A prominent leader in the American civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. was brutally murdered in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968.<\/p>\n
In one of the most famous photos from Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s assassination, several of King\u2019s fellow civil rights activists point in the direction of the assassin as King, fatally shot, lies bleeding at their feet.<\/p>\n
On a spring night in 1968, the world changed forever. Televisions buzzed and radios crackled as the news spread across the country: Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader who\u2019d given the iconic \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech in Washington, D.C. in 1963 and marched at Selma in 1965, was dead.<\/p>\n
King had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, killed at the age of 39 by a gunman who had fled into the night. Riots broke out in 100 American cities in the days that followed, and some 27,000 people were arrested. Grief and anger ricocheted across every corner of the country, and King\u2019s murder stands as one of the most pivotal events of the 20th century to this day.<\/p>\n
Read on to learn everything you need to know about the tragic assassination, from Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s death at the Lorraine Motel, to the hunt for the gunman, to the questions that have swirled around the event ever since.<\/p>\n
When Was MLK Assassinated?
\nMartin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader at the forefront of the American civil rights movement, was assassinated at 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 1968.<\/p>\n
King had been preparing to leave for dinner with Samuel Billy Kyles, a minister in Memphis, Tennessee. As Kyles later told The New York Times, he, King, and others spent about an hour in King\u2019s hotel room enjoying some \u201cpreacher talk.\u201d As the dinner hour neared, Kyles picked out a necktie for King and accompanied him onto the balcony of his hotel at around 5:45 p.m.<\/p>\n
Martin Luther King Jr. giving his last speech on April 3, 1968, known as the \u201cI\u2019ve Been to the Mountaintop\u201d speech.<\/p>\n
They were running late \u2014 dinner was supposed to start at 6 p.m. \u2014 so Kyles remembered trying to hurry King into the white Cadillac that was waiting for them below. King, though, took a moment to talk to several people who were waiting for him below in the courtyard. Then, Kyles heard the shot.<\/p>\n
It sounded like \u201ckuh-PIE-yah!\u201d Kyles recalled.<\/p>\n
Where Was MLK Shot?
\nMartin Luther King Jr.\u2019s assassination took place at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. King was staying in Room 306, and he was fatally shot near his door on the motel\u2019s second-floor balcony.<\/p>\n
The Lorraine Motel today, which is now part of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis.<\/p>\n
King and other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) were in Memphis to support a local sanitation workers\u2019 strike. Though King was focused on planning a march in Washington, D.C., the \u201cPoor People\u2019s Campaign,\u201d he agreed to come to Memphis to support the 1,300 Black city sanitation workers who were striking. They were paid poorly, and were demanding a wage increase and better working conditions.<\/p>\n
On the night before his death, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis in support of the strikers. King\u2019s sermon \u2014 largely off the cuff \u2014 is now known as the \u201cI\u2019ve Been to the Mountaintop\u201d speech. It would be the last speech he ever gave, and in the days following his assassination, it struck many people as prophetic.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got some difficult days ahead,\u201d King told the crowd. \u201cBut it really doesn\u2019t matter with me now, because I\u2019ve been to the mountaintop\u2026 Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I\u2019m not concerned about that now\u2026 I\u2019ve 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! \u2026 I\u2019m not worried about anything. I\u2019m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!\u201d<\/p>\n
When Did Martin Luther King Die?
\nMartin Luther King Jr. was shot at 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 1968. But even though he was mortally wounded, he didn\u2019t die right away. King had a pulse, and his mouth moved, although he did not speak. As the men on the balcony with King attempted to make him comfortable, covering him with a blanket and placing his head on a pillow, King quickly lost consciousness.<\/p>\n
The shooting was radioed to police headquarters just moments later \u2014 there had also been several police officers stationed across the street from King\u2019s hotel who witnessed the shooting and ran to the scene \u2014 and King was loaded into an ambulance at 6:09 p.m. St. Joseph\u2019s Hospital was about 1.9 miles away, and the ambulance made the trip in roughly four minutes.<\/p>\n
Martin Luther King Jr., moments after he was fatally shot.<\/p>\n
Though King was still clinging to life, doctors at St. Joseph\u2019s Hospital were ultimately unable to save him. He was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m.<\/p>\n
How Did Martin Luther King Jr. Die?
