When did Martin Luther King die?
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Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesman and leader in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. An African American church leader and the son of early civil rights activist and minister Martin Luther King Sr., King advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through nonviolence and civil disobedience. Inspired by his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi, he led targeted, nonviolent resistance against Jim Crow and other forms of discrimination.
King participated in and led marches for the right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other civil rights. He oversaw the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and later became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As president of the SCLC, he led the unsuccessful Albany Movement in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize some of the nonviolent 1963 protests in Birmingham, Alabama. King was one of the leaders of the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The civil rights movement achieved pivotal legislative gains in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
The SCLC put into practice the tactics of nonviolent protest with some success by strategically choosing the methods and places in which protests were carried out. There were several dramatic stand-offs with segregationist authorities, who sometimes turned violent. Several times King would be jailed. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director J. Edgar Hoover considered King a radical and made him an object of the FBI’s COINTELPRO from 1963, forward. FBI agents investigated him for possible communist ties, spied on his personal life, and secretly recorded him. The FBI in 1964 mailed King a threatening anonymous letter, which he interpreted as an attempt to make him commit suicide.
On October 14, 1964, King won the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. In 1965, he helped organize two of the three Selma to Montgomery marches. In his final years, he expanded his focus to include opposition towards poverty, capitalism, and the Vietnam War, in 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be calling the Poor People’s Campaign, when he was assassinating on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee.
His death was following by national mourning, as well as anger leading to riots in many U.S. cities. King was posthumously awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2003. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was establishing as a holiday in cities and states throughout the United States beginning in 1971; the holiday was enacting at the federal level by legislation signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the U.S. have been renamed in his honor; and the most populous county in Washington State was rededicated for him. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicating in 2011.
Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr., an African American clergyman and civil rights leader, was fatally shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, at 6:01 p.m. CST. He was rushed to St. Joseph’s Hospital, where he died at 7:05 p.m. He was a prominent leader of the civil rights movement and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who knew for his use of nonviolence and civil disobedience.
James Earl Ray, a fugitive from the Missouri State Penitentiary, was arrested on June 8, 1968, at London’s Heathrow Airport, extradited to the United States and charged with the crime. On March 10, 1969, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 99 years in the Tennessee State Penitentiary. He later made many attempts to withdraw his guilty plea and to be tried by a jury, but was unsuccessful. Ray died in prison in 1998.
The King family and others believe that the assassination was the result of a conspiracy involving the U.S. government, the mafia, and Memphis police, as alleged by Loyd Jowers in 1993. They believe that Ray was a scapegoat. In 1999, the family filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Jowers for the sum of $10 million. During closing arguments, their attorney asked the jury to award damages of $100, to make the point that “it was not about the money”.
During the trial, both sides presented evidence alleging a government conspiracy. The accused government agencies could not defend themselves or respond because they were not naming as defendants. Based on the evidence, the jury concluded that Jowers and others were “part of a conspiracy to kill King” and awarded the family $100. The allegations and the finding of the Memphis jury were later disputed by the United States Department of Justice in 2000 because of the lack of evidence.
The assassination was one of four major assassinations of the 1960s in the United States, coming several years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, and two months before the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in June 1968.
The Death of Martin Luther King
In a country with a history of great oratory Martin Luther King stands high. His spellbinding ‘I Have a Dream’ speech to a huge crowd in Washington DC in 1963 was admiring all over the world. He had first come to public attention as an inspiring leader during the Alabama bus boycott which began in 1955; when he was twenty-six. From Georgia originally; he was pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama; and both his father and his maternal grandfather were Baptist ministers.
In 1964 King won the Nobel Peace prize and as the decade drew on he widened his concerns to include the problem of poverty, among whites as well as blacks, and opposition to the Vietnam War, in 1967 he announced the founding of the Poor People’s Campaign to press the federal government into more effective action against poverty.
In an essay not published until long after his death he maintained that the civil rights movement was compelling America ‘to face all its interrelated flaws – racism, poverty, militarism and materialism’. Meanwhile black militants, angered by what they considered slow progress, were turning away from him and his principle of non-violence.
In the early months of 1968 King visited Memphis, Tennessee several times to support a strike by the city’s black sanitation workers. Leading a protest march there in March. He was horrified when some of the marchers began smashing windows and looting shops.
King was deeply depressing by the violence. Later, speaking at a meeting in Memphis on April 3rd about death-threats made against him, he 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 allowing 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. ’
King and some of his friends spent that night at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis and at about six the following evening he was standing on the balcony outside his second-floor room with a friend called Billy Kyles, waiting to go out to eat. Kyles turned to go downstairs where a limousine was waiting when there was a bang like a car back-firing.
It was a rifle shot, apparently fired from the window of a rooming house across the street; and King fell to the floor of the balcony, mortally wounded. Another friend, Ralph Abernathy; who was in the motel room, rushed out onto the balcony, saw King lying there with a gaping wound in the head and said; ‘Martin, Martin, this is Ralph. Do you hear me? This is Ralph.’ King’s lips moving, but he was unable to speak. An ambulance was summoned, but King died before it arrived. He was thirty-nine years old.
Mahalia Jackson sang King’s favourite hymn, ‘Take my hand, precious Lord’, at his funeral in Atlanta, Georgia. Meanwhile, riots had exploded in Washington DC and other cities at the news of the assassination as blacks went on the rampage, burning and looting. It took thousands of troops to restore order and King himself would have been deeply saddened.
Conspiracy theories about the murder have flourished ever since; but at the time the killer was identifying as a white minor criminal from Tennessee named James Earl Ray. He ran away to England; but was arrested in London and extradited back to Memphis where, tried in 1969. He pleaded guilty to the murder and was given a ninety-nine year prison sentence. He later protested his innocence, but few believed him and he died in prison at the age of seventy in 1998.
