| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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08/20/97-Memphis, Tennessee: Art and Civil Rights Museums:
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The hotel provides shampoo in a little envelope. I hate those things. It was a good idea originally. But then they had to make the little envelopes watertight. They use something like polyethylene. You cannot get a good enough grip with wet hands to tear those things. You try to tear them and they slip through your fingers. You would think someone would notice this. No. Year after year motels give these envelopes out. I guess it is cheaper than giving out the little plastic bottles of shampoo. But they just are more designed so that the motel can tell itself it has provided shampoo, not to provide a service to the customer.
It rained all night but stopped and showed signs of clearing in the morning.
The continental breakfast offered is your choice of coffee and glazed doughnuts or glazed doughnuts and coffee.
There is an art museum at the University of Memphis. In the back corner is a room of Egyptian antiquities. Two statues of the lion-headed Sekmet flank the doorway.
Inside are sarcophagi, some jewelry, canoptic jars. There are small iconic carvings of cats and gods. There is a nice Horus falcon. There are depictions of a god I was not familiar with, Bes, the almost Teddy Bear-like god of childbirth.
I folded an origami Anubis and left it on the case containing the mummy. Let it guide him to the next world.
Their more modern art contains a room with Elvis art. There is a room devoted to Joe Light who seems to write aphorisms and boards as his main art form. Things like 'When anybody hurt's a person's feelings time and again, they are a real liar if they say they like or love that person.'
The art museum is in the music building and you hear practicing as you leave. It was clear before, but it is clouding up again. It is hot and humid.
The world seems to have gone crazy about another of my old interests, the Titanic. This year there is a movie, a play on Broadway, the local IMAX has a show, Titanica. There is some local exhibit on the Titanic. I bet none of them hold a candle to A Night to Remember. That's the biggee.
Next is the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. This is free except for special exhibits, but they will expect a donation. The top floor starts with art of ancient Americas: terra-cotta statues, etc. There is a really strange figure of a kneeling, bound man. Off to the side is some more modern stuff including a Picasso pitcher.
Oceania has carved wooden figures. They look almost African except for the occasional seashells.
African art includes a sort of hornbill bird-man. (The guard comes around to get a closer look at what we are doing with our palmtops. In fact, I am describing the museum as I go.) They do have some nice imaginary figures.
Mediterranean. Some nice Etruscan. I like the Satyr's head.
One floor down for Antiquities, Medieval, and Renaissance.
At the beginning there is a theater, not connected with this exhibit. There was a twenty-minute film on Walter Anderson, a Mississippi artist who mixed abstract and realistic images.
The medieval paintings are mostly on religious themes. Madonnas, angels, the annunciation (surprise!), a Last Supper by Tommaso di Stefano (who missed the point of why they were gathered by the look of the table-it was not a seder table in his painting). Medieval artists seemed in agreement that Jesus was a really ugly baby.
Into Baroque Art there is 'The Finding of Moses. ' The dress is not anything like Egypt, and Pharaoh's daughter has an arm elongated like some kind of ape.
Moving to yet more modern times there is a Winslow Homer of a girl sitting in the grass reading. There is a sculpture by John Rogers called Coming to the Parson that looks like 3D Norman Rockwell. There is a Thomas Hart Benton of a train engineer dreaming of having to jump from a train at a washed out bridge.
The bottom floor has more modern art including an Elvis room with photographic images of a young Elvis by William Speer.
The first floor has the art of Walter Anderson, the subject of the film. He does subjects of nature, generally in the abstract.
Well, that being done, the next order of business is lunch. We drive up and down Poplar looking for a place. There is a Vietnamese restaurant we figure we will try. The lights are cycled on Poplar so you hit every light red in either direction. Mathematically I wonder how they do that.
The Pho is a restaurant that specializes in soups. It seems to be the only restaurant of its type in the area. Exotic restaurants are not common. On the other hand, I was not sure when I came in if there would be a place to sit down. The place is packed.
I got a huge bowl of seafood and noodle soup. Pretty good. Their iced coffee is a glass of ice and a small glass with a layer of coffee and a layer of thick cream. The latter is the consistency of sour cream. You mix the coffee and cream and pour it over ice. Then add sugar. The Thai Iced Coffee at Pad Thai in Highland Park, NJ, is a lot better.
On to the next stop.
The National Civil Rights Museum has pickets across the street calling it a fraud. I may drop over after to see why. (I didn't but Evelyn had read about the controversy. Apparently there is a profit being made from the museum and pickets think it should not be for private profit.)
They insisted on checking my camera. Fine, I can still create a word portrait.
The Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, has been turned into a museum on the history of black civil rights. The real problem with the National Civil Rights Museum is that it is too much article and not enough artifact. Suppose the whole building accidentally snagged on some chronoclastic elasticity, and it suddenly snapped back to the way it was a week after the assassination. Now the whole museum has to be recreated today. No problem. Almost nothing would be lost that money could not replace. It is not so much a museum as a large, walk-through picture book. There is a lot of information, but it is almost all in paragraph form on the wall. With pictures. And little is presented at all more imaginatively than that. This is a plain old bad presentation of information. Most people I saw were just looking at the pictures and walking past us since we were taking time to read some of what was there.
Some exhibits went beyond, but even those were not well thought out. There is a bus that you can sit down in. As soon as you do it starts yelling at you to move to the back of the bus and hitting the seat. If two people sit down ten seconds apart then you hear the same yelling from both seats, the same words, just ten seconds apart. What should have been a passionate and even enraging experience turns into a dry and rather spiritlessly academic exhibit rather than a real museum.
When you enter there is a seven-minute film every twenty minutes explaining some of the basics of the fight for civil rights. The actual exhibit starts with a timeline of pre-Civil-War efforts. Then there is a quilt, made in 1991, telling the story of the Underground Railroad.
The next room continued the timeline through World War I with explanations of Jim Crow, Plessy v. Ferguson, etc. There is one of the real artifacts, some Klan robes.
A third timeline continued to the 1950s with Marcus Garvey, Scottsboro, Eleanor Roosevelt, School Desegregation, World War II, the first sit-ins, and the first Freedom Ride.
Now we are into the age of amateur filing and news footage. So there are short film strips, but it is very hard to understand what is being said from background noise from other exhibits. A little further there are histories of bus boycotts and lunch counter sit-ins. They have a lunch counter peopled with four gray statues of protesters. Behind them are gray statues of beefy white troublemakers. Behind the scene they have newsreel footage of the fight to segregate lunch counters.
There are sections recounting Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, the Montgomery bus boycotts, and a section on freedom rides. It continues with the de-segregation of Ole Miss; the desegregation of Birmingham, Alabama, and the 1963 March on Washington. For the latter they have a copy of the speaker's program. Press on one of the listings and you can hear an excerpt of the speech. Just about everybody picks Mahalia Jackson singing 'He's Got the Whole World in His Hands.' I guess people feel they have been inundated with words or just don't care that much.
Final topics are the 1964 Freedom Summer, voter registration, King in Chicago, and finally King's visit to Memphis. This leads you to the actual room that King was staying in, the mess in the room at the time recreated. There is an account on how he came to be shot.
That is the climax of the museum and the conclusion. On the way out there is a souvenir shop, but Evelyn points out that there is little selection in the way of books on civil rights. There are pens and toys and postcards, but little in the way of information. That is kind of a pity. I guess there is not much interest in studying the ideas. At least not enough to support multiple accounts.
Another thing that disturbed me about the museum was that during the Fifties and Sixties Jews did a great deal to fight for civil rights for blacks. Jews were a big part of the Freedom Rides, much more than other ethnic groups. About the only reference to it is a Klan leaflet that indicates they knew that Jews were pivotal in founding the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality, and United Negro College Fund. The only one who seems to remember it these days is Farrakhan who claims that Jews controlled these organizations. The museum teaches about the Mississippi Burning incident, but doesn't mention that the murder victims were two Jews and one Black. Yet it took a long, long time to get black leaders to speak out against Farrakhan's anti-Semitism and even now it is full of equivocation. I guess the answer is to do what you think is right because it is right. If you help another ethnic group don't expect gratitude or reciprocity. Me, I feel I owe the Dutch, Scandinavians (especially the Finnish), and the Bulgarians, and some Japanese, Spanish, and French for what they did to save Jews during the Holocaust. There may be others that don't come to mind. For the most part they are not involved in controversy. But I do feel a debt to these nationalities for their willingness to risk their lives for others.
It was on the way so we stopped into Schwab's on Beale. It closes at 5 PM and we got there at 5:02 PM yesterday. Evelyn wanted to see it. I got myself a cheap hat and for my chachka table some voodoo oil. I could have gotten some Elvis thing, that they would surely sell here, but I could not bring myself to buy Elvis's picture.
On the way back to the room we stopped to see the Pink Mansion. No, it's not Graceland. It was the mansion being built by the owner of Piggly-Wiggly when he died. It has been turned into a general-purpose museum. Why was Piggly-Wiggly so successful? The owner came up with a new idea. Rather than tell the grocer what you want and having him give it to you, you walked through the rows of shelves and picked out your own groceries and took them to a cashier. The grocer had to do less and the customers saw what was available. They bought more seeing what the selection was available. The South still has Piggly-Wiggly groceries, but food stores all over the world do it his way now.
We went out for dinner at seven. About all that was convenient and decent is barbecue. At home I usually stay away from red meat, but when I travel I am not so finicky and I eat pork. |
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