Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (1968) in Memphis

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. took place in Memphis, Tennessee, on the evening of 4 April 1968, when the civil rights leader was shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. King, aged 39, had come to Memphis to support striking Black sanitation workers. His killing shocked the world, set off unrest in more than 100 American cities and ended the life of the most influential leader of the American civil rights movement.

Background: King in 1968

By 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. was internationally famous. He had led the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955–56, delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington in 1963 and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. Campaigns he helped to lead contributed to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In his last years King widened his focus from legal segregation to poverty and war. In April 1967 he publicly condemned the Vietnam War, which cost him support among some allies and in the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Late in 1967 his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) began planning a Poor People’s Campaign, a mass protest in Washington to demand jobs and income for poor Americans of all races.

King was also under heavy surveillance by the FBI, whose director J. Edgar Hoover regarded him as a threat. The bureau wiretapped him and tried to discredit him, as later investigations in the 1970s confirmed.

The Memphis sanitation strike

On 1 February 1968 two Black sanitation workers in Memphis, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death by a malfunctioning garbage truck. Workers had long complained of low wages, dangerous equipment and the refusal of the city to recognise their union, Local 1733 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).

On 12 February about 1,300 sanitation workers went on strike. Mayor Henry Loeb refused to negotiate while they were on strike. The workers marched carrying placards that read “I AM A MAN”, which became one of the defining images of the era.

King’s friend the Reverend James Lawson invited him to Memphis. King addressed a large rally on 18 March and returned to lead a march on 28 March. That march turned violent when some young people broke windows; police responded with tear gas and clubs, and a 16-year-old, Larry Payne, was shot dead by a police officer. King was dismayed and determined to return and lead a peaceful march.

King returned to Memphis on 3 April 1968 and checked into the Lorraine Motel, a Black-owned motel where he often stayed. That evening, despite a storm and his own exhaustion, he spoke to a crowd at Mason Temple, the headquarters of the Church of God in Christ.

In the speech now known as “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”, King spoke about the strike and about threats against his life. He told the audience that he had seen the promised land, adding: “I may not get there with you.” Many listeners later recalled the speech as prophetic.

The shooting

On the evening of 4 April King was preparing to go to dinner at the home of a local minister, the Reverend Samuel “Billy” Kyles. At about 6:01 pm, as he stood on the second-floor balcony outside Room 306 talking to colleagues in the car park below, he was struck by a single rifle bullet. It hit him in the right side of the face and lodged in his spine.

His colleagues, including Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young, rushed to him. He was taken to St. Joseph’s Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 7:05 pm.

Police quickly established that the shot had probably come from a shared bathroom in a rooming house across the street on South Main Street. Minutes after the shooting, a bundle containing a Remington rifle, binoculars and other items was found dumped in the doorway of a nearby shop. The rifle bore fingerprints that the FBI later matched to James Earl Ray.

The hunt for James Earl Ray

James Earl Ray was a career criminal who had escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary in April 1967. He had bought the rifle in Birmingham, Alabama, a few days before the shooting, using a false name, and had rented a room at the rooming house on 4 April.

The FBI launched one of the largest manhunts in its history. Ray fled to Canada, where he obtained a Canadian passport under a false name, and then flew to London. On 8 June 1968 he was arrested at Heathrow Airport while trying to travel on to Brussels. He was extradited to the United States.

On 10 March 1969 Ray pleaded guilty in Memphis and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. Three days later he recanted, claiming that he had been framed by a man he knew only as “Raoul”. He spent the rest of his life seeking a trial, which the courts refused. In 1977 he briefly escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Tennessee before being recaptured. He died in prison on 23 April 1998.

Riots and national mourning

News of King’s death spread rapidly. That night Senator Robert F. Kennedy, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, broke the news to a largely Black crowd in Indianapolis and appealed for calm. President Johnson also urged Americans to reject violence.

Nevertheless, riots and protests broke out in more than 100 cities in the days that followed, sometimes called the Holy Week Uprising. The worst unrest occurred in Washington, D.C., Chicago and Baltimore. Tens of thousands of National Guard and federal troops were deployed, around 40 people were killed, thousands were injured and more than 20,000 were arrested nationwide, according to commonly cited estimates. Large areas of some inner-city neighbourhoods were left damaged for decades.

Johnson declared 7 April a national day of mourning. King’s funeral was held on 9 April at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where he and his father had been pastors, followed by a public service at Morehouse College. Tens of thousands of people followed the farm cart that carried his coffin through the streets.

Consequences

On 11 April 1968 Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, whose Title VIII, known as the Fair Housing Act, banned discrimination in the sale and rental of housing. The bill had been stalled in Congress, and King’s death helped push it through.

In Memphis, the city council reached an agreement with the sanitation workers on 16 April, recognising their union and granting a pay rise. On 8 April, before the settlement, Coretta Scott King had led a silent march through the city.

The Poor People’s Campaign went ahead under Abernathy’s leadership. Protesters built a camp called Resurrection City on the National Mall in May 1968, but it suffered from rain, disorganisation and the shock of Robert Kennedy’s assassination in June, and it was cleared by police in late June.

Questions and investigations

Doubts about whether Ray acted alone appeared soon after the killing. Ray had little money but travelled widely, and some believed he must have been helped.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations reported in 1979 that Ray fired the fatal shot but that there was likely a conspiracy, possibly connected to a reward offered by segregationists in the St. Louis area. It found no evidence that federal, state or local government agencies were involved.

King’s family came to believe that Ray was innocent and supported his request for a trial. In 1999 a civil jury in Memphis, in a lawsuit brought by the family against a local restaurant owner, Loyd Jowers, found that a conspiracy involving him and others had existed. A review by the US Justice Department in 2000 concluded that there was no reliable evidence for these allegations. Most historians accept that Ray fired the shot, while the question of whether anyone helped him remains unresolved.

Legacy

The Lorraine Motel was preserved and reopened in 1991 as the National Civil Rights Museum. A federal holiday in King’s honour, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, was signed into law in 1983 and first observed in 1986. Memorials to King now stand across the United States, including the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C., opened in 2011.

King’s assassination is often seen as the end of the classic phase of the civil rights movement. Coming in the same year as the killing of Robert Kennedy and widespread protest against the Vietnam War, it marked 1968 as one of the most turbulent years in modern American history.

Timeline

• 1968, 1 February: Sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker are killed by a garbage truck in Memphis.
• 1968, 12 February: About 1,300 Memphis sanitation workers go on strike.
• 1968, 28 March: A march led by King turns violent; 16-year-old Larry Payne is killed by police.
• 1968, 3 April: King delivers his “Mountaintop” speech at Mason Temple.
• 1968, 4 April: King is shot at the Lorraine Motel at about 6:01 pm and dies at 7:05 pm.
• 1968, 9 April: King’s funeral is held in Atlanta.
• 1968, 11 April: President Johnson signs the Fair Housing Act.
• 1968, 16 April: The Memphis sanitation strike is settled.
• 1968, 8 June: James Earl Ray is arrested at Heathrow Airport, London.
• 1969, 10 March: Ray pleads guilty and is sentenced to 99 years.

Why it matters

The killing of Martin Luther King Jr. removed the leading voice of nonviolent protest at a moment of deep division in the United States. It provoked widespread unrest, sped the passage of fair housing law and left lasting questions about the circumstances of his death, while turning King into one of the most honoured figures in American history.