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To say that Richard and Mildred Loving were reluctant heroes would be an understatement. Richard, with his platinum blonde crew cut, backwoods accent and taciturn ways, looked more like a caricature for a white supremacist. And then there was Mildred. A soft-spoken, shy woman of African and Native-American descent, she possessed a quiet charm but like her husband, had no desire to bring attention to herself.

But the attention would come, and it would change the course of American history.

The couple had to flee Virginia to avoid prison time

In 1958, the couple was jolted out of their bed in the middle of the night and arrested by local Virginia police. Their crime: violating the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which forbid interracial marriage. Although the Lovings were legally married in Washington, D.C., the state of Virginia, which the couple made their home in, was one of more than 20 states that made marriage between the races a crime.

A local judge allowed the Lovings to flee the state to avoid prison time. The couple decidedly moved to D.C., just two hours away from Virginia, but for the two of them, their whole world - along with their family and friends - was wrapped up in their tiny farming community of Central Point, Virginia. They were simple people who wanted to live a simple life, and they were determined to go back home. After living the next five years in exile and raising their three children, Mildred found an opening.

Photo: Getty Images

The Lovings' case went to the Supreme Court

Feeling empowered by the Civil Rights Movement, Mildred wrote to Robert F. Kennedy in 1963 asking for counsel. Kennedy referred her to the ACLU, and it was there that their case eventually went to the Supreme Court. The judges unanimously ruled in favor of the Lovings with Chief Justice Earl Warren writing "the freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men."

The historic ruling led to the overturning of similar statutes in more than a dozen states and ultimately marked the end of segregation laws in America. But for the Lovings, the ruling was simply the freedom to go home and to continue on with their lives, this time, loving without fear.

Although Richard died in 1975 following a car accident, Mildred was able to live long enough to offer her support for gay marriage. On the 40th anniversary of the Lovings' landmark case and a year before her death in 2008, she said in a public statement: "The older generation's fears and prejudices have given way, and today's young people realize that if someone loves someone, they have a right to marry."

To look at the Lovings' legacy (along with their improbable last name), they make the saying "love conquers all" that much more believable.

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To say that Richard and Mildred Loving were reluctant heroes would be an understatement. Richard, with his platinum blonde crew cut, backwoods accent and taciturn ways, looked more like a caricature for a white supremacist. And then there was Mildred.

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This case brought down laws that were against interracial marriage. Now white women could marry African American men or African American women could marry White men. Before, this would have been illegal, many people were realizing that there isn't much of a difference between the two races. Richard and Mildred loving was the couple that brought up this case.

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What Is Miscegenation?

The Loving case was a challenge to centuries of American laws banning miscegenation, i.e., any marriage or interbreeding among different races. Restrictions on miscegenation existed as early as the colonial era, and of the 50 U.S. states, all but nine states had a law against the practice at some point in their history.

Early attempts to dispute race-based marriage bans in court met with little success. One of the first and most noteworthy cases was 1883's Pace v. Alabama, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that an Alabama anti-miscegenation law was constitutional because it punished Black people and white people equally. In 1888, meanwhile, the high court ruled that states had the authority to regulate marriage.

By the 1950s, more than half the states in the Union-including every state in the South-still had laws restricting marriage by racial classifications. In Virginia, interracial marriage was illegal under 1924's Racial Integrity Act. Those who violated the law risked anywhere from one to five years in a state penitentiary.

Richard and Mildred Loving

The central figures in Loving v. Virginia were Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter, a couple from the town of Central Point in Caroline County, Virginia.

Richard, a white construction worker, and Mildred, a woman of mixed Black and Native American ancestry, were longtime friends who had fallen in love. In June 1958, they exchanged wedding vows in Washington, D.C., where interracial marriage was legal, and then returned home to Virginia.

On July 11, 1958, just five weeks after their wedding, the Lovings were woken in their bed at about 2:00 a.m. and arrested by the local sheriff. Richard and Mildred were indicted on charges of violating Virginia's anti-miscegenation law, which deemed interracial marriages a felony.

When the couple pleaded guilty the following year, Judge Leon M. Bazile sentenced them to one year in prison, but suspended the sentence on the condition that they would leave Virginia and not return together for a period of 25 years.

Richard and Mildred Loving's Children

Following their court case, the Lovings were forced to leave Virginia and relocate to Washington, D.C. The couple lived in exile in the nation's capital for several years and raised three children-sons Sidney and Donald and a daughter, Peggy-but they longed to return to their hometown.

In 1963, a desperate Mildred Loving wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy asking for assistance. Kennedy referred the Lovings to the American Civil Liberties Union ( ACLU), which agreed to take their case.

Loving v. Virginia

The Lovings began their legal battle in November 1963. With the aid of Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschkop, two ACLU young lawyers, the couple filed a motion asking for Judge Bazile to vacate their conviction and set aside their sentences.

When Bazile refused, Cohen and Hirschkop took the case to the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, which also upheld the original ruling. Following another appeal, the case made its way to the United States Supreme Court in April 1967.

During oral arguments before the Supreme Court, Virginia's Assistant Attorney General Robert D. McIlwaine III defended the constitutionality of his state's anti-miscegenation law and compared it to similar regulations against incest and polygamy. Cohen and Hirschkop, meanwhile, argued the Virginia statute was illegal under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees all citizens due process and equal protection under the law.

During one exchange, Hirschkop stated that Virginia's interracial marriage law and others like it were rooted in racism and white supremacy. "These are not health and welfare laws," he argued. "These are slavery laws, pure and simple."

