The Lorraine Motel, located at 450 Mulberry Street, in downtown Memphis, opened its doors in the mid-twenties. It had sixteen rooms and stood just east of the Mississippi River. It was first named the Windsor Hotel, and later the Marquette Hotel. Then, in 1945, Walter and Loree Bailey bought it and named it after Loree, as well as the popular song “Sweet Lorraine,” which artists including Rudy Vallée, Teddy Wilson, and Nat King Cole had recorded. The couple expanded the hotel by adding more guest rooms and drive-up access, transforming it into a motel. It was a modest establishment, but it would change everything about their lives.
As a hotel, the Windsor and the Marquette were all-white establishments. Under the Baileys’ ownership, the Lorraine Motel became a safe haven for black travellers and visitors to Memphis. The motel was listed in “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” also known as the Green Guide, a compilation of hotels, restaurants, gas stations, beauty parlors, barber shops, and other businesses that were friendly to African-Americans during the Jim Crow era. Given the motel’s proximity to Beale Street and Stax Records, black songwriters and musicians would stay at the Lorraine while they were recording in Memphis. Negro League baseball players and the Harlem Globetrotters also spent time at the motel. The Baileys welcomed black and white guests, served home-cooked meals, and offered an upscale environment. Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Aretha Franklin, Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan, and Nat King Cole were all guests. As Isaac Hayes reminisced, “We’d go down to the Lorraine Motel and we’d lay by the pool and Mr. Bailey would bring us fried chicken and we’d eat ice cream. . . . We’d just frolic until the sun goes down and [then] we’d go back to work.” Two famous songs, “In the Midnight Hour” and “Knock on Wood,” were written at the motel.
Martin Luther King, Jr., was the Lorraine Motel’s most famous guest. He stayed at the motel numerous times while visiting the city, and again in the spring of 1968, when he came to Memphis to support a strike by sanitation workers. On April 4, 1968, he stepped out of Room 306 and talked to friends in the parking lot below. He asked the saxophonist Ben Branch to play “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” at the rally that evening. As King turned to walk back into his room, a bullet struck him in the neck, taking his life instantly. Loree Bailey suffered a stroke when she heard the shot fired. She died on April 9th, the same day as King’s funeral.
Walter Bailey continued to run the motel, but he never rented Room 306 again. He turned it into a memorial. The room has been preserved to capture exactly what it looked like on that tragic night. There are two beds. (King was sharing the room with Dr. Ralph Abernathy, a friend.) King’s bed was not fully made because he was not feeling well and had been lying down. Dishes left in the room were from the kitchen where Loree Bailey prepared food for the motel’s guests.
In 1982, Walter Bailey declared bankruptcy and stood by helplessly as his high-end establishment became a brothel. The Lorraine would have been sold at auction, but the Save the Lorraine organization bought it and decided to transform it into a museum.
The Lorraine Motel still stands on Mulberry Street. It is instantly recognizable, and appears as though suspended in another time. Two large cars—a white 1959 Dodge Royal with lime green fins and a white 1968 Cadillac—are parked in front of the motel, and the aqua doors to the rooms are numbered with a sparse font. The large motel sign features “Lorraine” printed in a dramatic script against a bright yellow background, and “Motel” is written in large red block letters, each letter stamped inside its own white circle. A large white wreath hangs on the balcony outside Room 306, to memorialize the spot where King stood at the time of the assassination. Standing in front of the motel transports visitors to a bygone era. If you close your eyes, the iconic photograph of King’s friends pointing off into the distance, at the place from which they believed the shot was fired, comes into sharp view.
The motel is now the home of the National Civil Rights Museum. Filled with artifacts, films, oral histories, and interactive media, the exhibits guide visitors through five centuries of history, from slave resistance to the numerous protests of the American civil-rights movement. The dulcet voice of the gospel singer and civil-rights activist Mahalia Jackson fills the small corridor where visitors can gaze into Room 306. (Jackson performed “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” at his funeral.) Visits to the museum conclude with a video of images of the anti-apartheid movement, the election of President Obama, and other major events of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As visitors exit the museum, they glimpse their shadows cast against a wall of silhouetted marchers, a symbolic way of encouraging visitors to join the ongoing movement for racial justice and equality.
Walter Bailey died in July, 1988, just over a year after the motel closed. He did not live to see the opening of the National Civil Rights Museum, in 1991. His “Sweet Lorraine” would never be the same building that had held so much promise when he and Loree bought it. Perhaps there is some consolation in knowing that the Lorraine welcomes more guests now than ever before.
