Assassination

The Lorraine Motel, where Rev. King was assassinated, now the site of the National Civil Rights Museum

Martin Luther King's tomb, located on the grounds of the King Center

King was assassinated at 6:01 p.m. the next day, April 4, 1968, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Friends inside the motel room heard the shots and ran to the balcony to find King shot in the throat. He was pronounced dead at St. Joseph's Hospital at 7:05 p.m. The assassination led to a nationwide wave of riots in more than 60 cities.Five days later, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a national day of mourning for the lost civil rights leader. A crowd of 300,000 attended his funeral that same day. Vice-President Hubert Humphrey attended on behalf of LBJ, who was meeting with several advisors and cabinet officers on the Vietnam War in Camp David, and there were fears he may be hit with protests and abuses over the war.

Two months after King's death, escaped convict James Earl Ray was captured at London Heathrow Airport while trying to leave the United Kingdom on a false Canadian passport in the name of Ramon George Sneyd. Ray was quickly extradited to Tennessee and charged with King's murder, confessing to the assassination on March 10, 1969 (though he recanted this confession three days later). Later, Ray would be sentenced to a 99-year prison term.

Ray, a presumed white supremacist and segregationist, allegedly killed King because of the latter's extensive civil rights work. On the advice of his attorney Percy Foreman, Ray took a guilty plea to avoid a trial conviction and thus the possibility of receiving the death penalty, although it is unlikely that a death sentence would have been carried out, due to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1972 decision in the case of Furman v. Georgia that invalidated all state death penalty laws then in force.

Ray fired Foreman as his attorney (from then on derisively calling him "Percy Fourflusher") claiming that a man he met in Montreal, Canada with the alias "Raoul" was involved, as was his brother Johnny, but not himself, further asserting that although he didn't "personally shoot Dr. King," he may have been "partially responsible without knowing it," hinting at a conspiracy. He spent the remainder of his life attempting (unsuccessfully) to withdraw his guilty plea and secure the trial he never had.

Allegations of conspiracy

Some have speculated that Ray had been used as a "patsy" similar to the way that alleged John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was supposed to have been. Some of the claims used to support this assertion are:

    * Ray was a small-time thief and burglar, and had no record of committing violent crimes with a weapon.

    * The weapon that Ray is believed to have used in the assassination (a Remington Gamemaster Model 760 .30-'06 caliber rifle) had only two of Ray's fingerprints on it.

    * According to several fellow prison inmates, Ray had never expressed any political or racial opinions of any kind, casting doubt on Ray's purported motive for committing the crime.

    * The rooming-house bathroom from which Ray is said to have fired the fatal shots did not have any of his fingerprints at all.

    * Ray was believed to have been an average marksman, and it is claimed by many that Ray had not fired a rifle since his discharge from the United States Army in the late-1940s.