On September 20, 1958, while signing copies of his book Stride Toward Freedom in Blumstein's department store in Harlem, King narrowly escaped death when Izola Curry, a mentally ill black woman who believed he was conspiring against her with communists, stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener. It missed his heart by a fraction of an inch. After emergency surgery, King was hospitalized for several weeks, while Curry was found mentally incompetent to stand trial.
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| King in hospital after stabbing |
As early as 1961, King warned the AFL-CIO that a growing right-wing coalition would soon “threaten everything fair and decent in American life.” With automation and outsourcing leading to rising unemployment, underemployment, and loss of unions, the economic climate would be “made to order for those who would seek to drive labor into impotency” and erase civil rights gains.
On September 28, 1962, as King spoke at a church in Birmingham, Alabama, White Power advocate Roy James jumped onto the stage and smashed King in the face. King staggered as James then slugged him on the side of the head, following with two kidney punches. As his aides led James away, King calmly returned to his talk. Four months later, James again slugged King while he was speaking in Chicago. The Rockwell Report, the organ of George Lincoln Rockwell’s National Socialist White People’s Party—the American Nazis—published “How I Bashed Nigger King” in which James boasted of “administering justice to a vile communist race-mixing nigger agitator.”
King believed the hate contributed to the climate in which someone believed they would be rewarded for murdering President John F. Kennedy. He told his wife Coretta that climate would lead to his death, too.
In April 1963, the SCLC began a campaign against racial segregation and economic injustice in Birmingham, Alabama. The campaign used nonviolent but intentionally confrontational tactics. Black people in Birmingham, organizing with the SCLC, occupied public spaces with marches and sit-ins, openly violating laws that they considered unjust. King's intent was to provoke mass arrests and "create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation". During the protests, the Birmingham Police Department, led by Eugene "Bull" Connor used high-pressure water jets and police dogs against protesters, including children. Footage of the police response was broadcast on national television news and dominated the nation's attention, shocking many white Americans and consolidating black Americans behind the movement.
King was arrested and jailed early in the campaign—his 13th arrest out of 29. From his cell, he composed the now-famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail" which responded to calls on the movement to pursue legal channels for social change. King argued that the crisis of racism was too urgent, and the current system too entrenched: "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." He pointed out that the Boston Tea Party, a celebrated act of rebellion in the American colonies, was illegal civil disobedience, and that, conversely, "everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was 'legal'". King also expressed his frustration with white moderates and clergymen too timid to oppose an unjust system:
"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season"
King, representing the SCLC, was among the leaders of the so-called "Big Six" civil rights organizations who were instrumental in the organization of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which took place on August 28, 1963. The primary logistical and strategic organizer was King's colleague Bayard Rustin.
The march originally was conceived as an event to dramatize the desperate condition of blacks in the southern U.S. and an opportunity to place organizers' concerns and grievances squarely before the seat of power in the nation's capital. Organizers intended to denounce the federal government for its failure to safeguard the civil rights and physical safety of civil rights workers and blacks. However, the group acquiesced to presidential pressure and influence, and the event ultimately took on a far less strident tone. As a result, some civil rights activists felt it presented an inaccurate, sanitized pageant of racial harmony. The march did, however, make specific demands: an end to racial segregation in public schools; meaningful civil rights legislation, including a law prohibiting racial discrimination in employment; protection of civil rights workers from police brutality; a $2 minimum wage for all workers; and self-government for Washington, D.C., then governed by congressional committee.
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| March on Washington |
Despite tensions, the march was a resounding success. More than a quarter of a million people of diverse ethnicities attended the event, sprawling from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial onto the National Mall and around the reflecting pool. At the time, it was the largest gathering of protesters in Washington, D.C.'s history.
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| Crowd at the Mall |
King delivered a 17-minute speech, later known as "I Have a Dream". In the speech's most famous passage—in which he departed from his prepared text, possibly at the prompting of Mahalia Jackson, who shouted behind him, "Tell them about the dream!"—King said:
I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.
It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.'
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today.
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| King, August 28, 1963 |
The March, and King's speech, helped put civil rights at the top of the political agenda in the United States and facilitated passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
After the November 22, 1963 assassination of President John Kennedy, he told his wife Coretta: "This is what is going to happen to me also. I keep telling you, this is a sick society."
