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Video: April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr. Assassinated

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The civil rights activist is shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn.

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Who Was James Earl Ray?

James Earl Ray was born in Alton, Illinois, on March 10, 1928. A confirmed racist and small-time criminal, Ray began plotting the assassination of revered civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in early 1968. He shot and killed King in Memphis on April 4, 1968, confessing to the crime the following March. Ray died in prison on April 23, 1998.

Death

Ray died at Columbia Nashville Memorial Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, on April 23, 1998. Ray had been treated for liver disease over the years and according to the Tennessee Department of Correction, Ray died from that and kidney failure.

Anna Sandhu Ray

Ray met Anna Sandhu in 1977. A courtroom artist, Sandhu drew Ray during his trial for a prison escape attempt. The two married in 1978 and divorced in 1992.

MLK Assassination

Exactly what led James Earl Ray to kill Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. continues to be a source of debate, as does his role in the murder. Evidence does suggest that Ray had little stomach for the integration policies that were sweeping the country. In addition to his segregationist beliefs, he also saw a big payday, some historians have said, in killing black leaders like H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael and, of course, King.

Whatever the exact details were that led him to Memphis in April 1968, Ray rented a room at a rooming house under the name Eric Starvo Galt, near the Lorraine Motel, where King was staying.

Where Did James Earl Ray Shoot From?

On April 4, 1968, Ray stood in the bathtub of a shared bathroom, balanced his rifle on a window ledge and shot King as the civil rights leader was standing on a balcony outside of his motel room. After shooting King, Ray immediately fled, setting off a manhunt that would last more than two months and cover five countries. At the time, it was said to be the FBI's most expensive and biggest investigation in its history.

Finally, on July 19, 1968, the FBI caught up with Ray in London and extradited him to the United States. Ray pleaded guilty to the murder, something he'd spend the rest of his life trying to reverse, and was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

Innocent or Guilty?

In the years following Ray's arrest, questions arose about his exact involvement in King's murder. Ray himself countered that he was not the only one involved in the crime. He insisted that a man he'd met in Canada, who went by the name of Raoul, had orchestrated the murder and ultimately shot King.

Later, in the early 1990s, he suggested a conspiracy involving the government had been behind the assassination. Even a 1978 special congressional committee said there was the "likelihood" that Ray did not act alone.

Toward the end of his life, Ray, whose sentence had been extended to 100 years after he escaped from prison in 1977, had the support of an unexpected ally: the King family. Not long before Ray's death, Dexter King, Dr. King's son, visited the man presumed to be his father's killer. Ray, who was feeble and sick from hepatitis C, was asked by King about his involvement in the assassination. "I had nothing to do with killing your father," Ray said. "I believe you," Dexter King responded, and shook his hand.

Early Years

Born on March 10, 1928, in Alton, Illinois, James Earl Ray was the eldest of George and Lucille Ray's nine children. The Rays struggled to make ends meet, and as a consequence the family moved several times during the early part of Ray's childhood.

A part of his life was shaped by tragedy. In 1935 the family suddenly left Alton and relocated to Ewing, Missouri, after police had started looking for Ray's father on a forgery charge. Two years later, his young sister Marjorie, died in a fire after playing with matches and accidentally catching herself on fire.

At the age of 16, Ray left his parents and returned to Alton, where he moved in with his grandmother and landed work in the dye room of the International Shoe Tannery.

After getting laid off in 1945, Ray enlisted in the Army, eventually getting stationed in West Germany. But he found it difficult to adapt to the military's strict codes of conduct. He was charged with drunkenness and breaking arrest, before getting discharged for ineptness and lack of adaptability in 1948.

Ray's life outside the Army proved even less stable. After returning to Alton and moving back in with his grandmother, he blazed through a number of odd jobs. In 1949 he left for Los Angeles, where in October of that year police arrested him for robbing a cafe. He was sentenced to 90 days in prison, but the lockup did little to reform him.

Over the next several years, Ray embarked on a number of small crimes, serving various jail times. The most serious of those came in 1959, when Ray, on parole for an earlier theft, robbed two St. Louis grocery stores, as well as another in Alton. In March 1960 Ray started a 20-year sentence for the crimes.

