He was “on the job” in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968, rallying support for some 1,300 Black city sanitation workers two months into a tension-filled strike over unequal pay and poor and unsafe working conditions. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was to be the featured speaker at a church that evening, but King and a small group that came with him to Memphis would first have dinner.
A courtesy car was waiting downstairs, and moments after King came out his second-floor room, a sniper-assassin’s bullet took him down.
Leid Stories commemorates the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with the sober reminder that his work can be kept alive, if we make it so.