MEMPHIS, TENN. — The National Civil Rights Museum, built around the motel where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, is drawing criticism that its governing board is too white and too closely tied to big business to watch over such an important piece of black history.
“The board should more nearly approximate the soldiers of the civil-rights movement that it celebrates, and they were overwhelmingly African-American,” said D’Army Bailey, a black judge who helped found the museum but resigned from the board in 1991 when it refused to make him chairman.
The museum opened 16 years ago at the old Lorraine Motel and is run by a foundation under a lease from the state. A citizens group largely inspired by Bailey opposes renewal of the foundation’s lease and argues that the museum should instead be run by the government, whether local, state or federal.
Of its 32 board members, the Lorraine Civil Rights Museum Foundation lists 12 as representatives of large corporations.