\nWhen Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, the bullet entered on the right side of his face and neck. An autopsy found that the bullet had shattered King\u2019s right jawbone, then traveled through the right side of his neck, injuring the external jugular vein, the vertebral artery, and the subclavian artery. The bullet then transected the spinal cord and lodged in the left shoulder blade.<\/p>\n
King\u2019s official cause of death was hemodynamic collapse from hemorrhagic shock. Dr. Jerry Francisco, the medical examiner who conducted King\u2019s autopsy, later put it in simpler terms. King had died, he said, from a \u201cgunshot wound to the chin and neck with a total transaction of the lower cervical and upper thoracic spinal cord and other structures of the neck.\u201d<\/p>\n
Martin Luther King Jr. was just 39 years old.<\/p>\n
What Was The Reaction To Martin Luther King\u2019s Death In The United States?
\nNews of Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s assassination spread quickly throughout the country. Though most people would have heard reports on television or the radio, a crowd in Indianapolis, Indiana, learned of King\u2019s murder from Robert F. Kennedy, who was in the city during his presidential campaign. (Kennedy, of course, would be assassinated himself just months later.)<\/p>\n
Speaking to a mostly Black audience, Kennedy announced the news to gasps and screams, then said: \u201cFor those of you who are Black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.\u201d<\/p>\n
Though things stayed relatively calm in Indianapolis that night, riots broke out in over 100 other cities. Some 3,500 people were injured, 40 were killed, and some 27,000 people were arrested, including 6,100 in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n
A riot following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.<\/p>\n
Inside the anger and despair that the rioters felt was a question: Who had killed Martin Luther King Jr.? But even though investigators quickly identified a suspect, it took them over two months to track him down.<\/p>\n
Who Killed MLK?
\nAfter Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, investigators found a Remington .30-06 hunting rifle near a boarding house across the street from the Lorraine Motel. Authorities then found fingerprints on the gun. They also determined that a white Mustang spotted leaving the scene was registered to a Mr. Eric Galt, and the gun had been purchased by a Mr. Harvey Lowmyer. These were known aliases of a criminal named James Earl Ray.<\/p>\n
The fingerprints on the gun were Ray\u2019s as well.<\/p>\n
But tracking Ray down was no easy feat. The alleged assassin had escaped from Missouri State Penitentiary in 1967, where he\u2019d been serving a 20-year sentence. As investigators later determined, he\u2019d quickly left the country after Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s assassination, crossing the Canadian border on April 6, 1968, and then making his way across the Atlantic to Europe.<\/p>\n
In June 1968, however, investigators finally caught up with Ray. He was arrested in London, and later pleaded guilty to shooting King on March 10, 1969. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison for the crime.<\/p>\n
So who exactly was James Earl Ray?<\/p>\n
Who Was James Earl Ray?
\nBorn on March 10, 1928, in Alton, Illinois, most of James Earl Ray\u2019s life was marked by ineptitude. After enlisting in the U.S. Army during World War II, Ray was discharged for \u201cineptness and lack of adaptability to military service.\u201d<\/p>\n
James Earl Ray\u2019s mugshot in 1966, two years before Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s death.<\/p>\n
Afterward, he followed in the footsteps of several others in his family and embarked on a life of crime. But Ray proved to be inept here, too. The first time that Ray tried to rob someone, he left behind his identification. And when he tried to rob a taxi driver at gunpoint \u2014 for $11 \u2014 Ray led the police into a dead-end alleyway, where they quickly arrested him.<\/p>\n
Ray committed more crimes in the 1950s and, in 1959, was sentenced to 20 years for holding up a grocery store in St. Louis. He managed to escape in 1967, and wound his way through Canada, Alabama, Mexico, and Los Angeles, before making his way to Memphis, Tennessee, in April 1968.<\/p>\n
There, investigators alleged, James Earl Ray had killed Martin Luther King Jr. But to understand Ray\u2019s purported motives, you have to understand the role Martin Luther King Jr. had grown to play in American society.<\/p>\n
Who Was Martin Luther King?
\nBorn on Jan. 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia, to Martin Luther King Sr. and Alberta Williams King, King grew up in a comfortable, middle-class Black family. However, he still experienced segregation and racism in Jim Crow America.<\/p>\n
King later attended Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary, and Boston University. He met his wife, Coretta Scott, in Boston, and the couple soon moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where King became the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. In 1955, King became the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott, a protest against segregation on the city\u2019s buses.<\/p>\n
This marked the start of King\u2019s leadership role in the civil rights movement.<\/p>\n
What Did Martin Luther King Jr. Do?
