1929 – 1968
Killed 4 April 1968 · Memphis, Tennessee
He was thirty-nine, and he was in Memphis for a strike about wages and safety, which is not the part usually remembered.
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. 28 August 1963. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
28 August 1963
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom drew something on the order of a quarter of a million people to the Mall. The full name matters and is usually dropped: it was a march about employment and economic conditions as much as about segregation law.
King spoke last. The passage everyone can quote was not in the prepared text — Mahalia Jackson called out to him to tell them about the dream, and he left the page.
Spring 1968
Two sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death by a malfunctioning truck in February 1968. The strike that followed was about pay, recognition of the union, and not being killed at work. The placards read I AM A MAN.
King came to support it. By 1968 he had moved well beyond segregation law toward poverty and the war in Vietnam, positions that cost him a good deal of the support he had held in 1963.
On the evening of 3 April, at Mason Temple, he gave the speech that ends with him saying he had been to the mountaintop and had seen the promised land, and that he might not get there with them. He was killed the next evening on the balcony outside room 306 of the Lorraine Motel.
The days after
Unrest broke out in more than a hundred American cities. Robert Kennedy, campaigning in Indianapolis, told a crowd that did not yet know, and asked them to go home; he would himself be killed two months later.
The Civil Rights Act of 1968, which included the fair-housing provisions that had been stalled for two years, was signed on 11 April — one week after the killing.
James Earl Ray pleaded guilty in 1969 and later spent decades trying to withdraw the plea. He died in prison.
Sequence
Echol Cole and Robert Walker are crushed by a garbage truck's compactor. The city offers their families almost nothing.
Around 1,300 Memphis sanitation workers walk out.
A march King leads turns violent at its edges. He returns determined to lead a peaceful one.
King gives the speech that ends 'I've been to the mountaintop.'
King is shot on the second-floor balcony outside room 306.
He is pronounced dead.
The Civil Rights Act of 1968 is signed into law.
Memphis recognises the union and raises wages.