Tennessee to Mississippi - Where civil rights history meets rock ‘n’ soul

Fifty years after Martin Luther King was assassinated, new museums and memorials are highlighting the civil rights movement, writes Isabel Conway, as she travels from Tennessee to Mississippi.

Bertha Looney’s name is not found on the roll call of American civil rights martyrs and activists who helped bring about change in a society relentlessly clinging to white supremacy, and segregation in America’s Deep South. Yet, in her own modest way, she was a trail blazer.

We meet inside the National Civil Rights Museum that incorporates the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King JR was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee 50 years ago, on April 4, 1968. “I have a dream,” Dr King famously said. The leader of the Civil Rights Movement’s dream was that all individuals, regardless of who they were, or where they were from, would be given the unalienable rights of life, equality, liberty, dignity, and the pursuit of happiness.