(April 4, 2008)—Forty years ago Friday evening, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed by a single rifle shot as he stood on a second floor balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., where he had gone to support striking sanitation workers.
Biographer Taylor Branch says King died after telling musician Ben Branch, “Ben, make sure you play “Take My Hand Precious Lord,” in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty.”
The night before he was killed, King addressed a rally at Mason Temple in Memphis, and spoke of his own mortality, making reference to a bomb threat that had delayed his flight.
“Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind,” King said.
“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've 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. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
The assassination triggered riots in a hundred U.S. cities.
President Lyndon B. Johnson called for calm and declared a national day of mourning.
Five days later, funeral services were held in Atlanta for King at Ebenezer Baptist Church and on the campus of Morehouse College.
James Earl Ray was arrested in June 1998 in England and pleaded guilty in March 1969 to King’s murder.
But he spent the remainder of his life insisting that he was innocent.
The King family shared the belief, saying Ray “was not the triggerman and, in fact, was an unknowing patsy.”
Whatever the truth about his death, the fact remains that in life, King played a defining role in the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
At the time of his assassination, he was a Nobel Prize winner who was both the focus of threats from angry whites and criticism from frustrated blacks who questioned his philosophy of non-violent disobedience and argued in favor of a more direct and more confrontational approach.
He had stepped onto a larger stage, and was planning another march on Washington to push for legislation ensuring economic parity for black workers.
On the eve of the anniversary King’s death Wednesday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi reflected on the civil rights leader’s message as she spoke about a recent trip to Indian and how it reminded her of King’s earlier journey to learn about Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent movement.
“Truth Insistence, insistence on the truth, and that's what the Rev. Martin Luther King did in the non-violent civil disobedience in the United States that changed our country for the better,” she said.
Wednesday in Memphis, a men and women who were sanitation workers in 1968 were honored for the role they played in the civil rights movement.
The surviving union members were given plaques by Leadership Memphis for their important contribution to history.
Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was with King when he was killed, spoke to the group of the importance the strike played in the overall movement toward racial equality.
Click Here For Martin Luther King’s Nobel Biography
Click Here For The King Center Web Site
Click Here For Stanford University’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research And Education Institute Web Site
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