If you want to really know your country, Memphis is a good place to start. Artists such as Howlin’ Wolf and Elvis Presley brought American culture together and sent it around the world from a studio only steps from where a slave trader was celebrated in a city park. Martin Luther King Jr. marched for economic justice, climbed to the mountaintop, and was taken by an assassin’s bullet, all within a triangle separated by a couple of miles.

A ceremony Thursday at the site of three lynchings more than a century ago was part of a week of Ida B. Wells events leading up to Friday’s statue unveiling.