It’s only 6 o’clock. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot while standing on a balcony in front of his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a hygiene strike, and he was on his way to dinner when a bullet hit him in the jaw and cut his spine. King was pronounced dead upon arriving at Memphis Hospital. He was 39 years old.
MLK Assassination
In the months leading up to his assassination, Martin Luther King became more concerned with economic inequality in the United State. To address this problem, he organized a campaign for the poor, including a march in Washington, and traveled to Memphis in March 1968 to promote the mistreatment of African-American health workers. On March 28, a protest rally of workers led by King ended with the violence and death of an African-American teenager. King left the city but promised to return in early April to lead another demonstration.
On April 3, back in Memphis, the king gave his last sermon when he said, “We have hard days ahead of us. But I don’t care now because I was already on top of the mountain … And I let me go up the mountain. And I saw and I saw the promised land. Maybe I can’t be with you. But I want you to know tonight that we humans can go to the Promised Land. ”
The day after saying these words, Dr. King was shot by a sniper. As information about the killings spread, riots broke out in cities across the United States and National Guard troops were deployed to Memphis and Washington, D.C. On April 9, King was buried in his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets to bow to the king’s coffin as two mice dragged her through a wooden field wagon. On the night of King’s assassination, a Remington .30-06 shotgun was found on the sidewalk next to the chamber house block from the Lorraine Motel. Over the next few weeks, the gun, witness reports, and gun fingerprints included one suspect: fugitive convict James Earl Ray. Ray, a double criminal, escaped from a Missouri prison in April 1967 while serving a prison sentence. In May 1968, a major search for Ray began. The FBI eventually decided to obtain a Canadian passport under a false identity, which was relatively quick at the time. On June 8, Scottish investigators arrested Yard Ray at London Airport. He tried to fly to Belgium, with the aim, he later admitted, of reaching Rhodesia. Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe, was ruled by a repressive and internationally condemned white minority government. Ray was extradited to the United States and in March 1969 appeared before a judge in Memphis and confessed to killing King to prevent the use of the electric chair. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison. Three days later, he tried to call off his guilt, claiming that he was innocent of the king’s murder and that he had been appointed as a pancake in a larger conspiracy. He admits that in 1967 he was approached by a mysterious man named “Raoul” and recruited into a firearms company. On April 4, 1968, he realized he was a falcon for the assassination of the king, and fled to Canada. Ray’s motion was rejected, as were his various lawsuits over the next 29 years.
In the 1990s, the widow and children of Martin Luther King, Jr. he speaks publicly in support of Ray and his allegations, has declared him innocent and speculated about a plot of assassination involving the US government and the military. The American authorities, in the minds of the conspirators, were involved in this situation. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was impressed by King’s communist influence. For the last six years of his life, King went through frequent wiretaps and harassment by the FBI. Before he died, Dr. King was also controlled by US military intelligence, which could be asked to follow King after publicly criticizing the Vietnam War in 1967. In addition, by calling for radical economic reforms in 1968, including a guaranteed annual income for all, King made several new friends during the Cold War.
Martin Luther King Death
Over the years, the assassination has been reviewed by the House of Representatives Committee on Assassinations, in Shelby County, Tennessee, the District Attorney’s Office, and three times by the U.S. Department of Justice. All investigations ended with the same conclusion: James Earl Ray murdered Martin Luther King. The House Committee acknowledged that there might be a low-level conspiracy involving one or more of Ray’s employees, but no evidence was found to fully support this theory. . In addition to a mountain of evidence against him – such as his fingerprint on the murder weapon and his alleged presence in the House of Commons on April 4 – Ray had a clear motive for killing the King: hatred. According to his family and friends, it was a direct racist who informed her of his intention to kill Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He died in 1998.