National Civil Rights Museum's new phase will tell the post-Martin Luther King Jr. story

Located across the street from the primary campus of the National Civil Rights Museum , the renovated "Legacy Building" will function in part as almost a sequel to the main building by telling the stories of the human rights and social justice warriors who continued the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the wake of the civil rights icon's assassination, officials said Tuesday.

"Who are the brave ones who picked up the torch and soldiered on?" asked Tiffany L. Graham, the museum's chief marketing and development director. The Legacy Building will answer that question, in hopes of motivating "the next generation of catalysts who will inspire positive social change."

Graham's remarks came during a Tuesday press conference that offered an update on the museum's "Become the Dream" $55 million capital campaign, which to date has raised $34 million to redesign and renovate the three-story Legacy Building — formerly the South Main boarding house from which James Earl Ray shot King — and its adjacent Founders Park, which connects Main to Mulberry, the street that runs alongside the front of the National Civil Rights Museum and the preserved Lorraine Motel balcony where King was killed.

The transformed park will become the "BlueCross Healthy Place at Founders Park," a space "to reflect" and "to heal," said John Hawbaker, director of corporate communications and community engagement for Chattanooga-based BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee , a company that, through its foundation, has contributed $9.6 million to the project.

To date, the foundation has invested $60 million in 25 "Healthy Space" projects in Tennessee, including two previous Memphis locations, David Carnes Park in Whitehaven and Foote Park at South City, in the southeastern part of Downtown.

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Previous "Healthy Spaces" have been playgrounds or places for recreation, but the Founders Park site will represent "a new kind of shared experience," Hawbaker said. With artful landscaping, seating areas, a space for performances and screen projection, water features, artwork installations and other enhancements, the space — unfenced and open — will invite visitors to ponder and maybe catch their breath, so to speak, after the intensity of the civil rights museum, which in its main building relates the alternately tragic and heroic history of civil rights and race relations in America, up until about 1968, the year King was assassinated.

The renovated Legacy Building will feature its own outdoor space, "Legacy Terrace," with enough circular seating to accommodate the many school classrooms that tour the museum. The building itself will add another 7,500 square feet of exhibit space to the structure's existing 17,000 square feet (which includes the fateful room that enabled Ray to target the Lorraine balcony). The Legacy Building initially was opened in 2001, a decade after the debut of the main National Civil Rights Museum.

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Some other major contributors to the "Become the Dream" project include Boeing, which contributed $1.35 million through its Global Engagement initiative, and the state of Tennessee, which added $10 million through Tourist Development.

The BlueCross Healthy Space at Founders Park is expected to have its official opening in the summer of 2025. The renovated Legacy Building likely will open in early 2026. Memphis-based Self+Tucker Architects is overseeing the design.

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: National Civil Rights Museum's new phase will tell the post-Martin Luther King Jr. story