Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King was shot on a motel balcony in Memphis on 4 April 1968 and more than a hundred American cities burned. He was in Memphis to support a strike by sanitation workers, which was the direction his work had taken: after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had removed the legal structure of segregation, he had turned to poverty, housing in northern cities, and the war in Vietnam. The speech against the war at Riverside Church in April 1967 cost him a great deal of support, including from the administration and from parts of the movement. He was organising a Poor People's Campaign to bring an encampment to Washington. The speech he gave in Memphis the night before he died ends with a passage about having been to the mountaintop and seen the promised land, and about not minding whether he got there himself. The shot came from a rooming house across the street the following evening. James Earl Ray, an escaped convict, was arrested at Heathrow two months later, pleaded guilty, and recanted three days after sentencing; the King family came to believe he was not responsible, and a civil jury in Memphis found in 1999 that there had been a conspiracy. Riots broke out in some 110 cities and forty-three people died. The Fair Housing Act passed a week later. He was thirty-nine. His own reading of what he had achieved was less triumphant than the annual commemorations suggest. He told an interviewer in 1967 that he had integrated lunch counters for people who could not afford a hamburger, and that the second phase was going to be far harder than the first.
- Year: 1968 CE
- Category: Political
