Dr. Martin Luther King murdered 54 years ago

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (WAND) – It was April 4, 1968, 54 years ago, when civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down by a single shot from a sniper at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn.

King did not survive. But his legacy was cemented in history for generations to come. The Lorraine Motel, where King was killed on a balcony outside of room 306, has been preserved and is now part of the National Civil Rights Museum.

King was in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers who were only paid between $1.60 and $2.10 an hour. They worked in horrible conditions and went on strike after two sanitation employees were killed on the job in February 1968.

King faced an injunction preventing a planned march, but earlier in the day, before his assassination, a judge lifted that order allowing the march to proceed.

“That afternoon Dr. King was actually in a very good mood,” Dr. Noelle Trent of the National Civil Rights Museum told WAND News. “The injunction was removed. The march was going on as planned. Plans for the Poor People’s Campaign (Proposed by King in 1967) were going well. So, things were looking up and he was very excited about the future.”

The fatal shot at the Lorraine Motel came at 6:01pm from a rooming house directly across the street. James Earl Ray, the man who killed King, fled Memphis. He went to Atlanta, then to Canada and later to London where he was eventually arrested and extradited back to the United States.

Ray was born in Alton, Illinois. He had an Illinois conviction for robbing a taxi driver. When he shot King he was a wanted fugitive having escaped from a Missouri prison.

Ray entered a guilty plea in 1969 avoiding the death penalty. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison where he died in 1998.