Dr. King is assassinated 1968
Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. is fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers’
strike and was on his way to dinner when a bullet struck him in the jaw
and severed his spinal cord. King was pronounced dead after his arrival
at a Memphis hospital. He was 39 years old.
In the months before his assassination, Martin Luther King became
increasingly concerned with the problem of economic inequality in
America. He organized a Poor People’s Campaign to focus on the issue,
including an interracialpoor people’s marchon Washington,
and in March 1968 traveled to Memphis in support of poorly treated
African-American sanitation workers. On March 28, a workers’ protest
march led by King ended in violence and the death of an African-American
teenager. King left the city but vowed to return in early April to lead
another demonstration.
On April 3, back in Memphis, King gave his last sermon, saying,
“We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with
me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop…And He’s allowed me to go
up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised
Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that
we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”
One day after speaking those words, Dr. King was shot and killed by a
sniper. As word of the assassination spread, riots broke out in cities
all across the United States and National Guard troops were deployed in
Memphis and Washington, D.C. On April 9, King was laid to rest in his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia.
Tens of thousands of people lined the streets to pay tribute to King’s
casket as it passed by in a wooden farm cart drawn by two mules.
The evening of King’s murder, a Remington .30-06 hunting rifle was
found on the sidewalk beside a rooming house one block from the Lorraine
Motel. During the next several weeks, the rifle, eyewitness reports,
and fingerprints on the weapon all implicated a single suspect: escaped
convict James Earl Ray. A two-bit criminal, Ray escaped a Missouri
prison in April 1967 while serving a sentence for a holdup. In May
1968, a massive manhunt for Ray began. The FBI eventually determined
that he had obtained a Canadian passport under a false identity, which
at the time was relatively easy.
On June 8, Scotland Yard investigators arrested Ray at a London
airport. He was trying to fly to Belgium, with the eventual goal, he
later admitted, of reaching Rhodesia. Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe, was
at the time ruled by an oppressive and internationally condemned white
minority government. Extradited to the United States, Ray stood before a
Memphis judge in March 1969 and pleaded guilty to King’s murder in
order to avoid the electric chair. He was sentenced to 99 years in
prison.
Three days later, he attempted to withdraw his guilty plea, claiming
he was innocent of King’s assassination and had been set up as a patsy
in a larger conspiracy. He claimed that in 1967, a mysterious man named
“Raoul” had approached him and recruited him into a gunrunning
enterprise. On April 4, 1968, he said, he realized that he was to be the
fall guy for the King assassination and fled to Canada. Ray’s motion
was denied, as were his dozens of other requests for a trial during the
next 29 years.
During the 1990s, the widow and children of Martin Luther King Jr.
spoke publicly in support of Ray and his claims, calling him innocent
and speculating about an assassination conspiracy involving the U.S.
government and military. U.S. authorities were, in conspiracists’ minds,
implicated circumstantially. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover
obsessed over King, who he thought was under communist influence. For
the last six years of his life, King underwent constant wiretapping and
harassment by the FBI. Before his death, Dr. King was also monitored by
U.S. military intelligence, which may have been asked to watch King
after he publicly denounced the Vietnam War
in 1967. Furthermore, by calling for radical economic reforms in 1968,
including guaranteed annual incomes for all, King was making few new
friends in the Cold War-era U.S. government.
Over the years, the assassination has been reexamined by the House
Select Committee on Assassinations, the Shelby County, Tennessee,
district attorney’s office, and three times by the U.S. Justice
Department. The investigations all ended with the same conclusion: James
Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King. The House committee acknowledged
that a low-level conspiracy might have existed, involving one or more
accomplices to Ray, but uncovered no evidence to definitively prove this
theory. In addition to the mountain of evidence against him–such as his
fingerprints on the murder weapon and his admitted presence at the
rooming house on April 4–Ray had a definite motive in assassinating
King: hatred. According to his family and friends, he was an outspoken
racist who informed them of his intent to kill Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr. He died in 1998.
(More Events on This Day in History)
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American Revolution
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Automotive
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-
Civil War
- 1865 President Lincoln tours Richmond
-
Cold War
- 1949 NATO pact signed
-
Crime
- 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated
-
Disaster
- 1933 Dirigible crash kills 73
-
General Interest
- 1841 President Harrison dies after one month in office
- 1918 Second Battle of the Somme ends
- 1949 NATO established
- 1975 Microsoft founded
-
Hollywood
- 1960 Ben-Hur wins 11 Academy Awards
- 2013 Legendary movie critic Roger Ebert dies
-
Literary
- 1928 Maya Angelou is born
-
Music
- 1913 Muddy Waters is born
-
Old West
- 1843 Yellowstone photographer William Jackson is born
-
Presidential
- 1841 Harrison dies of pneumonia
- 1865 Lincoln dreams about a presidential assassination
-
Sports
- 1982 Gretzky finishes season with 212 points
-
Vietnam War
- 1967 Martin Luther King, Jr., speaks out against the war
- 1975 Operation Baby Lift aircraft crashes
-
World War I
- 1918 Germans and Allies step up operations near Somme
-
World War II
- 1884 Yamamoto Isoroku, Japan’s mastermind of the Pearl Harbor attack, is born
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