama Jackson is a columnist at theGrio and host of the award-winning podcast, “Dear Culture” on theGrio Black Podcast Network. He writes very Black things, drinks very brown liquors, and is pretty fly for a light guy. His biggest accomplishment to date coincides with his Blackest accomplishment to date in that he received a phone call from Oprah Winfrey after she read one of his pieces (biggest) but he didn’t answer the phone because the caller ID said “Unknown” (Blackest).
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