At 6:05 P.M. On Thursday, April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot in Memphis, Tennessee while standing on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel. 

Martin Luther King Jr. was a scholar and Baptist minister who led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) civil rights movement. Through his activism and inspirational speeches, beginning in the mid-1950s, King played a monumental role in ending legal segregation in the United States.

In the last years of his life, there was mounting criticism from young African American activists who renounced his nonviolent methods of seeking change. These young radicals favored a more aggressive approach and were not happy working within the established political framework.

As a result of the increasing opposition from other African American leaders, King sought to increase his popularity beyond his race, speaking out publicly against the Vietnam War. Plans were underway for him and his SCLC colleagues to march to Washington to revive his movement and lobby Congress on behalf of the poor Americans, Black and white alike. He hoped to address a range of issues such as poverty and unemployment.

In the spring of 1968, King traveled to support a sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis. King gave an eerily prophetic speech on the night of April 3 at the Mason Temple Church, which seemed to foreshadow his untimely passing. The next evening, a sniper bullet struck King in the neck. An ambulance took King to St. Joseph’s Hospital where he was pronounced dead at 7:05 P.M.

In the wake of his death, a wave of riots sparked in major cities across the country, followed by a period of national mourning. After a two-month manhunt, James Earl Ray, an escaped convict, was apprehended. In March 1969, Ray pled guilty to King’s murder charges. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison. To date, King is still memorialized on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.