In March 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. used one of the museum's buildings as a safe house two weeks before he was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis.

[1][2][3] The museum's focus is the grass-roots activism in the rural Black Belt that led to the US civil rights movement.

[2][3] Martin Luther King Jr. used it as a safe house on March 21, 1968, while being hunted by the Ku Klux Klan, shortly before his assassination.

The buildings were renovated and their exteriors restored to their original style, and a covered gallery was built to connect them.

[3] In 2018, it was one of 20 Alabama sites important to civil rights history to be placed on the World Monument Fund's watch list.