King became an object of the Federal Bureau of Investigations' COINTELPRO for the rest of his life. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover personally ordered surveillance of King, with the intent to undermine his power as a civil rights leader. According to the Church Committee, a 1975 investigation by the U.S. Congress, "From December 1963 until his death in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to 'neutralize' him as an effective civil rights leader." The Bureau received authorization to proceed with wiretapping from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in the fall of 1963 and informed President John F. Kennedy. Both Kennedys unsuccessfully tried to persuade King to dissociate himself from Stanley Levison, a New York lawyer who had been involved with Communist Party USA. Although Robert Kennedy only gave written approval for limited wiretapping of King's phones "on a trial basis, for a month or so", Hoover extended the clearance so his men were "unshackled" to look for evidence in any areas of King's life they deemed worthy. The Bureau placed wiretaps on Levison's and King's home and office phones, and bugged King's rooms in hotels as he traveled across the country. In 1967, Hoover listed the SCLC as a black nationalist hate group, with the instructions: "No opportunity should be missed to exploit through counterintelligence techniques the organizational and personal conflicts of the leaderships of the groups ... to insure the targeted group is disrupted, ridiculed, or discredited."
One anonymous letter sent to King just before he received the Nobel Peace Prize read, in part" "The American public, the church organizations that have been helping—Protestants, Catholics and Jews will know you for what you are—an evil beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done. King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant [sic]). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation." A tape recording of several of King's extramarital liaisons, excerpted from FBI wiretaps, accompanied the letter. King interpreted this package as an attempt to drive him to suicide, although William Sullivan, head of the Domestic Intelligence Division at the time, argued that it may have only been intended to "convince Dr. King to resign from the SCLC". King refused to give in to the FBI's threats.
On October 14, 1964, King became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded to him for leading non-violent resistance to racial prejudice in the U.S.
In his Nobel lecture King said that the most pressing problem confronting humanity today was ‘the poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance.’ This was apparent in the three evils that had grown out of man's ‘ethical infantilism,’ racial injustice, poverty, and war, which were all intertwined. Nonviolence ‘seeks to redeem the spiritual and moral lag . . . to secure moral ends through moral means.’ It was a ‘weapon unique in history, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it.’
King emphasized that peace was a positive concept and called for ‘an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. When I speak of love, I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality’.
King, James Bevel, and the SCLC, in partial collaboration with SNCC, attempted to organize a march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery, for March 7, 1965. The first attempt to march on March 7 was aborted because of mob and police violence against the demonstrators. This day has since become known as "Bloody Sunday".
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| Bloody Sunday |
Bloody Sunday was a major turning point in the effort to gain public support for the Civil Rights Movement, the clearest demonstration up to that time of the dramatic potential of King's nonviolence strategy. King did not attend the march due to church duties. Footage of police brutality against the protesters was broadcast extensively and aroused national public outrage.
King led marchers on March 9 to the Edmund Pettus in Selma, then held a short prayer session before turning the marchers around and asking them to disperse so as not to violate the court order blocking the march.
The march finally went ahead fully on March 25, 1965. At the conclusion of the march on the steps of the state capitol building in Montgomery, Alabama, King delivered a speech. In it, King stated that equal rights for African Americans could not be far away, "because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice".
In 1966, during open-housing marches in Chicago, crowds of hate-filled young white men carrying Nazi and “white power” slogans, taunted King with death threats and hit him in the head with a rock.
In an April 4, 1967 appearance at the New York City Riverside Church —exactly one year before his death—King delivered a speech titled "Beyond Vietnam". He spoke strongly against the U.S.'s role in the war, arguing that the U.S. was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today". He also connected the war with economic injustice, arguing that the country needed serious moral change. He stated in "Beyond Vietnam" that "true compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar ... it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring".
King's opposition cost him significant support among white allies, including President Johnson, union leaders and powerful publishers. "The press is being stacked against me", King said, complaining of a double standard that applauded his non-violence at home, but deplored it when applied "toward little brown Vietnamese children". Life magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi", and The Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people".
In 1968, King and the SCLC organized the "Poor People's Campaign" to address issues of economic justice. King traveled the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would march on Washington to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol until Congress created an 'economic bill of rights' for poor Americans. The campaign culminated in a march on Washington, D.C., demanding economic aid to the poorest communities of the United States. The Poor People's Campaign was controversial even within the civil rights movement. Rustin resigned from the march stating that the goals of the campaign were too broad, the demands unrealizable, and thought that these campaigns would accelerate the backlash and repression on the poor and the black.
On March 29, 1968, King went to Memphis, Tennessee, in support of the black sanitary public works employees who had been on strike since March 12 for decent wages and treatment. The strike was precipitated by the deaths of garbage collectors Echol Cole and Robert Walker, who were crushed by a malfunctioning truck. In addition to recognition of their union, the workers were demanding improved safety standards to avoid similar tragedies.
