Martin Luther King, Jr. Assassination

LTC Stephen F. I Remember, I was 10 Years Old, Growing Up in an Ethnically Diverse Community. He went down there to Support the Trash Collectors Strike.

How Martin Luther King Jr. Changed the World | Full Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xabWOU6tU-M

Images:
1. King’s family in his funeral procession April 9, 1968, in Atlanta. L-to-R daughter Yolanda, brother A.D., daughter Bernice, widow Coretta, Ralph Abernathy, sons Dexter & Martin
2. The rifle that James Earl Ray used was found wrapped in this blanket bundle that he abandoned when he left the rooming house.
3. Funeral procession for Martin Luther King, Jr., April 9, 1968, Atlanta.
4. Martin-Luther-King 'The time is always right to do what is right

Background from {[https://www.britannica.com/event/assassination-of-Martin-Luther-King-Jr]}
Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
United States history
WRITTEN BY Jeff Wallenfeldt, manager of Geography and History, has worked as an editor at Encyclopaedia Britannica since 1992.
Last Updated: Mar 28, 2021 See Article History
Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., mortal shooting of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the most prominent leader of the American civil rights movement, on April 4, 1968, as he stood on the second floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had come to lead a march by striking sanitation workers. In response to King’s death, more than 100 American inner cities exploded in rioting, looting, and violence. James Earl Ray, a career small-time criminal who became the object of a more than two-month manhunt before he was captured in England, pled guilty to the shooting and received a 99-year prison sentence. He quickly recanted his plea and spent the rest of his life claiming that he had been framed by a conspiracy that was really responsible for King’s assassination.
Context: Martin Luther King, Jr., And the United States In April 1968
The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., was one of the earthshaking events of 1968 that made it among the most tumultuous and momentous years in American history. The civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the antiwar movement all were in full swing as the year began. King’s opposition to the Vietnam War had been building steadily since 1965, though initially he was reluctant to prominently criticize the conduct of the war by Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson, who had been a key ally in the effort to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. When the war effort began to rob funding from Johnson’s Great Society plan, however, King became a more vocal critic, and his opposition to the war grew to embrace a more radical critique of what he saw as U.S. militarism and imperialism. King also took American capitalism to task and began portraying inequality in economic as well as racial terms. “Beyond Vietnam,” the address that he gave at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his death, brought all of these elements together in a speech that made manifest his opposition to the war.

A number of mainstream publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, thought King had gone too far with the speech. He had already begun to find himself betwixt and between. Many whites saw him as a dangerous radical. On the other hand, despite his increasingly radical message, a growing number of militant African Americans had become impatient with his nonviolent methods and what they saw as a lack of success in his civil rights efforts in northern cities. It had been several years since his southern triumphs in the Montgomery bus boycott, the Birmingham campaign, and the Selma March.
In November 1967 King’s concern with economic inequality led him and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to mount a Poor People’s Campaign, which was to culminate in a massive march on Washington, D.C. Before that could happen, other events of early 1968 interceded. On January 30, North Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive, a widespread attack in South Vietnam that put the Americans and South Vietnamese on their heels for weeks. The pervasiveness of this shocking assault and especially the images of fighting in and around the U.S. embassy in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) dramatically belied the U.S. government’s contention that the Americans and the South Vietnamese had the war well in hand. Opposition to the war led to Johnson’s defeat by antiwar candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy in the March 12, 1968, Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire, followed by the announcement of the candidacy of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (March 16) and the withdrawal of Johnson’s candidacy (March 31). Meanwhile, Republican front-runner Richard Nixon’s popularity grew with the “silent majority” who opposed social change and supported the war. Against this backdrop and that of the previous year’s rioting in Detroit and Newark, King interrupted the planning of the Poor People’s March to travel to Memphis in support of a strike by sanitation workers.

The Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike
Sanitation workers in Memphis—most of whom were African American and received a paltry wage of about $1.00 per hour—conducted a strike for better wages and working conditions in 1966 but failed to gain sufficient community support. The situation changed after a pair of sanitation workers who had been sheltering from the rain by crouching inside the loading hopper of their garbage truck were crushed because of a malfunctioning switch. This time the strike that resulted in response to their deaths was supported by some 150 local clergymen. The group’s leader, the Rev. James Lawson, asked King, his friend, for support, and on March 18 King addressed a crowd of between 15,000 and 25,000 people, which was said to be the largest indoor gathering in the history of the civil rights movement to that date. King returned to Memphis on March 28 to join Lawson in leading a march in support of the strike. Violence erupted early in the demonstration: looting broke out, and police shot and killed a 16-year-old boy. King was reluctantly spirited away to safety. Dozens of others were injured as police dispensed tear gas and wielded batons while pursuing demonstrators inside the Clayborn Temple. Blame for the outbreak of violence, which marred King’s reputation for nonviolent protest, was placed by many on the Black Organizing Project (better known as the Invaders), a local Black Panther Party-inspired organization. The next day, strikers returned to their daily demonstrations carrying placards that read “I Am a Man,” and reporters asked King if he would be able to keep the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington peaceful. He met with representatives of the Invaders, who claimed not to have instigated the violence and with whom King agreed to coordinate efforts as plans began for a follow-up march.
Having returned to his home base in Atlanta, King contemplated not going back to Memphis. The planning for the Poor People’s Campaign was escalating. At a meeting on March 30, however, he decided that he needed to see through his commitment to the effort in Memphis, and, after some dissent, the leadership of the SCLC agreed. King had come to see the struggle in Memphis as emblematic of the objectives of the Poor People’s Campaign.

Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
QUICK FACTS
DATE April 4, 1968
(53rd Anniversary)
The “Mountaintop Speech”
On April 3 King was back in Memphis, where the city government had sought an injunction to prevent him from leading another march. The departure of his flight from Atlanta that morning had been delayed to allow a search of the luggage and plane for possible explosives. King was no stranger to death threats, but they had increased since he emphasized his opposition to the Vietnam War. Indeed, before leaving for Memphis, King had informed his wife and parents that a price supposedly had been put on his head.
That night a rally was scheduled at Bishop Charles Mason Temple, a Memphis Pentecostal church. King was exhausted, had a sore throat, and was feeling ill. With a thunderstorm raging that was anticipated to hold down the turnout, he sent his best friend and chief lieutenant, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, to speak in his stead. When Abernathy arrived at the church, he found a larger-than-expected crowd buzzing with excitement at the prospect of hearing King. Abernathy telephoned King, asked him to come, and promised that he would give the major address, leaving King to say but a few words, and King agreed.
At the event, King spoke for more than 40 minutes, almost completely off the cuff, gathering energy and energizing his audience as he went, ultimately delivering one of his most emotionally soaring and rhetorically brilliant speeches. He began the address, which became known as the “Mountaintop Speech,” by considering his moment in history versus other times that he might have lived and concluded that the last half of the 20th century was where he wanted to be. He then located the Memphis sanitation strike within the long struggle for human freedom and the battle for economic justice, evoking the New Testament parable of the Good Samaritan to stress the need for selfless involvement. He called for unity, stressing the power it provided. Then he recalled the attempt on his life in 1958, when a deranged woman stabbed him with a letter opener that nearly penetrated his aorta, leaving him—as characterized at the time—“a sneeze away from death.” He remembered a letter from a white high-school student telling him that she was glad that he did not sneeze. Saying that he too was glad that he had not sneezed, he reflected on some of the monumental civil rights triumphs in which he would not have participated (including his “I Have A Dream” speech) had he not lived. Finally, as he wound to a close, his speech became prophetic:
We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.…Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now.…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!...I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!
Both the audience and King himself were deeply moved. When he finished speaking, King returned to his seat next to civil rights leader Benjamin Hooks, who said he saw tears rolling down King’s cheeks.

The Assassin: James Earl Ray
On April 23, 1967, in the same month King gave his speech at Riverside Church, the man who would become his assassin, James Earl Ray, escaped from the maximum-security Missouri State Penitentiary by hiding beneath the false bottom of a prison bakery bread box. Ray, a small-time career criminal from a poor family who had already served two prison terms, was seven years into a 20-year sentence for a grocery store armed robbery at the time of his escape. Once free, he traveled to Chicago, Montreal, Birmingham, Alabama, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and on to Los Angeles, financing his life on the lam with money he had saved in prison from selling contraband (probably smuggled drugs) and by committing more robberies. All the while, Ray, a consummate loner, successfully maintained the low profile necessary to prolong his life as a fugitive. As “Eric Starvo Galt,” he rented lodging, obtained a driver’s license, visited a doctor, took dancing lessons, and attended bartending school. However, it may have been fame rather than freedom that Ray sought. A rabid consumer of news, he was reportedly greatly disappointed that he had not landed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Most Wanted list.
According to many sources, including family members, Ray was deeply racist. While in California, he became enamored of the third-party presidential candidacy of segregationist George Wallace, for whose campaign he volunteered. His support for Wallace was twinned with a special enmity for King, whose civil rights successes in Alabama Ray saw as affronts to Wallace, that state’s governor. Some of Ray’s prison friends said later that King’s appearances on television would send Ray into a rage. At some point during Ray’s stay in California, his hatred for King apparently spiked, and on or about March 17, 1968, he began making his way to Atlanta. Once there, he became obsessed with King, circling his home on a map, along with the Ebenezer Baptist Church (where King was co-pastor with his father) and the SCLC headquarters. Observers have speculated that Ray may have decided that killing King would somehow benefit Wallace’s candidacy or prolong segregation. Undoubtedly, Ray was well aware of King’s involvement in the sanitation strike in Memphis. After traveling to Birmingham to purchase a scoped .30-calibre Remington rifle, Ray, who had learned to shoot in the Army, followed King to Memphis.

