This Unfortunate Day in History

On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, TN. The highly respected civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers' strike and was preparing to leave for dinner when a bullet struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. Dr. King was pronounced dead shortly after his arrival at St. Joseph's Hospital. Dr. King was thirty-nine years old, leaving behind a wife and four small children. According to biographer Taylor Branch, the autopsy revealed that Dr. King had the heart of a sixty-year-old, quite possibly resulting from the stress of the thirteen years of the Civil Rights Movement.

In the months prior to his assassination, Dr. King became increasingly concerned with the issue of economic inequality in the United States. He organized the Poor People's Campaign to focus on this issue, including an interracial march of poor Americans on Washington, D.C. And then in March, he traveled to Memphis in support of poorly treated African-American sanitation employees. Dr. King left the city but vowed to return in early April in order to lead another demonstration. On April 3 in Memphis, Dr. King delivered his final sermon, prophetically declaring:

"Well, I don't know what will happen now.
We've got some difficult days ahead.
But it really doesn't matter with me now
Because I've been to the mountaintop
And I don't mind.

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 allowed 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.

And so, I'm happy tonight.
I'm not worried about anything.
I'm not fearing any man.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

Dr. King was killed the next day. Captured more than two months later, James Earl Ray, a habitual offender and escaped criminal, eventually pleaded guilty to murdering Dr. King and was sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison. (Although evidence exists which casts some doubt on Ray's guilt, it is certainly not along the same lines of Lee Harvey Oswald, where there is absolutely no way that he could have killed President John F. Kennedy.) However, the actual gunman is not even of importance here. It is that the irony of Dr. King's murder is almost to the point of immeasurability: A man who consistently preached and lived non-violence was felled by an assassin's bullet.