Tom Dent interviews Miriam DeCosta-Willis in Charleston, South Carolina. She talks about the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel. Her husband raised 8.8 million dollars to help develop the museum, which would focus on the ordinary people involved in the civil rights struggle at the site of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination. She was born in Florence, Alabama and moved to Charleston as a child when her father, Frank DeCosta, became principle of Avery High School. His family was from Charleston. DeCosta-Willis talks about her family history and education. She came from a family of educators. She attended Felton Training School in Orangeburg, along with president of Tuskegee University Benjamin Payton and Barbara Williams, Head Librarian at South Carolina State. She went on to become the first black student at Westover School in Middlebury, Connecticut with the assistance of Westover graduate Elizabeth Avery Waring whom she met through Ruby Cornwell. She then attended Wellesley College and married Russell B. Sugarmon in her junior year. They returned to the South to take part in the Civil Rights movement. Her parents had moved to Montgomery, Alabama and were involved in the bus boycotts. She met Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta in Montgomery and was in the city when the Kings' house was bombed. She and her mother went to the house and her mother refused to step back when the police told them to. DeCosta-Willis and Sugarmon moved to Memphis in 1956, where they became active in the NAACP. She and Maxine Smith applied to Memphis State, but were told they did not qualify, despite ample qualifications. She was also turned down for a position teaching in the public schools. When Smith became pregnant, DeCosta-Willis took over her position at Le Moyne College, under President Hollis Price. That summer she went to St. Louis and began her Master's degree. Sugarmon ran for the City Commission in Memphis. Her second husband A.W. Willis was also a NAACP attorney. People flew to Memphis on the way to Mississippi and the city acted as a headquarters. Dent talks about his work with Andrew Young and his discussion of King's involvement in Memphis. They discuss the need for a book on the involvement of Memphis in the Civil Rights movement and they talk about King's assassination. DeCosta-Willis explains her ambivalent feelings about Charleston, describing the class stratification present there as well as the distinctive Lowcountry black culture. She talks about the African roots of the culture, the work of the Avery Research Center, and the influence of the Gullah people and the islands. Zora Neale Hurston came to stay with their family for two weeks. The First African Baptist Church in Savannah was the first black Baptist church, founded around 1785 and predating Mother Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia. She discusses conflict faced by progressives in Charleston.