The Assassination
Ray learned from local media reports that while in Memphis King would be staying in Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel. Using the name John Willard, between 3:00 and 3:30 PM on April 4 Ray checked into Room 5B of Bessie Brewer’s rooming house, the back windows of which faced the Lorraine Motel across Mulberry Street. According to the most plausible speculation of Ray’s subsequent action, he likely determined that the window of the common bathroom at the back of the second floor of the boardinghouse’s north wing provided the best available sight line to Room 306. After purchasing binoculars at a sporting goods store at about 4:00 PM, Ray probably monitored the Lorraine from his room. He did not have to wait long. At about 5:55 PM King and Abernathy emerged from the room they shared on the motel’s second floor, on their way to have dinner at a local minister’s home. King teased Jesse Jackson about not being appropriately dressed for dinner and, while pausing on the balcony, chatted with people in the courtyard below. During these moments Ray is thought to have made his way to the bathroom, bolstered his rifle on the windowsill above the bathtub, and shot. (Residents of the boardinghouse later testified that they had heard someone repeatedly walking toward or using the bathroom.) At 6:01 PM, as he stood on the balcony, King was mortally wounded by a bullet that entered the right side of his face, fractured his jaw, exited his lower face, and reentered his body through the neck area, severing vital arteries and causing multiple fractures to his spine. Abernathy and an undercover Memphis police officer tried to stem the bleeding of the fallen King with a towel. King was rushed to St. Joseph Hospital, where emergency surgery proved futile. At 7:05 PM King was officially pronounced dead.

Aftermath and Reaction: Inner City Violence
The anguished and angry response to the news of King’s murder spread fast and furiously throughout the United States. For many his death seemed to signal the end of the hope that nonviolent means could bring about a better world for African Americans. America’s Black inner cities exploded. Over the next several days, more than 100 cities experienced significant outbreaks of rioting, arson, looting, and violence. In all, some 27,000 people were arrested, about 3,500 were injured, and more than 40 were killed. Some 6,100 people were arrested and more than 1,000 were injured in the national capital alone. In Chicago there were some 125 fires and 11 deaths. In Baltimore more than 5,000 federal troops patrolled the city in an attempt to forestall arson. Only after police forces around the country had been reinforced by some 58,000 U.S. National Guard and Army troops did the violence subside.
One of the few major cities in which violence did not break out was Indianapolis. There, on the night of the shooting, presidential candidate Kennedy empathetically announced King’s death to a mostly Black audience at an inner city campaign rally:
For those of you who are Black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I 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. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.
It was the first time since 1963 that Kennedy had spoken publicly about the assassination of his brother, Pres. John F. Kennedy. Some two months later, on June 6, 1968, Kennedy himself would be killed by an assassin. Like Indianapolis, Atlanta remained peaceful, benefiting in no small measure from the efforts of students and faculty of historically Black colleges belonging to the Atlanta University Consortium who served as peacekeeping marshals and staged a march to honour King’s doctrine of nonviolence.

Funeral Rites
King’s death resulted in the temporary suspension of the 1968 presidential campaign. The Academy Awards ceremony was postponed. Businesses, schools, and other public buildings were closed. April 7 was declared a national day of mourning by President Johnson. The next day King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, led thousands in a march in Memphis commemorating her husband and supporting the striking sanitation workers.
On April 9 a seven-and-one-half hour series of funeral rites for King was held in Atlanta, beginning with a private funeral at the Ebenezer Baptist Church. Abernathy opened the service by saying that “one of the darkest hours of mankind” was at hand. In accordance with a request from Mrs. King, a tape recording was played of a sermon that King had delivered some two months earlier (“ Drum Major Instinct ”) in which he (again prophetically) outlined the sort of funeral he wanted for himself, including suggestions for his eulogy:
Ralph David Abernathy eulogizing Martin Luther King, Jr., 1968
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. 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 the other shallow things will not matter.
In attendance at the private ceremony were four presidential candidates—Kennedy, McCarthy, Nixon, and Vice Pres. Hubert Humphrey—along with other prominent politicians, public servants, civil rights leaders, celebrities from the world of entertainment and sports, and foreign dignitaries. After the service, King’s casket was carried by a mule-drawn wagon for 4 miles (6 km) through downtown Atlanta to his alma mater, Morehouse College. En route the procession was joined by bystanders and may have swelled to as many as 100,000 people. On the way it passed the state capitol, inside of which Georgia’s segregationist governor, Lester Maddox, was holed up, surrounded by armed troops whom he had deployed because of the fear that the funeral would engender violence. At Morehouse an outdoor memorial service was performed. Former Morehouse president Benjamin Mays delivered the eulogy, and Mahalia Jackson (about whom King had once said, “a voice like hers comes along once in a millennium”) sang the gospel standard “Precious Lord.”
Finally, a hearse transported King’s casket to South-View Cemetery, which had been established in 1886 as the final resting place for Atlanta’s African American elite. King’s grandparents were buried there, and his parents would later be interred there as well. King’s remains would later be transferred to a tomb on the grounds of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change adjacent to the Ebenezer Baptist Church. His new tomb bears the same epitaph as that of his original gravestone: “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty I’m free at last.”

