The Lorraine Before 1968

The Lorraine Motel at 450 Mulberry Street was a Black family's business for more than twenty years before April 1968. Built in the 1920s as a small hotel, it was bought in 1945 by Walter Bailey, who named it for his wife, Loree, and for the song Sweet Lorraine. The Baileys added a second floor and a motel wing with drive-up parking and a pool, and listed it in the Green Book, the guide Black travelers used to find safe lodging in the segregated South. Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Aretha Franklin, Jackie Robinson, Sarah Vaughan and Stax musicians all stayed there, by the museum's account, and In the Midnight Hour and Knock on Wood were reportedly written there. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy stayed so often that Room 306 became known as the King-Abernathy Suite. When his first Memphis march broke up in violence on March 28, 1968, police took King to the Holiday Inn Rivermont, a luxury hotel on the river, and the Memphis papers attacked him for it. An FBI memo that week proposed pressing the contrast with the Black-owned Lorraine. That is why he insisted on the Lorraine when he came back in April, at about $13 a night. He and Abernathy ate catfish there, and he joked to Mrs. Bailey that he would be back for hers. He was shot on the balcony on April 4. Loree Bailey suffered a cerebral hemorrhage within moments and died days later. Walter Bailey never rented Room 306 again. He kept it as a memorial to King, with Loree's shoes and books beside what remained from that week, and stayed on at the motel until January 1988.