Key Takeaways
On April 3 , 1968 , the night before he was murdered , Martin Luther King Jr.spoke before a enraptured crowd in a packed church in Memphis , Tennessee . The words , " I ’ve Been to the Mountaintop , " is one of the most quoted in the famed preacher man ’s calling .
In the roughly 43 - minute address , an played out , under - the - atmospheric condition King — he initially had asked his champion , theRev . Ralph David Abernathy , to fill in for him , but afterward relented — covered many of the subject that had made him the world-class civil rights figure of the sentence . But it ’s the way King envelop up his speech that is perhaps best known now , more than 50 years after his destruction .
King , who had traveled from his household in Atlanta to begin with in the day to underpin sanitation workers necessitate in a bitter ten-strike against the city , finished his speech to the gang at theMason Temple Church of God in Christlike this :
He reason in a crescendo : " And so I ’m happy tonight . I ’m not worried about anything . I ’m not fearing any humans . Mine eye have seen the glory of the approaching of the Lord . "
Did Martin Luther King Jr. know his assassination was imminent ? That ’s one of a ten thousand of questions that have flourished in the years since King ’s murder , a decease that now sometimes imperil to overshadow thecivil rightsicon ’s considerable bequest .
A Fatal Shot, and More Questions
King was killed by a single bullet from a rifle at just after 6 p.m. April 4 , 1968 , as he remain firm on the breezeway outside his way at Memphis ' Lorraine Motel . Two months later in London , an escaped criminal make James Earl Ray was arrested and blame by the FBI with the slaying . Almost a year after the shooting , and after a complicated serial of effectual maneuver that included fighting his extradition to the United States , Ray agree to plead hangdog , advise that he was merely a player in a larger patch to kill King , and was sentenced to 99 year in prison .
Three daytime subsequently , he recanted his statement . He was never granted a retrial .
The official , government - sanctioned version was that Ray waited in a partake in bath on the second base of a tatty boarding menage across from the Lorraine until King appear , fired a single round from a fiddling more than 200 infantry ( 60 meters ) off , squirrel away his rifle in a nearby doorway , jumped in his Ford Mustang to drive to Atlanta , and then fled the country . He was , accord to several different government investigations , the lonesome gunman .
Still , almost from the minute King fell , citizenry have wondered whether Ray actually kill King , and if he did , whether he acted alone . Dozens of questions about the shot remain today , including :
At theNational Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel(NCRM ) , those questions and others are raised for visitors to see .
" What the museum aims to do , and what we definitely continue to do , is that we remain neutral , " says Ryan Jones , a museum pedagog at the NCRM . " We do n’t endorse either hypothesis , either story . We help host the theories and all the subsequent investigations , we tell apart them as they were , and we allow our guests to determine on their own … what happened on that portentous day . "
The Case for Conspiracy
For those close to King — include his family — the most significant interrogation have been settle . To them , it ’s clean that King was not belt down by Ray but by a syndicate of actor that may include Union , state and local regime agency , theMafia , Jowers and another possible torpedo : Memphis Police Lieutenant Ed Clark .
That was the conclusion of a polite trial in 1999 , after which the King folk and many associate of the former leader lauded the unanimous finding of fact .
" Anyone who sat in on almost four weeks of testimonial , with over 70 viewer — believable watcher , I might tot , from several judges to other very credible witnesses — would know that the truth is here , " MLK ’s son , Dexter , said after the trial . " The question now is , ' What will you do with that ? ' We as a family have done our part . We have carried this curtain for as long as we can carry it . We know what happened . It is on public phonograph recording . The transcriptswill be available … [ a]ny serious researcher who wants to screw what happened can encounter out . "
Others indorse the king and the interpretation uncover at the civil run .
" I cogitate there was a major conspiracy to transfer Dr. King from the American scene , " the recent Georgia congressman John Lewistold The Washington Postin 2018 . " I do n’t know what happened , but the Sojourner Truth of what encounter to Dr. King should be made available for history ’s saki . "
And the Case Against
That civic case , as much as the Kings may have wished it so , was not the concluding word . Not long before the civil guinea pig go to tribulation , King ’s widow , Coretta Scott King , ask President Bill Clinton to look further into the assassination . In August 1998 , Clinton ’s Justice Department , under then - Attorney General Janet Reno , spread a new probe .
In June 2000 , after conducting more than 200 witness interviews , critique decade of grand of page of records , and channel scientific testing and analysis of documentary evidence , the U.S. Department of Justice announced it findings . It said the allegations by Jowers in the civic face — in addition to several other charges that orient responsibility off from Ray , include one by former FBI agent Donald Wilson — were unfounded , prevalent with falsehoods and inconsistencies .
" Our investigation of these most recent allegations , as well as several exhaustive late official investigations , found no honest evidence that Dr. King was pop by conspirators who framed James Earl Ray,“the report states . " Nor have any of the conspiracy theory advanced in the last 30 years , include the Jowers and the Wilson allegations , come through critical test . "
Among the previous investigating was a congressional inquiry in 1979 by theHouse Select Committee on Assassinations , which conclude that Ray was the crap-shooter , but that he likely killed King for money as part of a conspiracy . According to that investigating , though , the plot of land was not spearhead by the Mafia or the FBI , but instead by two racist St. Louis businessmen who at one clip allegedly offer a $ 50,000 bounty for anyone who would assassinate King .
The King Legacy
Several books , including three by King family protagonist and lawyerWilliam F. Pepper , make the sheath for a confederacy to kill King . Others , let in " bolt down the Dream : James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King , Jr. , " finger Ray for the slaying and absolve the regime for any allegation of conspiracy .
Pre - COVID-19 , the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel host more than 300,000 visitors a class . The museum is dedicated to the total struggle for equal right , start with bondage and through such germinal events as theMontgomery Bus Boycottsand the Freedom Rides .
Yet some of its most popular exhibits , not astonishingly , are King - have-to doe with : Room 306 , where he spent his last night ; the touch in the construction across the street where Ray allegedly fired the fatal gibe ; the rifle that Ray allegedly used ; and the Ford Mustang in which he made his so-called getaway . The museum also has an synergistic timeline of the civic right shinny that includes a crack-up of the final day of King and the lingering questions that surround his assassination .
" Dr. King was en route to Washington , D.C. , " the NCRM ’s Jones says of King ’s post - Memphis itinerary . " He planned to march with 500,000 Black and white miserable people , and he made the comment very shortly before his death that if America continued to give its financial assets to the Vietnam War , America would go to hell . "
It was a comment that did n’t sit well with a government essay to win a war that was becoming more and more unpopular , and it furthered his report among his enemies that he was anti - American .
" The forces were very much against him in the mood at the prison term of his death , " Jones say .
Did King ’s liveliness work — striving for polite right hand , aiding the poor , speaking out against warfare — guide to his death ? Did King , the nighttime before , see it total ?
Multiple investigations have been channel , multiple book written , multitudinous arguments made .
The answers to what sincerely happen that Clarence Day in Memphis ? It ’s anybody ’s call .
FAQs
The investigation found no reliable evidence to fend for Jowers ' claim or any confederacy theory surrounding King ’s assassination .
James Earl Ray suggested he was a histrion in a larger plot to kill King , but no definitive grounds was incur to support this claim .