\nBetween 1955 and his death in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. employed several tactics to move the civil rights movement forward. He helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, which embraced the idea of nonviolent protests, and oversaw boycotts, sit-ins, and marches. King, a talented orator, also gave iconic speeches about civil rights, most famously his 1963 \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n
Martin Luther King Jr. giving his famous \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech in Washington, D.C. 1963.<\/p>\n
This made King a public figure in the United States \u2014 and a controversial one. The FBI tried to expose King\u2019s dark side to the public, including his extramarital affairs, and some Black activists like Malcolm X thought that King\u2019s nonviolence was the wrong approach to address racism.<\/p>\n
King\u2019s house was dynamited during the Montgomery bus boycott, and he was nearly stabbed to death in 1958 by a mentally disturbed woman named Izola Ware Curry. Just before he flew to Memphis in April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s flight was delayed because of a bomb threat \u2014 which led him to tell his family that he thought a \u201cprice\u201d had been put on his head.<\/p>\n
Why Did James Earl Ray Kill Martin Luther King Jr.?
\nSo why did James Earl Ray shoot Martin Luther King Jr.? In the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s death, those who knew Ray thought that the answer was perfectly clear: Ray was a racist who hated what King stood for.<\/p>\n
Ray\u2019s fellow inmates remembered him flying into a rage when King appeared on TV, and exclaiming: \u201cSomebody\u2019s got to get him. If I ever get to the streets, I am going to kill him.\u201d Ray similarly told his brother Jerry that he wanted to kill King, and that he believed that George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama who was running for president, would eventually pardon him. Jerry also recalled that his brother admired Adolf Hitler and wanted the United States to be an \u201call-white country.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the end, the House Select Committee on Assassinations speculated that James Earl Ray had killed King in order to collect a $50,000 bounty that had been offered by George Wallace supporters in St. Louis.<\/p>\n
But even though Ray initially pleaded guilty to assassinating King, he attempted to withdraw his confession just 72 hours later.<\/p>\n
Was James Earl Ray Guilty?
\nAfter his arrest, James Earl Ray pleaded guilty in order to avoid the death penalty. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison for the crime. But in the following days, Ray began to tell quite a different story.<\/p>\n
According to Ray, he had not murdered King. He claimed that he\u2019d met a blond Cuban named \u201cRaoul\u201d (or \u201cRaul\u201d) and that he\u2019d bought the incriminating Remington .30-06 hunting rifle on Raoul\u2019s behalf.<\/p>\n
Ben Holley, the supervisor of the state property and evidence room, holds the gun purchased by James Earl Ray.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had met with him twice while in Memphis at Jim\u2019s Grill, which was near the boarding house,\u201d Ray later claimed in an interview with The Tennessean. \u201cOn the night of the shooting, I had left the rifle with Raoul.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ray said he only pleaded guilty because his lawyer and the FBI pressured him into it. Though his story may seem suspect \u2014 no one has ever found Raoul \u2014 many of King\u2019s loved ones believed he was telling the truth.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is abundant evidence of a major high-level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband,\u201d Coretta Scott King, King\u2019s widow, said in 1999. Specifically, she suspected that the FBI played a role in the murder, especially since the organization had harassed King so much.<\/p>\n
Did The FBI Kill MLK? Inside Other Theories About His Death
\nOn Dec. 16, 1993, ABC aired an eyebrow-raising episode of Primetime Live, in which a man named Loyd Jowers claimed to have knowledge of a conspiracy behind Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s murder. Jowers wasn\u2019t just anybody \u2014 he was the owner of Jim\u2019s Grill, the restaurant specifically mentioned by Ray as a place where he had met Raoul.<\/p>\n
Jowers had spoken to police in 1968. Then, he told them he was working at Jim\u2019s Grill at the time of the assassination. He heard a loud noise, went to investigate, and saw nothing. But in 1993, Jowers changed his story.<\/p>\n
ABC obscured Jowers\u2019 face, though they showed his full name.<\/p>\n
He then claimed that he had accepted $100,000 from a man named Frank Liberto, a produce merchant who had alleged ties to the Mafia, to \u201chire someone to assassinate Dr. Martin Luther King.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jowers further claimed that James Earl Ray was not the gunman who shot King, and that King\u2019s real assassin was an \u201cAfrican American man.\u201d Later, he alternatively described the assassin as a white \u201cLieutenant\u201d with the Memphis Police Department, \u201cRaoul,\u201d and another unidentified person.<\/p>\n
In 1999, Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s family brought a wrongful death suit against Jowers. A jury in Memphis unanimously found that Jowers had indeed conspired to kill King alongside \u201cothers, including government agencies.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, five official investigations into Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s death came to a different conclusion: They found that King had been killed by James Earl Ray. There is no confirmed evidence that King was killed by the FBI, the Mafia, or any other larger conspiracy. That said, many experts on the topic believe it\u2019s possible Ray had help. After all, pulling off a high-profile murder and an international escape would\u2019ve been difficult to do on his own.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s little wonder why many people \u2014 including King\u2019s own children \u2014 suspect that there\u2019s more to the story of his 1968 assassination.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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