King Assassinated: America Loses Its Moral Voice

Martin Luther King Jr. was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, at 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 1968. He was thirty-nine years old. He had come to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers, most of them Black, who were demanding equal pay and safer working conditions after two colleagues were crushed to death by a malfunctioning garbage truck. The night before his assassination, he delivered the "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech at the Mason Temple, which ended with the 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." He had been in a difficult period. The Poor People's Campaign, his attempt to build a multiracial coalition against poverty, was struggling to gain momentum. His public opposition to the Vietnam War had cost him allies in the Johnson administration and within the civil rights establishment itself. The FBI's COINTELPRO operation had been surveilling him for years, and J. Edgar Hoover had authorized a letter anonymously suggesting King take his own life. James Earl Ray fired a single shot from a bathroom window in a rooming house across Mulberry Street from the motel. The bullet struck King in the jaw, severed his spinal cord, and he died at St. Joseph's Hospital at 7:05 p.m. His death triggered riots in more than one hundred American cities. President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968 six days later. Ray pleaded guilty and was sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison. He recanted his confession almost immediately and spent the rest of his life claiming he had been framed.