The Manhunt And Guilty Plea
In the aftermath of the assassination, the manhunt for King’s killer mounted. Shortly after King fell, when police approached the scene, witnesses pointed as one toward the boardinghouse. A bundle containing the Remington rifle, binoculars, and other items were soon found dumped in the doorway of a building next to the boardinghouse, and a white man was reported running away. The description of the suspect soon placed him in a white Mustang automobile.
Meanwhile, Ray, in that Mustang, drove back to Atlanta, where he abandoned it and then took a bus to Detroit. On April 6 he crossed from Detroit into Canada by taxicab. In the meantime, the evidence found in the bundle led investigators to believe that three men were involved in the shooting: Eric S. Galt, Harvey Lowmeyer, and John Willard (all aliases used by Ray). As the investigation continued, the Mustang was found, more was learned about Galt, and fingerprints led the FBI to conclude that they were probably after a single suspect employing multiple aliases. On April 19 fingerprint analysis revealed Ray’s identity.
In Toronto on April 24, Ray was able to obtain a Canadian passport as George Sneyd. On May 6 he flew to London. There he exchanged his return ticket to Canada for one for a flight to Lisbon, where he flew on May 7, hoping to catch a boat bound for Africa. His ultimate destination was then white supremacist Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), which had no extradition agreement with the United States. After missing the boat he had hoped to catch, Ray returned to London on May 17. With his funds dwindling, he bungled a pair of attempted robberies. On June 1 investigators made the connection between Ray and Sneyd, and Sneyd’s name was put on the airport “watch and detain” list. When he tried to buy a ticket to Brussels at London’s Heathrow Airport on June 8, Ray was apprehended. He had two Canadian passports and a loaded gun in his possession. Having been “the most wanted man in America” for more than two months, he was extradited to Memphis on July 19. After firing one lawyer and being told by a second (Percy Foreman) that his case was hopeless, Ray pled guilty on March 10, 1969 (thus avoiding a possible death sentence), and was sentenced to 99 years in the Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Tennessee.

Conspiracy Theories
On March 13, 1969, three days after his sentencing, Ray recanted his guilty plea, saying that Foreman had coerced him into making it. The remainder of his life was spent arguing various conspiracy theories in defense of his innocence and punctuating those efforts with escape attempts. In addition to the shifting set of alibis that Ray offered to prove that he was not at the scene of the crime, he claimed that he had been set up as a decoy by a group of conspirators including the person he said was King’s actual killer, a mystery man known to Ray only as Raoul, whom he first met in Montreal in 1967. According to Ray, Raoul had involved him in a gun-running scheme, and actions such as buying the Remington rifle and renting the room at Bessie Brewer’s had all been done at Raoul’s behest, ostensibly as part of that scheme. Over the years, however, the details of the story offered by Ray were inconsistent, including varying descriptions of Raoul’s physical appearance. Ray was also unable to provide witnesses to his supposed encounters with Raoul. State and federal courts alike repeatedly found nothing in Ray’s arguments to cause them to overturn his guilty plea.
In December 1978, having assiduously reviewed the evidence, the House Select Committee on Assassinations found Ray’s story to be flawed and determined that he was the killer. However, the committee concluded that there likely had been a conspiracy to kill King, most probably involving Ray’s brothers John and Jerry. The committee’s report also cited “substantial evidence” that there was a St. Louis-based conspiracy to finance King’s assassination, which may have had associations with the local Wallace campaign. Because it lacked conclusive evidence for these assertions, the committee ultimately could only present its belief that a St. Louis conspiracy offered an explanation for the involvement of Ray and his brothers. Its report suggested that it was possible that Ray might have acted on the expectation that he would be paid for King’s assassination or that he and his brothers might have entered into an agreement with the group involved in the St. Louis conspiracy. Absent sufficient evidence, however, the committee was left only to bemoan the failure of law enforcement officials to investigate these possibilities in 1968 when they might have been able to prove a conspiracy.
Hoping to spark a reopening of Ray’s case, in 1993 William Pepper, Ray’s latest and last attorney, staged a televised mock murder trial of Ray that was shown on HBO on the 25th anniversary of the assassination. Ray “testified” by satellite from his prison cell in Tennessee and was found not guilty by the mock jury. Also in 1993, Loyd Jowers, the owner of a tavern below Brewer’s rooming house, said in a television interview that he had been paid $100,000 to plan King’s assassination by a Memphis merchant with connections to organized crime. He claimed that he had hired King’s killer (not Ray), who had fired from a bush outside the tavern. Although Jowers later disavowed his story, he became the defendant in a wrongful death civil suit brought by the King family in 1998 in which they were represented by Pepper. This unusual pairing came about after King’s son Dexter became aware of Orders to Kill (1995), a book in which Pepper argued that King’s assassination was the result of a labyrinthine conspiracy involving the executive branch, the FBI and CIA, foreign intelligence agencies, and the Memphis police, among others. Dexter King visited Ray in prison in 1997 and came away believing that Ray was not his father’s killer.

