Martin Luther King Jr. Assassinated in Memphis While Supporting Striking Sanitation Workers

On April 4, 1968, at 6:01 PM Central Standard Time, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was 39 years old. King had traveled to Memphis to support Black sanitation workers who were striking for better pay, working conditions, and union recognition—a cause that connected his civil rights work to economic justice and labor rights. He was rushed to St. Joseph’s Hospital but was pronounced dead at 7:05 PM. King’s assassination came at a moment when he was expanding his focus beyond desegregation to address systemic poverty, economic inequality, and the Vietnam War, making him an even greater threat to established power structures. At the time of his death, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program had been actively working to “neutralize” King as a civil rights leader for years.

James Earl Ray, an escaped convict from the Missouri State Penitentiary with ties to the segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign, was arrested on June 8, 1968, at London’s Heathrow Airport after the largest investigation in FBI history. Ray pleaded guilty on March 10, 1969, and was sentenced to 99 years in prison, but he quickly recanted his confession and spent the rest of his life claiming he was a patsy. The FBI’s investigation uncovered fingerprints matching Ray in an Atlanta apartment, but numerous questions remained about whether Ray acted alone or as part of a broader conspiracy. The House Select Committee on Assassinations later acknowledged that a low-level conspiracy might have existed but found no definitive evidence.

King’s assassination triggered riots in cities across the United States, with National Guard troops deployed in Memphis, Washington D.C., and other major cities. A crowd of 300,000 attended his funeral on April 9, with Vice President Hubert Humphrey representing President Johnson, who was at Camp David for a Vietnam War meeting. The King family has consistently maintained that they believe Ray was innocent and that King was the victim of a broader conspiracy. In 1999, a Memphis civil trial jury unanimously concluded that King was the victim of a conspiracy involving government agencies, though the U.S. Department of Justice disputed this conclusion in 2000. The family’s skepticism was rooted in well-founded distrust: the FBI, which conducted the assassination investigation, had spent years surveilling King, attempting to blackmail him into suicide, and working to destroy his reputation and movement through COINTELPRO. The assassination occurred just months after an FBI memo stated the goal of preventing the rise of a “messiah” who could unify Black movements, explicitly naming King. Whether Ray acted alone or as part of a conspiracy, King’s murder demonstrated the extreme dangers faced by civil rights leaders who challenged not just segregation but the broader systems of economic and political power, and the institutional failures surrounding his assassination—from FBI harassment while alive to inadequate protection to unresolved questions about conspiracy—revealed the complicity and dysfunction of law enforcement agencies that were supposed to protect citizens but instead targeted those fighting for constitutional rights.