Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. , mortal shooting of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. , the most prominent leader of the American civil rights movement , on April 4, 1968, as he stood on the second floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis , Tennessee , where he had come to lead a march by striking sanitation workers. In response to King’s death, more than 100 American inner cities exploded in rioting, looting, and violence. James Earl Ray , a career small-time criminal who became the object of a more than two-month manhunt before he was captured in England , pled guilty to the shooting and received a 99-year prison sentence. He quickly recanted his plea and spent the rest of his life claiming that he had been framed by a conspiracy that was really responsible for King’s assassination.

A number of mainstream publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post , thought King had gone too far with the speech. He had already begun to find himself betwixt and between. Many whites saw him as a dangerous radical. On the other hand, despite his increasingly radical message, a growing number of militant African Americans had become impatient with his nonviolent methods and what they saw as a lack of success in his civil rights efforts in northern cities. It had been several years since his southern triumphs in the Montgomery bus boycott , the Birmingham campaign , and the Selma March .

The Memphis sanitation workers strike

Sanitation workers in Memphis—most of whom were African American and received a paltry wage of about $1.00 per hour—conducted a strike for better wages and working conditions in 1966 but failed to gain sufficient community support. The situation changed after a pair of sanitation workers who had been sheltering from the rain by crouching inside the loading hopper of their garbage truck were crushed because of a malfunctioning switch. This time the strike that resulted in response to their deaths was supported by some 150 local clergymen. The group’s leader, the Rev. James Lawson, asked King, his friend, for support, and on March 18 King addressed a crowd of between 15,000 and 25,000 people, which was said to be the largest indoor gathering in the history of the civil rights movement to that date. King returned to Memphis on March 28 to join Lawson in leading a march in support of the strike. Violence erupted early in the demonstration: looting broke out, and police shot and killed a 16-year-old boy. King was reluctantly spirited away to safety. Dozens of others were injured as police dispensed tear gas and wielded batons while pursuing demonstrators inside the Clayborn Temple. Blame for the outbreak of violence, which marred King’s reputation for nonviolent protest, was placed by many on the Black Organizing Project (better known as the Invaders), a local Black Panther Party-inspired organization. The next day, strikers returned to their daily demonstrations carrying placards that read “I Am a Man,” and reporters asked King if he would be able to keep the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington peaceful. He met with representatives of the Invaders, who claimed not to have instigated the violence and with whom King agreed to coordinate efforts as plans began for a follow-up march.

Having returned to his home base in Atlanta, King contemplated not going back to Memphis. The planning for the Poor People’s Campaign was escalating. At a meeting on March 30, however, he decided that he needed to see through his commitment to the effort in Memphis, and, after some dissent, the leadership of the SCLC agreed. King had come to see the struggle in Memphis as emblematic of the objectives of the Poor People’s Campaign.