Overview of the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., by James Earl Ray.
As early as August 1979, Jesse Jackson had become convinced of Ray’s innocence, and in 1991 he wrote the foreword for Ray’s book Who Killed Martin Luther King?: The True Story by the Alleged Assassin. It is perhaps not surprising that the King family and King intimates would accept a conspiracy theory grounded in government involvement, given the White House-approved sometimes tawdry efforts by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to attack King’s character and reputation as they ostensibly sought to connect him with the Communist Party. The King family felt vindicated when the jury in the wrongful death suit found Jowers and “unknown conspirators” liable, though only for the token amount sought by the Kings, who brought the case on principle in the hope of reopening the investigation into the assassination. Jowers’s attorney, however, had put up little battle, and the bar for a finding in the civil suit was lower than that for conviction in a criminal case. The ruling was not enough to persuade the Shelby County district attorney to reopen Ray’s case, but, largely at the request of the King family, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno ordered a new investigation. In June 2000, after 18 months of investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice concluded that there was no evidence to support recent theories about plots to kill King or that he had been assassinated by conspirators who had framed Ray (who died in 1998). The report found that no further investigation was necessary. The King family challenged the report’s conclusions, saying “We do not believe that, in such a politically sensitive matter, the government is capable of investigating itself.”
At the time of the assassination’s 50th anniversary in 2018, King’s death remains a matter of controversy.

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Dr Martin Luther King Jr : I have a dream
[French subtitles]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otmOBR0PH7A

Images:
1. King rides the Montgomery bus on Dec. 21, 1956, with the Rev. Glenn Smiley of Texas. In 1955, black activists formed the Montgomery Improvement Association to boycott the segregated transit.
2. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. 'I Have a Dream'
3. U.S. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson talking with Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Oval Office at the White House, Washington, D.C., 1963.
4. Martin Luther King Jr. with his wife Coretta Scott King, and their children Dexter Scott and Yolanda.

