Get it right. That's what Beverly Robertson, the executive director of the National Civil Rights

Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, told us at the start of the museum's five-year, $27 million

renovation. You are here to tell the story of the African-American freedom struggle from slavery

to the present. Make sure you get it right.

Everyone on the Exhibit Redesign team took her charge to heart.

The National Civil Rights Museum is located at the Lorraine Motel, where civil rights leader

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

So it is more than just a place where history is told, or even just a place where history happened.

It's hallowed ground, a sacred space that draws a quarter of a million visitors annually.

So the design team's responsibility to get it right to tell the historical truth

was a responsibility to everyone who would ever walk through the museum's doors.

As the lead historian for the renovation, I was often asked to explain design decisions,

usually to the board of directors.

The questions were simple enough, as were the answers.

I will never forget, though, the time I was asked to respond to a

major donor's concern that the new exhibits just didn't give him that same uplifting, feel-good

spirit that he had with the old exhibits. I remember thinking, Lord have mercy this dude. And I remember

saying, if he wants to be happy, tell him to go to Disney World. I mean, our charge wasn't to

make people happy. It was to get the history right. And that's exactly what we did. We didn't sanitize slavery. We rendered visible the horrors of the

Middle Passage and the auction block and made plain to see the culture of black resistance.

We didn't perpetuate the myth that segregation was some kind of minor inconvenience, we made it abundantly clear that

Jim Crow was designed to degrade and humiliate black people for the purpose of controlling their

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