Martin Luther King, Jr. Assassination
Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, an event that sent shock waves reverberating around the world. A Baptist minister and founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), King had led the civil rights movement since the mid-1950s, using a combination of impassioned speeches and nonviolent protests to fight segregation and achieve significant civil-rights advances for African Americans. His assassination led to an outpouring of anger among black Americans, as well as a period of national mourning that helped speed the way for an equal housing bill that would be the last significant legislative achievement of the civil rights era.
King Assassination: Background
In the last years of his life, King faced mounting criticism from young African-American activists who favored a more confrontational approach to seeking change. These young radicals stuck closer to the ideals of the black nationalist leader Malcolm X (himself assassinated in 1965), who had condemned King’s advocacy of nonviolence as “criminal” in the face of the continuing repression suffered by African Americans.
As a result of this opposition, King sought to widen his appeal beyond his own race, speaking out publicly against the Vietnam War and working to form a coalition of poor Americans—black and white alike—to address such issues as poverty and unemployment.
In the spring of 1968, while preparing for a planned march to Washington to lobby Congress on behalf of the poor, King and other SCLC members were called to Memphis, Tennessee, to support a sanitation workers’ strike. On the night of April 3, King gave a speech at the Mason Temple Church in Memphis.
In his speech, King seemed to foreshadow his own untimely passing, or at least to strike a particularly reflective note, ending with these now-historic words: “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. And I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
The body of the slain Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. lies in state at the R.S. Lewis funeral home in Memphis, Tennessee. Hundreds of mourners filed in on April 5, 1968, before his body was sent to Atlanta for burial.
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Crowds of mourners took to the streets around the country on April 7, 1968, like this crowd seen in Harlem. This crowd was on their way to a memorial service for Dr. King being put on in Central Park that would pull in thousands across the city.
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Soldiers stationed in Vietnam during the war attended a memorial service as well on April 8, 1968. The chaplain eulogized King as "America's voice for the wisdom of non-violence."
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The first funeral was held for a group of family and friends at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, where King and his father had both served as pastor. Coretta Scott King, his wife, requested that the church play a recording of “The Drum Major Instinct,” a sermon her husband had delivered earlier that year. In it, he said he didn’t want a long funeral or eulogy, and that he hoped people would mention that he had given his life to serving others.
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After the private funeral, the mourners walked three miles to Morehouse College with a simple farm cart that contained King’s casket.
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Coretta led her children through the procession. From left are, daughter Yolanda, 12; King's brother A.D. King; daughter Bernice, 5; Rev. Ralph Abernathy; sons Dexter, 7, and Martin Luther King III, 10.
Over a hundred thousand mourners lined the streets, or joined in with the procession through Atlanta.
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Many waited outside Morehouse College, where the second funeral would take place.waiting for the funeral procession to pass them.
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Reverend Ralph Abernathy speaks at podium during outdoor Memorial Service for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at the college. King was eulogized by his friend Benjamin Mays, who had promised him he’d do so if he died before King. (King promised the same to Mays.)
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"Martin Luther King Jr. challenged the interracial wrongs of his country without a gun,” said Mays. “And he had the faith to believe that he would win the battle for social justice.”
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Both those who knew him personally and not were deeply saddened by the loss of a man that was the face of hope for many during the Civil Rights movement. This young boy was seen crying against the coffin covered with flowers.
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Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Just after 6 p.m. the following day, King was standing on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel, where he and his associates were staying, when a sniper’s bullet struck him in the neck. He was rushed to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead about an hour later, at the age of 39.
Shock and distress over the news of King’s death sparked rioting in more than 100 cities around the country, including burning and looting. Amid a wave of national mourning, President Lyndon B. Johnson urged Americans to “reject the blind violence” that had killed King, whom he called the “apostle of nonviolence.”
He also called on Congress to speedily pass the civil rights legislation then entering the House of Representatives for debate, calling it a fitting legacy to King and his life’s work. On April 11, Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act, a major piece of civil rights legislation.
King Assassination Conspiracy
On June 8, authorities apprehended the suspect in King’s murder, a small-time criminal named James Earl Ray, at London’s Heathrow Airport. Witnesses had seen him running from a boarding house near the Lorraine Motel carrying a bundle; prosecutors said he fired the fatal bullet from a bathroom in that building. Authorities found Ray’s fingerprints on the rifle used to kill King, a scope and a pair of binoculars.
On March 10, 1969, Ray pleaded guilty to King’s murder and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. No testimony was heard in his trial. Shortly afterwards, however, Ray recanted his confession, claiming he was the victim of a conspiracy.
Ray later found sympathy in an unlikely place: Members of King’s family, including his son Dexter, who publicly met with Ray in 1977 and began arguing for a reopening of his case. Though the U.S. government conducted several investigations into the trial—each time confirming Ray’s guilt as the sole assassin—controversy still surrounds the assassination.
At the time of Ray’s death in 1998, King’s widow Coretta Scott King (who in the weeks after her husband’s death had courageously continued the campaign to aid the striking Memphis sanitation workers and carried on his mission of social change through nonviolent means) publicly lamented that “America will never have the benefit of Mr. Ray’s trial, which would have produced new revelations about the assassination…as well as establish the facts concerning Mr. Ray’s innocence.”
Impact of the King Assassination
Though blacks and whites alike mourned King’s passing, the killing in some ways served to widen the rift between black and white Americans, as many blacks saw King’s assassination as a rejection of their vigorous pursuit of equality through the nonviolent resistance he had championed.
His murder, like the killing of Malcolm X in 1965, radicalized many moderate African-American activists, fueling the growth of the Black Power movement and the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
King has remained the most widely known African-American leader of his era, and the most public face of the civil rights movement, along with its most eloquent voice.
A campaign to establish a national holiday in his honor began almost immediately after his death, and its proponents overcame significant opposition—critics pointed to FBI surveillance files suggesting King’s adultery and his influence by Communists—before President Ronald Reagan signed the King holiday bill into law in 1983.
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