Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. was shot at 6:01 p.m. on 4 April 1968, while standing on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had come to support the city's striking Black sanitation workers in their AFSCME campaign. A single .30-06 rifle bullet fired from the bathroom of a nearby rooming house struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. He was pronounced dead at St. Joseph's Hospital at 7:05 p.m. He was 39 years old. James Earl Ray, a white prison escapee and petty criminal, was arrested two months later at Heathrow Airport with a Canadian passport. He confessed, then recanted, and died in prison in 1998 maintaining that a conspiracy (never proved) was involved. King's death triggered riots in over 100 American cities in the following days, resulting in 43 dead, 3,500 injured, and 27,000 arrested, requiring 75,000 National Guard and federal troops — the largest domestic military deployment since the Civil War. His assassination removed the civil rights movement's most internationally visible moral voice at the moment he was broadening his focus from racial equality to the war in Vietnam and economic justice for all Americans, the Poor People's Campaign agenda.
- Year: 1968 CE
- Category: Political
