Mourning the Promised Land: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Automortography and the National Civil Rights Musuem

When Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his final speech on the night of 3 April 1968 in Memphis, the weather was nearly biblical in its foreboding: the shutters of the Mason Temple flapped open in the winds, the city was blanketed in the darkness of power outages, and civil defense sirens wailed their warning. "[A]t some points" during the speech, notes Jesse Epps, "where there would have been applause, there was a real severe flash of lightening and a real loud clap of thunder that sort of hushed the crowd."¹ Through its proximity to King's death, "I've Been to the Mountaintop" haunts representations of the man. Eerie, unnerving, and prophetic all at once, the speech, in which King contemplates his own death, elicits a melancholic response. In its uncanny afterlife, or what I call automortography, King's last speech can be instrumental in reading the legacy of the Civil Rights movement, especially as it is represented in the National Civil Rights Museum built on the site of the Lorraine Motel where King died. Together, the speech and the museum's space provide a lens through which to view the relation between the melancholic, the aesthetic, and politics.

My essay will first consider how King's automortography can lead us to become melancholically oriented—mobilized—to see his project as unfinished, to see "history [as] open for continual re-negotiation."² Shifting next to a description of my visits to the National Civil Rights Museum during the summer of 2001, I will consider how the temporal and spatial aesthetics of the museum are similarly animated by a melancholic aesthetic. Both the speech and the space, through their aesthetics and their relation to King's death, are objects of continual automortographic witness. The museum's participatory exhibits cue the structures of feeling that linger in the American cultural imaginary, placing the visitor precisely at the point where the aesthetic and the political intersect. But in the end, do the exhibits present, like King's speech, an unfinished history, or do they encourage a closing of minds, locking King and the Civil Rights movement in the past?

Automortography, or the attempted representation of one's own death, describes the subject becoming an object (in the form of the corpse) and entails attempts by survivors to reanimate that subject through the object of the automortographic act. Like the aesthetic, which is "caught between subjectivity and objectivity," automortography enables the subject to fantasize about a posthumous objectification and the survivors to return, through melancholic sentiment and repetition, to that moment of fantasy.³ Because it is performative, the automortographic act is akin to the aesthetic: its construction enables an emotional projection (by self and other) and ruminations on mortality and the intersection of identity and community.

Automortography may be autobiography's kin, but it is more concerned with the mort of death than the bio of life. Instead of relying on the logic of the mature self reflecting (on) the progress of the immature self, automortography shows the self anticipating an impending death and scripting the response of the posthumous audience. The split in the self is not retrospective but forward-looking, occurring in what Donald Pease has described as the "future anterior tense" where one can imagine what will have been.⁴ In automortography, "what will have been" is one's own death; the dying self, uncannily projected past the grave, imagines its absence. The repetition at the heart of these acts of dying enables the survivors' melancholic attachment to automortography, opening up the space of the self with collective potential. In King's case, his automortographic final speech is replayed annually on National Public Radio and has been incorporated into exhibits at the National Civil Rights Museum. This speech has the ring of prophecy, and has enlisted thousands in King's...