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| Striking Sanitation Workers in Memphis |
On April 3, King addressed a rally and delivered his "*I've Been to the Mountaintop" address. King's flight to Memphis had been delayed by a bomb threat against his plane. In the close of the last speech of his career, in reference to the bomb threat, King said the following:
And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it 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. 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.
King was booked in room 306 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. According to Jesse Jackson, who was present, King's last words on the balcony before his assassination were spoken to musician Ben Branch, who was scheduled to perform that night at an event King was attending: "Ben, make sure you play "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty."
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| King, second from right, with colleagues on Lorraine Motel balcony |
Then, at 6:01 p.m., April 4, 1968, a shot rang out as King stood on the motel's second-floor balcony. The bullet entered through his right cheek, smashing his jaw, then traveled down his spinal cord before lodging in his shoulder.
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| Balcony of the Lorraine Motel, just after the shooting |
After emergency chest surgery, King was pronounced dead at St. Joseph's Hospital at 7:05 p.m. According to biographer Taylor Branch, King's autopsy revealed that though only 39 years old, he "had the heart of a 60 year old", which Branch attributed to the stress of 13 years in the civil rights movement.
The assassination led to a nationwide wave of riots in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, Louisville, Kansas City and many other American cities.
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| Rioting in Washington, D.C. |
New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy (who was himself assassinated two months later) was campaigning for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination. Before boarding a plane to fly to Indianapolis for a campaign speech in a predominantly black neighborhood of the city, he learned that King. They did not learn that King was dead until they landed in Indianapolis. Prior to arriving at the rally, the Chief of Police in Indianapolis told Kennedy that he could not provide protection and that giving the remarks would be too dangerous, but Kennedy decided to go ahead regardless. Standing on a podium mounted on a flatbed truck, Kennedy spoke for just four minutes and fifty-seven seconds.
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| Robert F. Kennedy giving speaking to crowd in Indianapolis |
Kennedy was the first to inform the audience of the death of Martin Luther King, causing some in the audience to scream and wail. Several of Kennedy's aides were worried that the delivery of this information would result in a riot. Once the audience quieted down, Kennedy acknowledged that many in the audience would be filled with anger. But then Kennedy went on: "For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with -- be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man." These remarks surprised Kennedy aides, who had never heard him speak publicly of his brother's assassination. Kennedy continued, saying that the country had to make an effort to "go beyond these rather difficult times," and then quoted a poem by the Greek playwright Aeschylus, on the theme of the wisdom that comes, against one's will, from pain. To conclude, Kennedy said that the country needed and wanted unity between blacks and whites, asked the audience members to pray for the King family and the country. Kennedy said, "Let us dedicate to ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world."
The speech was credited in part with preventing post-assassination rioting in Indianapolis where it was given. It is widely considered one of the most important speeches in American history.
President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered a national day of mourning on April 7, three days after King's death. Public libraries, museums, businesses and schools shut their doors.
A state funeral was refused to King by then-governor of Georgia, Lester Maddow, who had considered King an "enemy of the country" and had stationed 64 riot-helmeted state troopers at the steps of the state capitol in Atlanta to protect the "property of the state". He also initially refused to allow the state flag to be lowered at half-mast (apparently angered by the lowering of Confederate-designed state flags for a black man), but was compelled to do so when told that the lowering was a federal mandate.
Two days later, on April 9, two funeral services were held for King in Atlanta, Georgia. The first was held at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King and his father had both served as senior pastors, for family and close friends. It was followed by a three-mile procession to Morehouse College, King's alma mater, for a public service.
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| Coretta Scott King and daughter at funeral |
The first, private service began at 10:30 a.m. and was filled with some 1,300 people; among the dignitaries present were labor leaders, foreign dignitaries, entertainment and sports figures and leaders from numerous religious faiths. At his widow's request, King's last sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church was played at the funeral, a recording of his "Drum Major" sermon, which he had given two moths earlier on February 4, 1968. In that sermon, King made a request that at his funeral no mention of his awards and honors be made, but that it be said that he tried to "feed the hungry", "clothe the naked", "be right on the [Vietnam] war question", and "love and serve humanity". His good friend Mahalia Jackson sang his favorite hymn, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", at the funeral.
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| Coretta Scott King |
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| Casket on Mule Wagon |
The private funeral was followed by the loading of King's casket onto a simple wooden farm wagon pulled by two mules. The procession down the three-and-a-half miles from Ebenezer Baptist Church to Morehouse College was observed by anywhere between 10,000 to 100,000 people; the Southern Christian Leadership Conference commissioned a security detail to manage the crowd, while the Atlanta Police Department limited their participation to management of automobile traffic. The procession was silent, although it was accompanied on occasion by the singing of freedom songs which had been sung during the marches in which King had participated.