The Martin Luther King, Jr.
Research and Education Institute

King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Biography
January 15, 1929 to April 4, 1968
Martin Luther King, Jr., made history, but he was also transformed by his deep family roots in the African-American Baptist church, his formative experiences in his hometown of Atlanta, his theological studies, his varied models of religious and political leadership, and his extensive network of contacts in the peace and social justice movements of his time. Although King was only 39 at the time of his death, his life was remarkable for the ways it reflected and inspired so many of the twentieth century’s major intellectual, cultural, and political developments.
The son, grandson, and great-grandson of Baptist ministers, Martin Luther King, Jr., named Michael King at birth, was born in Atlanta and spent his first 12 years in the Auburn Avenue home that his parents, the Reverend Michael King and Alberta Williams King, shared with his maternal grandparents, the Reverend Adam Daniel (A. D.) Williams and Jeannie Celeste Williams. After Reverend Williams’ death in 1931, his son-in-law became Ebenezer Baptist Church’s new pastor and gradually established himself as a major figure in state and national Baptist groups. The elder King began referring to himself (and later to his son) as Martin Luther King.
King’s formative experiences not only immersed him in the affairs of Ebenezer but also introduced him to the African-American social gospel tradition exemplified by his father and grandfather, both of whom were leaders of the Atlanta branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Depression-era breadlines heightened King’s awareness of economic inequities, and his father’s leadership of campaigns against racial discrimination in voting and teachers’ salaries provided a model for the younger King’s own politically engaged ministry. He resisted religious emotionalism and as a teenager questioned some facets of Baptist doctrine, such as the bodily resurrection of Jesus.
During his undergraduate years at Atlanta’s Morehouse College from 1944 to 1948, King gradually overcame his initial reluctance to accept his inherited calling. Morehouse president Benjamin E. Mays influenced King’s spiritual development, encouraging him to view Christianity as a potential force for progressive social change. Religion professor George Kelsey exposed him to biblical criticism and, according to King’s autobiographical sketch, taught him “that behind the legends and myths of the Book were many profound truths which one could not escape” (Papers 1:43). King admired both educators as deeply religious yet also learned men and, by the end of his junior year, such academic role models and the example of his father led King to enter the ministry. He described his decision as a response to an “inner urge” calling him to “serve humanity” (Papers 1:363). He was ordained during his final semester at Morehouse, and by this time King had also taken his first steps toward political activism. He had responded to the postwar wave of anti-black violence by proclaiming in a letter to the editor of the Atlanta Constitution that African Americans were “entitled to the basic rights and opportunities of American citizens” (Papers 1:121). During his senior year King joined the Intercollegiate Council, an interracial student discussion group that met monthly at Atlanta’s Emory University.
After leaving Morehouse, King increased his understanding of liberal Christian thought while attending Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania from 1948 to 1951. Initially uncritical of liberal theology, he gradually moved toward Reinhold Niebuhr’s neo-orthodoxy, which emphasized the intractability of social evil. Mentored by local minister and King family friend J. Pius Barbour, he reacted skeptically to a presentation on pacifism by Fellowship of Reconciliation leader A. J. Muste. Moreover, by the end of his seminary studies King had become increasingly dissatisfied with the abstract conceptions of God held by some modern theologians and identified himself instead with the theologians who affirmed personalism, or a belief in the personality of God. Even as he continued to question and modify his own religious beliefs, he compiled an outstanding academic record and graduated at the top of his class.
In 1951, King began doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University’s graduate school, which was dominated by personalist theologians such as Edgar Brightman and L. Harold DeWolf. The papers (including his dissertation) that King wrote during his years at Boston University displayed little originality, and some contained extensive plagiarism; but his readings enabled him to formulate an eclectic yet coherent theological perspective. By the time he completed his doctoral studies in 1955, King had refined his exceptional ability to draw upon a wide range of theological and philosophical texts to express his views with force and precision. His capacity to infuse his oratory with borrowed theological insights became evident in his expanding preaching activities in Boston-area churches and at Ebenezer, where he assisted his father during school vacations.
During his stay in Boston, King also met and courted Coretta Scott, an Alabama-born Antioch College graduate who was then a student at the New England Conservatory of Music. On 18 June 1953, the two students were married in Marion, Alabama, where Scott’s family lived.
Although he considered pursuing an academic career, King decided in 1954 to accept an offer to become the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. In December 1955, when Montgomery black leaders such as Jo Ann Robinson, E. D. Nixon, and Ralph Abernathy formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to protest the arrest of NAACP official Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, they selected King to head the new group. In his role as the primary spokesman of the year-long Montgomery bus boycott, King utilized the leadership abilities he had gained from his religious background and academic training to forge a distinctive protest strategy that involved the mobilization of black churches and skillful appeals for white support. With the encouragement of Bayard Rustin, Glenn Smiley, William Stuart Nelson, and other veteran pacifists, King also became a firm advocate of Mohandas Gandhi’s precepts of nonviolence, which he combined with Christian social gospel ideas.
After the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed Alabama bus segregation laws in Browder v. Gayle in late 1956, King sought to expand the nonviolent civil rights movement throughout the South. In 1957, he joined with C. K. Steele, Fred Shuttlesworth, and T. J. Jemison in founding the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) with King as president to coordinate civil rights activities throughout the region. Publication of King’s memoir of the boycott, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958) further contributed to his rapid emergence as a national civil rights leader. Even as he expanded his influence, however, King acted cautiously. Rather than immediately seeking to stimulate mass desegregation protests in the South, King stressed the goal of achieving black voting rights when he addressed an audience at the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom.
King’s rise to fame was not without personal consequences. In 1958, King was the victim of his first assassination attempt. Although his house had been bombed several times during the Montgomery bus boycott, it was while signing copies of Stride Toward Freedom that Izola Ware Curry stabbed him with a letter opener. Surgery to remove it was successful, but King had to recuperate for several months, giving up all protest activity.
One of the key aspects of King’s leadership was his ability to establish support from many types of organizations, including labor unions, peace organizations, southern reform organizations, and religious groups. As early as 1956, labor unions, such as the United Packinghouse Workers of America and the United Auto Workers, contributed to the MIA, and peace activists such as Homer Jack alerted their associates to MIA activities. Activists from southern organizations, such as Myles Horton’s Highlander Folk School and Anne Braden’s Southern Conference Educational Fund, were in frequent contact with King. In addition, his extensive ties to the National Baptist Convention provided support from churches all over the nation; and his advisor, Stanley Levison, ensured broad support from Jewish groups.
King’s recognition of the link between segregation and colonialism resulted in alliances with groups fighting oppression outside the United States, especially in Africa. In March 1957, King traveled to Ghana at the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah to attend the nation’s independence ceremony. Shortly after returning from Ghana, King joined the American Committee on Africa, agreeing to serve as vice chairman of an International Sponsoring Committee for a day of protest against South Africa’s apartheid government. Later at an SCLC-sponsored event honoring Kenyan labor leader Tom Mboya, King further articulated the connections between the African-American freedom struggle and those abroad: “We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality” (Papers 5:204).
During 1959, he increased his understanding of Gandhian ideas during a month-long visit to India sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee. With Coretta and MIA historian Lawrence D. Reddick in tow, King met with many Indian leaders, including Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Writing after his return, King stated, “I left India more convinced than ever before that non-violent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom” (Papers 5:233).
Early the following year, he moved his family, which now included two children—Yolanda and Martin Luther King, III—to Atlanta in order to be nearer to SCLC headquarters in that city and to become co-pastor, with his father, of Ebenezer Baptist Church. (The Kings’ third child, Dexter, was born in 1961; their fourth, Bernice, was born in 1963.) Soon after King’s arrival in Atlanta, the southern civil rights movement gained new impetus from the student-led lunch counter sit-in movement that spread throughout the region during 1960. The sit-ins brought into existence a new protest group, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which would often push King toward greater militancy. King came in contact with students, especially those from Nashville such as John Lewis, James Bevel, and Diane Nash, who had been trained in nonviolent tactics by James Lawson. In October 1960, King’s arrest during a student-initiated protest in Atlanta became an issue in the national presidential campaign when Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy called Coretta King to express his concern. The successful efforts of Kennedy supporters to secure King’s release contributed to the Democratic candidate’s narrow victory over Republican candidate Richard Nixon.
King’s decision to move to Atlanta was partly caused by SCLC’s lack of success during the late 1950s. Associate director Ella Baker had complained that SCLC’s Crusade for Citizenship suffered from lack of attention from King. SCLC leaders hoped that with King now in Atlanta, strategy would be improved. The hiring of Wyatt Tee Walker as executive director in 1960 was also seen as a step toward bringing efficiency to the organization, while the addition of Dorothy Cotton and Andrew Young to the staff infused new leadership after SCLC took over the administration of the Citizenship Education Program pioneered by Septima Clark. Attorney Clarence Jones also began to assist King and SCLC with legal matters and to act as King’s advisor.
As the southern protest movement expanded during the early 1960s, King was often torn between the increasingly militant student activists, such as those who participated in the Freedom Rides, and more cautious national civil rights leaders. During 1961 and 1962, his tactical differences with SNCC activists surfaced during a sustained protest movement in Albany, Georgia. King was arrested twice during demonstrations organized by the Albany Movement, but when he left jail and ultimately left Albany without achieving a victory, some movement activists began to question his militancy and his dominant role within the southern protest movement.
