A Date Correction
Martin Luther King Jr. was not killed in 1967. He was shot in Memphis, Tennessee, on the evening of 4 April 1968, and died that night. The mix-up is common, partly because the year before his death was so important to the way he spent his last months. This article covers both: the 1967 turn that shaped his final campaigns, and the 1968 killing and its consequences.
King in 1967
By 1967 King was one of the most recognised figures in the country, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and the leading voice of the nonviolent wing of the civil rights movement. He was also increasingly uneasy. The legal victories of 1964 and 1965 had not changed the economic position of most Black Americans, and the 1966 campaign in Chicago, where he moved into a slum apartment to protest housing conditions, had met fierce resistance and produced limited results.
In 1967 he moved on two fronts. The first was the Vietnam War. On 4 April 1967, exactly a year before his death, he delivered his Beyond Vietnam speech at Riverside Church in New York. He argued that the war was damaging both Vietnamese society and American priorities at home, and he spoke as a minister who felt he could not stay silent. The speech drew criticism from some allies, including some in the civil rights establishment and in the press, who feared it would weaken the alliance with President Lyndon Johnson.
The second front was economic. His book Chaos or Community, published in 1967, set out an argument for tackling poverty, housing and employment. In a speech to his organisation, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, in August, he asked where the movement should go next. After the summer’s unrest in Newark and Detroit, which King regarded as expressions of despair, he supported nonviolence while insisting that the conditions behind the riots had to be addressed. In December he announced plans for a Poor People’s Campaign, which would bring poor Americans of all races to Washington to press for jobs and income.
Memphis
In February 1968, black sanitation workers in Memphis went on strike after two of them were killed in a garbage truck accident, and the strike came to centre on pay, safety and union recognition. King was drawn into the dispute as an example of the economic issues he had been talking about. A march he led on 28 March ended in disorder, with some windows broken and a teenager killed by police. King was shaken by the violence and returned to Memphis in early April to hold another march.
On 3 April he delivered a speech at Mason Temple, often called the mountaintop speech, in which he reflected on the possibility of his own death. The next day, at about 6 p.m., he was shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. He was taken to St. Joseph’s Hospital and was pronounced dead there. He was 39.
The Killing and the Suspect
The investigation led to James Earl Ray, an escaped convict. After a manhunt that ranged across several countries, Ray was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport in June 1968. In March 1969 he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 99 years in prison, but soon afterward he retracted his plea and claimed he had been set up. He died in 1998. The King family and others have continued to ask whether there was a wider conspiracy, and in a 1999 civil case in Memphis a jury found that others had been involved. Official investigations, including one by the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s, found Ray responsible, and the details remain disputed in some quarters.
Riots and Mourning
News of the killing set off disturbances in dozens of American cities, with Washington, Baltimore, Chicago and Kansas City among those most affected. Troops were deployed in several of them, including Washington, where fires burned within sight of the Capitol. Dozens of people died nationwide, according to commonly cited estimates, and thousands were arrested. President Johnson declared a day of mourning, and King’s funeral took place in Atlanta on 9 April.
The riots were a direct echo of the 1967 summer, and the Kerner Commission’s findings, published in February 1968, had already warned of a divided society. In the days after the killing, Congress moved to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which included the Fair Housing Act. President Johnson signed it on 11 April.
A Turning Point
The effect on the movement was profound. King’s death removed the best-known advocate of nonviolence just as many younger activists were turning toward Black Power. The Poor People’s Campaign went ahead under his colleagues’ leadership that spring, including a long encampment in Washington known as Resurrection City, but it ended without the legislative results King had hoped for.
The political climate was shifting too. Weeks earlier, Johnson had announced he would not seek re-election, and the backlash against unrest helped fuel the law-and-order politics of the 1968 campaign. Two months after King’s death, Robert Kennedy was also shot. Historians often treat the two killings as marking the end of an era of optimism in American liberal politics, though that is an interpretation rather than a settled fact.