Martin Luther King Jr.

Shot on 4 April 1968 on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis by James Earl Ray; the Nobel laureate of the civil rights movement died at thirty-nine.

Overview

King had come to Memphis to support the striking sanitation workers amid his Poor People Campaign. A single rifle shot from a rooming house across the street felled him at the balcony rail; he died at St Joseph hospital within the hour. Ray, an escaped convict, was traced through a rifle and a racist pamphlet trail, arrested in London, and pleaded guilty to avoid the electric chair, then spent the rest of his life seeking a trial and recanting. A 1999 civil suit brought by the King family found a conspiracy in a wrongful death verdict, while the Department of Justice investigations found none. Riots swept over a hundred American cities. Congress passed the Fair Housing Act within the week; the holiday in his name came in 1983. The shot echoes through American life to this day.