A wreath marks the site where King fell in 1968. (Hampton Hotels)

Next month a group of volunteers will spend 48 hours repairing Memphis's most infamous motel. The Lorraine Motel, now the National Civil Rights Museum, which opened in 1991 on the site of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, will get a coat of paint and other repairs from Hampton Hotel's Save-A-Landmarks program.

"Some of the exhibits and exteriors need work," says Chris Epting, spokesman for Hampton Hotels, which earlier this month announced its plans send 200 volunteers to the National Civil Rights Museum before April 4. "We thought this would be a good chance, since it's the 40th anniversary, to help out."

In 1982, a grassroots group formed a foundation and bought the dilapidated motel in foreclosure. A $9 million museum opened 11 years later inside the revamped motel, and another 12,000-square-foot expansion opened in 2002.

On Mar. 25 and 26, Hampton employees will replace the motel's handicapped-accessible ramps and paint and repair several exhibits.

Houses linked to Amelia Earhart and Edgar Allan Poe will be repaired this year through the nine-year-old Save-A-Landmarks program, which to date has donated $2.5 million in labor and materials to rehab more than 30 sites, from a WWII destroyer to the world's largest rocking chair in Alabama, damaged during Hurricane Katrina.

"It's a very pure-of-heart program," Epting says. "The place gets fixed, but also many people go away more educated about it, more aware of what's going on."

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