Housed at the Missouri State Penitentiary, Ray managed to escape the facility in 1967. He at first fled to Canada but, unable to get on a ship and flee overseas, he returned to the U.S. and made his way to first Alabama, then Mexico, and later Los Angeles.

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James Earl Ray was born in Alton, Illinois, on March 10, 1928. A confirmed racist and small-time criminal, Ray began plotting the assassination of revered civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in early 1968. He shot and killed King in Memphis on April 4, 1968, confessing to the crime the following March.

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Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. is fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers' strike and was on his way to dinner when a bullet struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. King was pronounced dead after his arrival at a Memphis hospital. He was 39 years old.

In the months before his assassination, Martin Luther King became increasingly concerned with the problem of economic inequality in America. He organized a Poor People's Campaign to focus on the issue, including an interracialpoor people's marchon Washington, and in March 1968 traveled to Memphis in support of poorly treated African-American sanitation workers. On March 28, a workers' protest march led by King ended in violence and the death of an African-American teenager. King left the city but vowed to return in early April to lead another demonstration.

On April 3, back in Memphis, King gave his last sermon, saying, "We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop...And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land."

One day after speaking those words, Dr. King was shot and killed by a sniper. As word of the assassination spread, riots broke out in cities all across the United States and National Guard troops were deployed in Memphis and Washington, D.C. On April 9, King was laid to rest in his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. Tens of thousands of people lined the streets to pay tribute to King's casket as it passed by in a wooden farm cart drawn by two mules.

The evening of King's murder, a Remington .30-06 hunting rifle was found on the sidewalk beside a rooming house one block from the Lorraine Motel. During the next several weeks, the rifle, eyewitness reports, and fingerprints on the weapon all implicated a single suspect: escaped convict James Earl Ray. A two-bit criminal, Ray escaped a Missouri prison in April 1967 while serving a sentence for a holdup. In May 1968, a massive manhunt for Ray began. The FBI eventually determined that he had obtained a Canadian passport under a false identity, which at the time was relatively easy.

On June 8, Scotland Yard investigators arrested Ray at a London airport. He was trying to fly to Belgium, with the eventual goal, he later admitted, of reaching Rhodesia. Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe, was at the time ruled by an oppressive and internationally condemned white minority government. Extradited to the United States, Ray stood before a Memphis judge in March 1969 and pleaded guilty to King's murder in order to avoid the electric chair. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

Three days later, he attempted to withdraw his guilty plea, claiming he was innocent of King's assassination and had been set up as a patsy in a larger conspiracy. He claimed that in 1967, a mysterious man named "Raoul" had approached him and recruited him into a gunrunning enterprise. On April 4, 1968, he said, he realized that he was to be the fall guy for the King assassination and fled to Canada. Ray's motion was denied, as were his dozens of other requests for a trial during the next 29 years.

During the 1990s, the widow and children of Martin Luther King Jr. spoke publicly in support of Ray and his claims, calling him innocent and speculating about an assassination conspiracy involving the U.S. government and military. U.S. authorities were, in conspiracists' minds, implicated circumstantially. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover obsessed over King, who he thought was under communist influence. For the last six years of his life, King underwent constant wiretapping and harassment by the FBI. Before his death, Dr. King was also monitored by U.S. military intelligence, which may have been asked to watch King after he publicly denounced the Vietnam War in 1967. Furthermore, by calling for radical economic reforms in 1968, including guaranteed annual incomes for all, King was making few new friends in the Cold War-era U.S. government.

Over the years, the assassination has been reexamined by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the Shelby County, Tennessee, district attorney's office, and three times by the U.S. Justice Department. The investigations all ended with the same conclusion: James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King. The House committee acknowledged that a low-level conspiracy might have existed, involving one or more accomplices to Ray, but uncovered no evidence to definitively prove this theory. In addition to the mountain of evidence against him-such as his fingerprints on the murder weapon and his admitted presence at the rooming house on April 4-Ray had a definite motive in assassinating King: hatred. According to his family and friends, he was an outspoken racist who informed them of his intent to kill Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He died in 1998.

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Dr. King is assassinated - Apr 04, 1968 - HISTORY.com

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Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. is fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers' strike and was on his way to dinner when a bullet struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord.

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Memphis, Tennessee