The National Civil Rights Museum is a complex of museums and historic buildings in Memphis, Tennessee; its exhibits trace the history of the civil rights movement in the United States from the 17th century to the present. The museum is built around the former Lorraine Motel, the site of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Two other buildings and their adjacent property, also connected with the King assassination, have been acquired as part of the museum complex.

After renovations, the museum reopened in 2014 with an increase in the amount of multimedia and interactive displays, as well as various short films to show highlights. The museum is owned and operated by the Lorraine Civil Rights Museum Foundation, based in Memphis. The Lorraine Motel is owned by the Tennessee State Museum and leased long term to the Foundation to operate as part of the museum complex. In 2016, the museum was honored by becoming an affiliate museum of the Smithsonian Institution. It is also a contributing property to the South Main Street Historic District of the National Register of Historic Places.

The complex is located at 450 Mulberry Street, with all properties except the Lorraine Motel owned by the Lorraine Civil Rights Museum Foundation. The motel is owned by the state of Tennessee and operated by the foundation under a 20-year lease with the state museum in Nashville.

The main museum is located on the south edge of downtown Memphis, in what is now the South Main Arts District, about six blocks east of the Mississippi River. The main 4.14-acre (1.7 ha) site includes the museum, the Lorraine Motel, and associated buildings. The museum also owns the Young and Morrow Building at 422 Main Street, where James Earl Ray initially confessed (and later recanted) to shooting King. The complex includes Canipe's Amusement Store at 418 Main Street, next to the rooming house where the murder weapon with Ray's fingerprints was found. Included on these grounds is the brushy lot that stood between the rooming house and the motel.

The museum exhibits a number of vehicles of historic value or which are otherwise relevant to the time period. Vehicles on display include an International Harvester garbage truck in an exhibit on the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike that brought King to Memphis, James Earl Ray's 1966 white Ford Mustang, a 1968 Cadillac and 1959 Dodge parked outside the motel, a re-creation of the burned shell of a Greyhound bus used by Freedom Riders, and a bus representative of the Montgomery bus boycott.

The site first opened as the 16-room Windsor Hotel in 1924, and was later known as the Marquette Hotel. In 1945, Walter Bailey purchased it and renamed it for his wife Loree and the song "Sweet Lorraine".

During the segregation era, Bailey operated the hotel as upscale lodging that catered to a black clientele. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned segregated businesses, Bailey believed he needed to improve the facility to compete with other hotels that were no longer whites-only. He expanded the complex significantly later that year, adding a second floor, a swimming pool, and drive-up access for new rooms on the south side of the complex. Accordingly, he then changed the name from the Lorraine Hotel to the Lorraine Motel. Many musicians stayed at the motel in the 1960s while recording at Memphis' Stax Records, including Ray Charles, Lionel Hampton, Aretha Franklin, Ethel Waters, Otis Redding, the Staple Singers and Wilson Pickett.

Civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King Jr. stayed in Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in early April 1968, while working to organize protests around the ongoing Memphis sanitation strike. While standing on the balcony outside his room on the evening of April 4, King was suddenly shot once through the neck by an unseen assassin's sniper's bullet. King fell to the ground, bleeding from his head and neck. He was rushed to St. Joseph's Hospital, but the wound was fatal. He died at the hospital an hour after the shooting.