Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4,
1968 nearly fifty years ago. The site of that tragic event at the Lorraine Motel in
Memphis, Tennessee, is now, the location of the National Civil Rights
Museum. We took a road trip from Saint Louis to Memphis that
allowed us to spend a good part of Saturday afternoon over President’s Day
weekend perusing that remarkable place.
The Saint Louis Art Museum marked Black History Month
with a variety of programming, including two film screenings The Black Power
Mixtape, 1967-1975 on Saturday, February 24th and “I Am Not Your Negro” on
Sunday, February 25th. The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 looks at the people,
society, culture, and style that fueled an era of convulsive change with
contemporary audio interviews from leading African American artists, activists,
musicians and scholars. Utilizing an innovative format that riffs on the
popular 1970s mixtape format, the film is a cinematic and musical journey into
the black communities of America. I Am Not Your Negro envisions the book James Baldwin
never finished, a radical narration about race in America, using the writer’s
original words, as read by actor Samuel L. Jackson. Alongside a flood of rich
archival material, the film draws upon Baldwin’s notes on the lives and
assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. to explore
and bring a fresh perspective to the racial narrative in America.
Meanwhile, the Missouri History Museum’s exhibition #1 in Civil Rights:
The African American Freedom Struggle in St. Louis examines the
local civil rights movement and the city’s leading role in advancing the cause
of racial justice from ground-level activism to groundbreaking supreme court
rulings.
This year, perhaps my sensibility has been heightened
with Special School District’s engagement with the Cambio Group. SSD is
demonstrating this year an effort, among other things, to improve cultural
competence. I am a white man in America and cannot help but feel reflective
when history, notably the events of the last fifty years, marks the struggle.
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