As King encountered increasingly fierce white opposition, he continued his movement away from theological abstractions toward more reassuring conceptions, rooted in African-American religious culture, of God as a constant source of support. He later wrote in his book of sermons, Strength to Love (1963), that the travails of movement leadership caused him to abandon the notion of God as “theologically and philosophically satisfying” and caused him to view God as “a living reality that has been validated in the experiences of everyday life” (Papers 5:424).
During 1963, however, King reasserted his preeminence within the African-American freedom struggle through his leadership of the Birmingham Campaign. Initiated by SCLC and its affiliate, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, the Birmingham demonstrations were the most massive civil rights protests that had yet occurred. With the assistance of Fred Shuttlesworth and other local black leaders, and with little competition from SNCC and other civil rights groups, SCLC officials were able to orchestrate the Birmingham protests to achieve maximum national impact. King’s decision to intentionally allow himself to be arrested for leading a demonstration on 12 April prodded the Kennedy administration to intervene in the escalating protests. The widely quoted “Letter from Birmingham Jail” displayed his distinctive ability to influence public opinion by appropriating ideas from the Bible, the Constitution, and other canonical texts. During May, televised pictures of police using dogs and fire hoses against young demonstrators generated a national outcry against white segregationist officials in Birmingham. The brutality of Birmingham officials and the refusal of Alabama’s governor George C. Wallace to allow the admission of black students at the University of Alabama prompted President Kennedy to introduce major civil rights legislation.
King’s speech at the 28 August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, attended by more than 200,000 people, was the culmination of a wave of civil rights protest activity that extended even to northern cities. In his prepared remarks, King announced that African Americans wished to cash the “promissory note” signified in the egalitarian rhetoric of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Closing his address with extemporaneous remarks, he insisted that he had not lost hope: “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.... 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.’” He appropriated the familiar words of “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” before concluding, “when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’” (King, “I Have a Dream,” 82, 85, 87).
Although there was much elation after the March on Washington, less than a month later, the movement was shocked by another act of senseless violence. On 15 September 1963, a dynamite blast at Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church killed four young school girls. King delivered the eulogy for three of the four girls, reflecting: “They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers” (King, Eulogy for the Martyred Children, 96).
St. Augustine, Florida became the site of the next major confrontation of the civil rights movement. Beginning in 1963, Robert B. Hayling, of the local NAACP, had led sit-ins against segregated businesses. SCLC was called in to help in May 1964, suffering the arrest of King and Abernathy. After a few court victories, SCLC left when a biracial committee was formed; however, local residents continued to suffer violence.
King’s ability to focus national attention on orchestrated confrontations with racist authorities, combined with his oration at the 1963 March on Washington, made him the most influential African-American spokesperson of the first half of the 1960s. He was named Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” at the end of 1963, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1964. The acclaim King received strengthened his stature among civil rights leaders but also prompted Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover to step up his effort to damage King’s reputation. Hoover, with the approval of President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, established phone taps and bugs. Hoover and many other observers of the southern struggle saw King as controlling events, but he was actually a moderating force within an increasingly diverse black militancy of the mid-1960s. Although he was not personally involved in Freedom Summer (1964), he was called upon to attempt to persuade the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegates to accept a compromise at the Democratic Party National Convention.
As the African-American struggle expanded from desegregation protests to mass movements seeking economic and political gains in the North as well as the South, King’s active involvement was limited to a few highly publicized civil rights campaigns, such as Birmingham and St. Augustine, which secured popular support for the passage of national civil rights legislation, particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The Alabama protests reached a turning point on 7 March 1965, when state police attacked a group of demonstrators at the start of a march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery. Carrying out Governor Wallace’s orders, the police used tear gas and clubs to turn back the marchers after they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the outskirts of Selma. Unprepared for the violent confrontation, King alienated some activists when he decided to postpone the continuation of the Selma to Montgomery March until he had received court approval, but the march, which finally secured federal court approval, attracted several thousand civil rights sympathizers, black and white, from all regions of the nation. On 25 March, King addressed the arriving marchers from the steps of the capitol in Montgomery. The march and the subsequent killing of a white participant, Viola Liuzzo, as well as the earlier murder of James Reeb dramatized the denial of black voting rights and spurred passage during the following summer of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
After the march in Alabama, King was unable to garner similar support for his effort to confront the problems of northern urban blacks. Early in 1966 he, together with local activist Al Raby, launched a major campaign against poverty and other urban problems, and King moved his family into an apartment in Chicago’s black ghetto. As King shifted the focus of his activities to the North, however, he discovered that the tactics used in the South were not as effective elsewhere. He encountered formidable opposition from Mayor Richard Daley and was unable to mobilize Chicago’s economically and ideologically diverse black community. King was stoned by angry whites in the Chicago suburb of Cicero when he led a march against racial discrimination in housing. Despite numerous mass protests, the Chicago Campaign resulted in no significant gains and undermined King’s reputation as an effective civil rights leader.
King’s influence was damaged further by the increasingly caustic tone of black militancy in the period after 1965. Black radicals increasingly turned away from the Gandhian precepts of King toward the black nationalism of Malcolm X, whose posthumously published autobiography and speeches reached large audiences after his assassination in February 1965. Unable to influence the black insurgencies that occurred in many urban areas, King refused to abandon his firmly rooted beliefs about racial integration and nonviolence. He was nevertheless unpersuaded by black nationalist calls for racial uplift and institutional development in black communities.
In June 1966, James Meredith was shot while attempting a “March against Fear” in Mississippi. King, Floyd McKissick of the Congress of Racial Equality, and Stokely Carmichael of SNCC decided to continue his march. During the march, the activists from SNCC decided to test a new slogan that they had been using, Black Power. King objected to the use of the term, but the media took the opportunity to expose the disagreements among protesters and publicized the term.
In his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), King dismissed the claim of Black Power advocates “to be the most revolutionary wing of the social revolution taking place in the United States,” but he acknowledged that they responded to a psychological need among African Americans he had not previously addressed (King, Where Do We Go, 45–46). “Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery,” King wrote. “The Negro will only be free when he reaches down to the inner depths of his own being and signs with the pen and ink of assertive manhood his own emancipation proclamation” (King, “Where Do We Go From Here?”, 184).
Indeed, even as his popularity declined, King spoke out strongly against American involvement in the Vietnam War, making his position public in an address, “Beyond Vietnam,” on 4 April 1967, at New York’s Riverside Church. King’s involvement in the anti-war movement reduced his ability to influence national racial policies and made him a target of further FBI investigations. Nevertheless, he became ever more insistent that his version of Gandhian nonviolence and social gospel Christianity was the most appropriate response to the problems of black Americans.
In December 1967, King announced the formation of the Poor People’s Campaign, designed to prod the federal government to strengthen its antipoverty efforts. King and other SCLC workers began to recruit poor people and antipoverty activists to come to Washington, D.C., to lobby on behalf of improved antipoverty programs. This effort was in its early stages when King became involved in the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike in Tennessee. On 28 March 1968, as King led thousands of sanitation workers and sympathizers on a march through downtown Memphis, black youngsters began throwing rocks and looting stores. This outbreak of violence led to extensive press criticisms of King’s entire antipoverty strategy. King returned to Memphis for the last time in early April. Addressing an audience at Bishop Charles J. Mason Temple on 3 April, King affirmed his optimism despite the “difficult days” that lay ahead. “But it really doesn’t matter with me now,” he declared, “because I’ve been to the mountaintop.... and I’ve seen the Promised Land.” He continued, “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,” (King, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” 222–223). The following evening, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., took place as he stood on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. A white segregationist, James Earl Ray, was later convicted of the crime. The Poor People’s Campaign continued for a few months after King’s death, under the direction of Ralph Abernathy, the new SCLC president, but it did not achieve its objectives.
Until his death, King remained steadfast in his commitment to the transformation of American society through nonviolent activism. In his posthumously published essay, “A Testament of Hope” (1969), he urged African Americans to refrain from violence but also warned: “White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society.” The “black revolution” was more than a civil rights movement, he insisted. “It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism” (King, “Testament,” 194).
After her husband’s death, Coretta Scott King established the Atlanta-based Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change (also known as the King Center) to promote Gandhian-Kingian concepts of nonviolent struggle. She also led the successful effort to honor her husband with a federally mandated King national holiday, which was first celebrated in 1986.

