After renovations, the museum reopened in 2014 with an increase in the amount of multimedia and interactive displays, as well as various short films to show highlights.

The museum also owns the Young and Morrow Building at 422 Main Street, where James Earl Ray initially confessed (and later recanted) to shooting King.

The complex includes Canipe's Amusement Store at 418 Main Street, next to the rooming house where the murder weapon with Ray's fingerprints was found.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned segregated businesses, Bailey believed he needed to improve the facility to compete with other hotels that were no longer whites-only.

[6] Civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King Jr. stayed in Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in early April 1968, while working to organize protests around the ongoing Memphis sanitation strike.

The King family, alongside many others, have long believed that Ray was not the culprit and that the assassination was carried out by a group of conspirators, possibly including agents of the U.S. federal government.

Within days of the assassination, King's supporters began asking Bailey to build a permanent memorial at the Lorraine Motel, with one early suggestion being an eternal flame similar to the one at the grave of John F.

King's widow Corretta and Ralph Abernathy, his successor as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, unveiled a memorial plaque at the motel shortly before the march started.

[15] The Martin Luther King Memphis Memorial Foundation, a newly-established non-profit organization, agreed to purchase the motel from Bailey for $240,000, which it would need to raise from donors to finalize the sale.

[18] However, these efforts raised only $96,568 of the needed $240,000 in time for the set deadline of October 28, 1982, leading the motel to be placed back on the auction block.

[20] The group, which changed its name to the Lorraine Civil Rights Museum Foundation, stopped charging admission to tour Room 306 in March 1983.

[10] The foundation continued to operate the Lorraine as a single-room occupancy motel while seeking to raise funds to convert the building into a museum.

Smith thought King would have objected to having millions of dollars spent on a memorial for him, evicting poor residents in the process, instead of policies and programs that would benefit the neighborhood community, which was generally lower-income and predominantly Black at the time.

On March 2, 1988, four sheriff's deputies forcibly carried her out of the building, while she shouted, "You people are making a mistake [...] If King were alive he wouldn't want this.

"[37] The Foundation worked with Smithsonian Institution curator Benjamin Lawless to develop a design to save historical aspects of the site.

[38] In 1999, the Foundation acquired the Young and Morrow Building, and its associated vacant lot on the West side of Mulberry, as part of the museum complex.

The exhibits were updated for historical accuracy and to add to their evocative power; the work was guided by a group of recognized civil rights scholars.

[40] Many of the museum's most popular exhibits did not change, such as Room 306 (where King was staying when he died), the replica sanitation truck (King came to Memphis to support an AFSCME sanitation workers' strike), and the replica of the bus Rosa Parks rode in Montgomery, Alabama, before initiating the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–1956.

The museum has several interactive kiosks where patrons can access audio, images, text and video about the full civil rights movement.

The Associated Press review said, "The powerful, visceral exhibit[s set] the tone for an evocative, newly immersive museum experience that chronicles the history of the civil rights struggle in America.

"[42] King scholar Clayborne Carson of Stanford University said that the museum's renovations present "the best and most recent scholarship on civil rights available today".