Walking in Memphis: revisiting the street politics of Ms Jacqueline Smith

Abstract

This piece revisits the street politics of Ms Jacqueline Smith and her two-plus decades of protest outside the former Lorraine Motel, where civil rights leader Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, was assassinated. Now the National Civil Rights Museum, the Motel is part of a growing heritage tourism industry in the American South, where landscapes of civil rights memorialization are often contested publicly and exist alongside other landscapes of racism. More recently, projects like the Museum have become central to urban redevelopment schemes and vehicles of gentrification. This piece introduces Ms Smith’s protest in relation to such themes in cultural geography, followed by the reproduction of a blog post documenting the author’s encounter with Ms Smith in June 2015. It urges cultural geographers to engage with Ms Smith’s street politics in their writings on landscape and their teachings in the classroom.