The Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. was shot at 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 1968, while standing on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was 39 years old, in Memphis to support 1,300 Black sanitation workers on strike since February 12 over poverty wages, no benefits, no breaks, and no protections — the same workers whose colleagues Echol Cole and Robert Walker had been killed when a garbage truck malfunctioned on February 1, their families receiving $500. King died at 7:05 p.m. Within hours, riots broke out in 125 cities. By the end of the week, 46 people were dead, 2,600 injured, and 21,000 arrested.^1^

Part of Blood of the Civil Rights Movement — ← Back to series hub

Who King Actually Was in 1968, Not in the Textbooks

The King commemorated on the national holiday is largely the King of “I Have a Dream” — the 1963 speech, the coalition, the moral clarity that could be made comfortable for a nation not yet asked to change very much. The King killed in 1968 was considerably less comfortable. He had spent the previous three years opposing the Vietnam War, a position that isolated him from Lyndon Johnson, the NAACP, and a significant portion of the liberal establishment. He had launched the Poor People’s Campaign, which sought economic justice for poor people of all races and went well beyond voting rights into the redistribution of wealth. His approval rating in the last Gallup poll before his death, taken in 1966, was 33 percent.^2^

At the time of his death, his FBI file documented years of surveillance, infiltration, and a 1964 letter from the FBI urging him to commit suicide. The country did not love Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. It has loved the memory of him, selectively curated, since.

James Earl Ray Pleaded Guilty and Recanted Three Days Later

James Earl Ray, a small-time criminal who had escaped from Missouri State Penitentiary in April 1967, shot King from a rooming house bathroom window across Mulberry Street using a Remington Model 760 Gamemaster rifle. He fled to Canada, then England, and was arrested at Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968, on a forged Canadian passport.

Ray pleaded guilty to first-degree murder on March 10, 1969, and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. He recanted his confession three days later and spent the rest of his life claiming he had not acted alone.^3^

The question of whether Ray acted alone has never been definitively resolved. In 1999, a civil trial — Coretta Scott King and other members of the King family versus Loyd Jowers and other unknown co-conspirators — resulted in a jury verdict finding that a conspiracy involving Jowers, local Memphis police officers, and organized crime was responsible for King’s death. The Justice Department investigated and concluded in 2000 that the evidence did not support a conspiracy. The King family accepted the civil jury verdict. James Earl Ray died in prison on April 23, 1998.

How the FBI Treated King as a National Security Threat

Documents released over the decades have established that the FBI’s COINTELPRO program treated King as the “most dangerous Negro in America” — Director J. Edgar Hoover’s description in 1963. The FBI tapped his phones, bugged his hotel rooms, and shared intelligence with his enemies. The suicide letter — discovered in FBI files, written in language clearly designed to read as if it came from King himself — urged him to kill himself before the March on Washington or face public exposure of alleged affairs.^4^

The Church Committee hearings in 1975 exposed the full scope of the program. The FBI sent King’s widow an apology letter for the surveillance program in 2014 — forty-six years after the assassination. The King family did not find it adequate.

What Was on the Lorraine Motel Balcony That Evening

Ralph Abernathy was on the balcony when King was shot, had known King since 1955, and caught him as he fell. Andrew Young was also on the balcony and went to the railing to point toward the sound of the shot — toward the rooming house across Mulberry Street. Jesse Jackson was on the ground floor; he appeared on television the next day wearing a shirt he said was stained with King’s blood.

The sanitation workers in Memphis settled their strike on April 16, 1968 — twelve days after the assassination. The city recognized their union and agreed to a wage increase. Echol Cole and Robert Walker were not there to see it.^5^

What the Assassination Did Not End

The Poor People’s Campaign came to Washington in May and June 1968 and built Resurrection City — a tent city of 3,000 people on the National Mall. It was evicted by police on June 24, 1968. No major economic legislation followed. The economic demands King had been pressing in his final years — guaranteed income, full employment, fair housing — remain substantially unmet.

The assassination is often narrated as the moment the civil rights movement lost its direction. What it actually demonstrates is that the violence against civil rights leadership was targeted at specific threats to the racial and economic order — and that King had become more threatening, not less, by 1968. The same white supremacist infrastructure that murdered Medgar Evers in 1963 and bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church that same year operated in an environment of near-total impunity, and that impunity was institutional, not accidental.

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Sources:

1. Honey, Michael K. Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign. W.W. Norton, 2007.
2. Branch, Taylor. At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68. Simon & Schuster, 2006.
3. Posner, Gerald. Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Random House, 1998.
4. Church Committee (U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations). Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans. Government Printing Office, 1976.
5. King, Coretta Scott. My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969.