On April 4, 1968, at 6:50 p.m., Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead while standing on a balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was about to address colleagues from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) who were standing in the parking area below when an assassin fired a single, fatal shot.
There have been many conspiracy theories about Dr. King’s murder, but it’s important to note that for all his influence, he still functioned like a private citizen. He stayed at the Lorraine Motel whenever he visited Memphis, and his killer knew he’d eventually step outside.
“You just don’t think that these powerful people, these people who are larger than life, can be killed by some nobody with a gun,” former Shelby County, Tenn., assistant district attorney John Campbell told NPR in 2018. “You know, there has to be more involved. Well, sometimes there’s not more involved.”
PREVIOUSLY: Remembering The Dr. King Conservatives Find So Damn Inconvenient
James Early Ray admitted to shooting Dr. King but would later maintain his innocence, and the King family believed him. The family struggled to accept that a lone gunman was responsible, especially considering that the FBI had hounded Dr. King for most of his life. In August 1967, the FBI created a COINTELPRO against so-called “Black Nationalist–Hate Groups.” This specifically targeted Dr. King, the SCLC, and other civil rights leaders. The FBI reportedly feared that Dr. King could become a “messiah” who’d declare himself a literal king, which the Romans would ban, and unite the separate Black liberation groups against white America. According to a Senate Select Committee, there were serious concerns that Dr. King would “abandon his supposed ‘obedience’ to ‘white liberal doctrines’ (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism.” It’s adorable that anyone assumed Dr. King’s commitment to nonviolence was a “white liberal doctrine.”
During the last months of Dr. King’s life, the FBI had amped up its efforts to discredit him and “neutralize” the SCLC. They were arguably successful: Dr. King had a 75 percent disapproval rating in early 1968. Not even Fox News with all its mighty powers of propaganda has managed this against Barack Obama or Joe Biden.
Dr. King, despite ongoing right-wing lies, was overtly progressive. He advocated more or less for reparations, stating in his book Why We Can’t Wait: “Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic.” He also said, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro.”
In an interview with Alex Haley for the non-naked parts of Playboy, Dr. King sounded like any number of anti-racist, CRT scholars whose work has lately been banned from public schools.
Can any fair-minded citizen deny that the Negro has been deprived? Few people reflect that for two centuries the Negro was enslaved, and robbed of any wages–potential accrued wealth which would have been the legacy of his descendants. All of America’s wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his centuries of exploitation and humiliation. It is an economic fact that a program such as I propose would certainly cost far less than any computation of two centuries of unpaid wages plus accumulated interest.
After pissing off right-wingers, he proceed to alienate white moderates with a class-based approach to social justice. I’m sure somewhere they are explaining to him why he’s wrong. They’re good at that.
In any case, I do not intend that this program of economic aid should apply only to the Negro; it should benefit the disadvantaged of all races. [The poor white man] made to realize that he is in the very same boat with the Negro ….Together, they could form a grand alliance.
This “grand alliance” might’ve also include advising poor people of all races against warring in foreign lands to further white America’s imperialistic agenda. It’s telling that the FBI was terrified that Dr. King might abandon his nonviolent teachings when it applied specifically to violent white racists in America, but Dr. King simply applying his philosophy consistently to all forms of violence was considered an even greater threat to the world order.
Dr. King had long opposed the Vietnam War, noting in 1965 that it was “accomplishing nothing.” Congress and the press weren’t thrilled, of course, but even other civil rights leaders argued that “expanding his message to include foreign affairs would harm the Black freedom struggle in America.” He moderated his criticism through 1965 and 1966 in fear of the dreaded Communist label, although his wife, Coretta Scott King, took a more active anti-war position at the time (Fox News wouldn’t have let this pass these days).
However, exactly a year before his death, on April 4, 1967, Dr. King condemned the Vietnam War in no uncertain terms to a crowd of 3,000 at Riverside Church in New York. “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned,” he proclaimed, “part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam.”
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems… But they asked, and rightly so, ‘what about Vietnam?’ They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.
That’s radical even today.
Dr. King was in Memphis on April 4, 1968, to support 1,300 Black sanitation workers in the city who’d gone on strike to demand better working conditions and higher pay. The city expected them to work grueling hours without overtime, and the workers earned just 65 cents an hour (about $5.62 today). The twisted irony was that they were paid so little they were eligible for welfare, but that obviously didn’t mean they were lazy.
The New Yorkerpublished a posthumous interview with Dr. King from just before his assassination.
In the course of our conversation, Dr. King told of a recent threat against his life, in Cleveland. “It has been given to me to die when the Lord calls me,” he said, digressing from his narrative. “The Lord called me into life and He will call me into death. I’ve known the fear of dying. Yes, I lived with that fear in Montgomery and in Birmingham, down in the State of Alabama, when brother fell upon brother in 1963.” His voice was rich as his sentences rolled inexorably toward their conclusions. It had a kind of patience that was hard to distinguish from fatigue. “Since then, I’ve stood on the banks of the Jordan and I’ve looked into the promised land,” he went on. “Maybe I won’t make the journey, but I know that my people are going to make the journey, because I’ve stood and looked. So it doesn’t particularly matter anymore. I’ve conquered the fear of dying, and a man that’s conquered the fear of dying has conquered everything. I don’t have to fear any man.”
Dr. King wasn’t yet 40, but he’d lived fearlessly and with dignity.
[King Institute / NPR / NOLA]
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