The Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee was a Black-owned institution at the heart of the American civil rights movement. It housed King, Abernathy, Jackson, and the men and women who were remaking the country from the inside out. It was a place of warmth and community and strategy and rest.

Then April 4, 1968 happened. And the motel became a symbol of something else entirely — a wound the country never fully healed and a history it rarely tells in full.

Sam Pollard is one of the great living documentarians — his films on MLK, on the history of slavery’s economic legacy, on the soul music of America have established him as among the most important archivists of Black American history working in cinema. THE LORRAINE is a documentary about what came before the trauma. About the Lorraine Hotel as a living institution. About the people who built and ran it and why it mattered.

Why The LSMG Ledger Covers This Film

The LSMG Ledger was founded to give independent Black press access to the spaces where cultural history is being made. Sam Pollard making a film about the Lorraine Hotel at the 25th Tribeca Festival is a convergence of exactly what we exist to cover. History, Black entrepreneurship, civil rights, and one of the finest documentary filmmakers alive. The Ledger will be at the world premiere.