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| The Funeral Procession |
The procession passed by the Georgia state capitol building. At the conclusion, the group sang "We Shall Overcome". Following the funeral, King's casket was loaded into a hearse for burial in the South View Cemetery.
In the wake of King's death, journalists reported callous or hostile reactions from many parts of white America, particularly in the south. Journalist David Halberstam, who reported on King's funeral, recounted a comment at an affluent white dinner party: "One of the wives—station wagon, three children, forty-five-thousand-dollar house—leaned over and said, 'I wish you had spit in his face for me.' It was a stunning moment; I wondered for a long time afterwards what King could possibly have done to her, in what conceivable way he could have threatened her, why this passionate hate."
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| FBI Wanted Poster for James Earl Ray |
Two months after King's death, escaped convict James Early Ray was captured at London's Heathrow Airport while trying to leave the United Kingdom on his way to white-ruled Rhodesia. Ray was extradited to Tennessee and charged with King's murder. He confessed to the assassination on March 10, 1969, though he recanted this confession three days later. On the advice of his attorney, Ray pled guilty to avoid a trial conviction and thus the possibility of receiving the death penalty. He was sentenced to a 99-year prison term. He spent the remainder of his life attempting, unsuccessfully, to withdraw his guilty plea and secure the trial he never had.
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| Ray after arrest |
The FBI, which conducted most of the initial investigations, was more interested in finding and then convicting Ray than in finding accomplices. The FBI had received death threats against King which it had never shared with the civil rights leader, and it withheld relevant files from later investigations.
The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) conducted investigations into the murders of both President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the King case, the HSCA wrote about the context of the murder, noting in particular the then-recent revelations of the FBI's COINTELPRO operations and its harassment of Dr. King. Regarding the assassination itself, the HSCA interviewed Ray extensively, along with his brothers and many witnesses and officials. The HSCA reported There was a "likelihood" of conspiracy. In particular, the HSCA focused on an alleged $50,000 bounty on King's life offered in St. Louis.
The HSCA was also aware of a $100,000 bounty offer on Dr. King which was being offered by the White Knights of Mississippi. A number of post-assassination leads pointed to the possibility that members of the White Knights were involved in some fashion with the attack on Dr. King.
In 1997, King's son Dexter Scott King met with Ray, and publicly supported Ray's efforts to obtain a new trial. Two years later, Coretta Scott King, King's widow, along with the rest of King's family, won a wrongful death claim against Loyd Jowers and "other unknown co-conspirators". Jowers claimed to have received $100,000 to arrange King's assassination. The jury of six whites and six blacks found Jowers guilty and that government agencies were party to the assassination. In 2000, the U.S. Department of Justice completed the investigation about Jowers' claims but did not find evidence to support allegations about conspiracy. The investigation report recommended no further investigation unless some new reliable facts are presented.
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| Loyd Jowers |
Many documents pertaining to this investigation remain classified, and are slated to remain secret until 2027.
In 1977, King's remains were exhumed and reburied at the plaza between the King Center Ebenezer Church. His widow Coretta was buried next to him in 2006.
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| Gravesite of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King |
On November 2, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill creating a federal holiday to honor King. Observed for the first time on January 20, 1986, it is called Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Following President George H.W. Bush's 1992 proclamation, the holiday is observed on the third Monday of January each year, near the time of King's birthday. On January 17, 2000, for the first time, Martin Luther King Jr. Day was officially observed in all fifty U.S. states. Arizona, (1992), New Hampshire (1999) and Utah (2000) were the last three states to recognize the holiday.
More than 730 cities in the United States have streets named after King.
In 1980, the U.S. Department of Interior designated King's boyhood home in Atlanta and several nearby buildings the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site.
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| Lorraine Motel |
The Lorraine Motel, where King was killed, is now part of Memphis' National Civil Rights Museum. Visitors can see the room where King was staying the day of his assassination, along with its balcony and the courtyard of the landmark building.
In 1984, the Irish rock band U2 released the song "Pride (in the Name of Love). It commmemorated King's assassination with the lyrics, "Early morning, April 4/Shot rings out in the Memphis sky/Free at last, they took your life/They could not take your pride." (King was actually killed in the early evening.) It has since become one of the band's most popular songs.
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| Opening Day for Marking Luther King Memorial in Washington, D.C. |
King was the first African American and the first non-president honored with his own memorial in the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The memorial opened in August 2011 and is administered by the National Park Service. The address of the monument, 1964 Independence Avenue, S.W., commemorates the year that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law.
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| Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial |
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| President Barack Obama at King Memorial |
In speaking once about how he wished to be remembered after his death, King stated:
"I'd like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others. I'd like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to love somebody.
I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison.
And I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity.
Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major. Say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter."
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