Footnotes
Introduction, in Papers 1:1–57.
King, “An Autobiography of Religious Development,” 12 September 1950–22 November 1950, in Papers 1:359–363.
King, Eulogy for the Martyred Children, 18 September 1963, in A Call to Conscience, ed. Carson and Shepard, 2001.
King, “I Have a Dream,” Address Delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 28 August 1963, in A Call to Conscience, ed. Carson and Shepard, 2001.
King, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” Address Delivered at Bishop Charles Mason Temple, 3 April 1968, in A Call to Conscience, ed. Carson and Shepard, 2001.
King, “Kick Up Dust,” Letter to the Editor, Atlanta Constitution, 6 August 1946, in Papers 1:121.
King, “My Trip to the Land of Gandhi,” July 1959, in Papers 5:231–238.
King, “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” 13 April 1960, in Papers 5:419–425.
King, Remarks Delivered at Africa Freedom Dinner at Atlanta University, 13 May 1959, in Papers 5:203–204.
King, Strength to Love, 1963.
King, “A Testament of Hope,” in Playboy (16 January 1969): 193–194, 231–236.
King, “Where Do We Go From Here?,” Address Delivered at the Eleventh Annual SCLC Convention, 16 August 1967, in A Call to Conscience, ed. Carson and Shepard, 2001.
King, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967.

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