And the civil rights activist, actor, author and judge, D’Army Bailey, has died at the age of 73. Bailey joined with fellow African Americans to buy the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and turn it into the National Civil Rights Museum. In 2007, I interviewed D’Army Bailey on the balcony outside room 306, where Dr. King last stood.

D’Army Bailey: “So it’s not a museum that celebrates Dr. King; it’s a museum that celebrates the spirit of a movement. And so, we had the exhibits on Selma and on Montgomery, and on the Freedom Summer of 1954, and we had the exhibit on the courage of the nine black children at Central High School in Little Rock, who braved the mobs to desegregate that school, and James Meredith’s singular courage to desegregate the University of Mississippi, and, of course, finally this tragic event that occurred here on April 4th of 1968.”

D’Army Bailey died Sunday in Memphis after a battle with cancer. He was 73. To see the full interview with him at the Lorraine Motel in 2007, you can go to democracynow.org.