Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr., the best-known leader of the American civil rights movement, was shot dead on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, at 6.01 p.m. on 4 April 1968. He was 39. His killing set off riots in more than a hundred cities. James Earl Ray, an escaped convict, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 99 years in prison, but later retracted his plea, and the King family came to believe that Ray had been made a scapegoat for a wider conspiracy.

King had faced death threats since the mid-1950s, when the Montgomery bus boycott first made him famous, and had survived a stabbing in 1958. By 1968 he was planning a Poor People's Campaign in Washington and had openly opposed the Vietnam War. He came to Memphis to support the city's Black sanitation workers, who had struck in February after two of their colleagues were crushed to death in a garbage truck. The men earned about $1 an hour and had no recognised union. A march King led on 28 March ended in violence, and he returned on 3 April determined to lead a peaceful one.

That night, in heavy rain, King addressed a crowd of about 2,000 at the Mason Temple. In what became known as the "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech, he recalled how close the 1958 stabbing had come to killing him and spoke openly of the threats against his life. It was his last public address.

On the evening of 4 April King was preparing to go to dinner with Ralph Abernathy and other colleagues. As he stood at the railing outside room 306, chatting with people in the courtyard below, a single rifle bullet struck him in the right side of the face and passed into his neck and shoulder. He was taken unconscious to St Joseph's Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 7.05 p.m. The shot came from a Remington rifle, and on 19 April the FBI matched fingerprints on the weapon to Ray, a 40-year-old escapee from the Missouri State Penitentiary.

In Indianapolis, Senator Robert F. Kennedy broke the news to a largely Black crowd in an improvised speech appealing for compassion, which is credited with helping to keep that city calm while violence broke out elsewhere. President Lyndon B. Johnson declared 7 April a national day of mourning. Memphis soon settled the strike on terms favourable to the workers. On 8 April Coretta Scott King led some 40,000 people in a silent march through Memphis, and the next day King's funeral in Atlanta drew vast crowds.

Ray was arrested at London's Heathrow Airport on 8 June 1968 and extradited. On 10 March 1969 he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and received a 99-year sentence. He later made repeated attempts to withdraw the plea and obtain a jury trial, all unsuccessful. He died in 1998.

In 1993 Loyd Jowers alleged that the killing had been a conspiracy involving the government, the Mafia and the Memphis police. King's son Dexter met Ray in 1997 and said the family believed his denial. In 1999 the family brought a wrongful-death suit against Jowers. Because no government body was a defendant, the allegations of official involvement went unanswered in court; the Memphis jury found that Jowers and others, including government agencies, had been part of a conspiracy, and awarded the family the $100 it had sought. In 2000 the Department of Justice reported that its investigation had found no reliable evidence to support Jowers's claims. A sister of Jowers said he had invented the story to sell it. The King biographer David Garrow rejects the claim of government involvement, and the author Gerald Posner concluded that Ray acted alone.

Our 1960 map shows the United States in the civil rights era; Memphis is in the state of Tennessee.