Memphis Sights

  1. Brooks Museum of Art

    Stately homes surround relaxing Overton Park, where the Brooks Museum of Art offers excellent exhibits from stonework to cartoons. The permanent collection includes Renaissance and Baroque paintings and sculptures, plus an extensive collection of American work.

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  2. Center for Southern Folklore

    The Center for Southern Folklore in Pembroke Sq at Peabody Place Mall, has a café, books, photographic arts and crafts, and holds free music performances, local tours and film screenings.

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  3. Children's Museum of Memphis

    The Children's Museum of Memphis near Liberty Bowl Stadium, gives the kids a chance to let loose and play in, on and with exhibits like a giant model heart, weaving loom and water wheel.

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  4. Memphis Rock 'n' Soul Museum

    The Smithsonian's Memphis Rock 'n' Soul Museum next to FedEx Forum, examines the social and cultural history that produced the music of the Mississippi Delta.

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  5. Mississippi River Museum

    The Mississippi River Museum displays excellent exhibits depicting the cultural and physical history of the lower Mississippi River valley, including a supercool to-scale model of the river and Gulf.

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  7. National Civil Rights Museum

    Housed in the Lorraine Motel, where the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr was fatally shot on April 4, 1968, is the excellent National Civil Rights Museum. Five blocks south of Beale St, this museum's extensive exhibits, detailed timeline and accompanying audio tour chronicle the ongoing struggles for African American freedom and equality in the US.

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  8. Pink Palace Museum & Planetarium

    Pink Palace Museum & Planetarium sits 3 miles east of downtown. The 1923 mansion was built as a residence for Piggly Wiggly founder Clarence Saunders and opened in 1996 as a natural- and cultural-history museum. It mixes fossils, Civil War exhibits and an exact replica of the original 1916 Piggly Wiggly, the world's first self-service grocery store. It also has an Imax theater; tickets sold separately.

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  9. Slave Haven Underground Railroad Museum/Burkle Estate

    The Slave Haven Underground Railroad Museum/Burkle Estate in an unimposing clapboard house, is thought to have been a way station for runaway slaves on the underground railroad, complete with trapdoors and tunnels.

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  10. Stax Museum of American Soul Music

    If the Stax Museum of American Soul Music fails to give visitors goose pimples it's because the original building was demolished long ago, but today's more stable structure echoes the past with a marquee blazing the reassuring words 'Soulsville USA.' Indeed, this venerable spot was soul music's epicenter in the 1960s, when Otis Redding, Booker T and the MGs and Wilson Pickett recorded here.

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  11. WC Handy House Museum

    Dedicated to the songwriter and composer WC Handy is this Beale St museum. Around the corner, between 3rd and 4th Sts, is a statue of WC Handy that overlooks the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, a park and outdoor amphitheater where bands jam in the summertime.

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