Supreme Court Ruling

The Supreme Court announced its ruling in Loving v. Virginia on June 12, 1967. In a unanimous decision, the justices found that Virginia's interracial marriage law violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

"Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the state," Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote.

The landmark ruling not only overturned the Lovings' 1958 criminal conviction, it also struck down existing laws against interracial marriage in 16 U.S. states including Virginia.

What Happened to the Lovings?

The Lovings had lived secretly on a Virginia farm for much of their legal battle, but after the Supreme Court decision, they returned to the town of Central Point to raise their three children.

Richard Loving was killed in 1975 when a drunk driver in Caroline County struck the couple's car. Mildred survived the crash and went on to spend the rest of her life in Central Point. She died in 2008, having never remarried.

Legacy of Loving v. Virginia

Loving v. Virginia is considered one of the most significant legal decisions of the civil rights era. By declaring Virginia's anti-miscegenation law unconstitutional, the Supreme Court ended prohibitions on interracial marriage and dealt a major blow to segregation.

Despite the court's decision, however, some states were slow to alter their laws. The last state to officially accept the ruling was Alabama, which only removed an anti-miscegenation statute from its state constitution in 2000.

In addition to its implications for interracial marriage, Loving v. Virginia was also invoked in subsequent court cases concerning same-sex marriage.

In 2015, for example, Justice Anthony Kennedy cited the Loving case in his opinion on the Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized gay marriage across the United States.

On December 13, 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act into law. The law requires that individual states recognize same-sex and interracial marriages that were lawfully performed in other states.

June 12-the anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia decision-is now commemorated each year as "Loving Day," a holiday celebrating multiracial families.

Sources

Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law-an American History. By Peter Wallenstein.
Loving v. Virginia. Encyclopedia Virginia.
Loving v. Virginia. Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute.
Law and the Politics of Marriage: Loving v. Virginia After 30 Years Introduction. Robert A. Destro.
What You Didn't Know About Loving v. Virginia. Time Magazine.

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Loving v. Virginia: 1967 & Supreme Court Case - HISTORY

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The Loving case was a challenge to centuries of American laws banning miscegenation, i.e., any marriage or interbreeding among different races. Restrictions on miscegenation existed as early as the colonial era, and of the 50 U.S. states, all but nine states had a law against the practice at some point in their history.

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this law was passed to forbid discrimination by renters or sellers of property

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The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin or sex. Intended as a follow-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the bill was the subject of a contentious debate in the Senate, but was passed quickly by the House of Representatives in the days after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. The Fair Housing Act stands as the final great legislative achievement of the civil rights era.

Struggle for Fair Housing

Despite Supreme Court decisions such as Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) and Jones v. Mayer Co. (1968), which outlawed the exclusion of African Americans or other minorities from certain sections of cities, race-based housing patterns were still in force by the late 1960s. Those who challenged them often met with resistance, hostility and even violence.

Meanwhile, while a growing number of African American and Hispanic members of the armed forces fought and died in the Vietnam War, on the home front their families had trouble renting or purchasing homes in certain residential areas because of their race or national origin.
READ MORE: How a New Deal Housing Program Enforced Segregation
In this climate, organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP), the G.I. Forum and the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing lobbied for new fair housing legislation to be passed.

The proposed civil rights legislation of 1968 expanded on and was intended as a follow-up to the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964. The bill's original goal was to extend federal protection to civil rights workers, but it was eventually expanded to address racial discrimination in housing.

Title VIII of the proposed Civil Rights Act was known as the Fair Housing Act, a term often used as a shorthand description for the entire bill. It prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin and sex.

Congressional Debate

In the U.S. Senate debate over the proposed legislation, Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts-the first African American ever to be elected to the Senate by popular vote-spoke personally of his return from World War II and his inability to provide a home of his choice for his new family because of his race.

In early April 1968, the bill passed the Senate, albeit by an exceedingly slim margin, thanks to the support of the Senate Republican leader, Everett Dirksen, which defeated a southern filibuster.

It then went to the House of Representatives, from which it was expected to emerge significantly weakened; the House had grown increasingly conservative as a result of urban unrest and the increasing strength and militancy of the Black Power movement.

On April 4-the day of the Senate vote-the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to aid striking sanitation workers. Amid a wave of emotion-including riots, burning and looting in more than 100 cities around the country-President Lyndon B. Johnson increased pressure on Congress to pass the new civil rights legislation.

Since the summer of 1966, when King had participated in marches in Chicago calling for open housing in that city, he had been associated with the fight for fair housing. Johnson argued that the bill would be a fitting testament to the man and his legacy, and he wanted it passed prior to King's funeral in Atlanta.

Did you know? A major force behind passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 was the NAACP's Washington director, Clarence Mitchell Jr., who proved so effective in pushing through legislation aiding Black people that he was referred to as the "101st senator."

After a strictly limited debate, the House passed the Fair Housing Act on April 10, and President Johnson signed it into law the following day.

Impact of the Fair Housing Act

Despite the historic nature of the Fair Housing Act, and its stature as the last major act of legislation of the civil rights movement, in practice housing remained segregated in many areas of the United States in the years that followed.

From 1950 to 1980, the total Black population in America's urban centers increased from 6.1 million to 15.3 million. During this same time period, white Americans steadily moved out of the cities into the suburbs, taking many of the employment opportunities Black people needed into communities where they were not welcome to live.

This trend led to the growth in urban America of ghettoes, or inner city communities with high minority populations that were plagued by unemployment, crime and other social ills.

In 1988, Congress passed the Fair Housing Amendments Act, which expanded the law to prohibit discrimination in housing based on disability or on family status (pregnant women or the presence of children under 18).
READ MORE: Civil Rights Movement Timeline
These amendments brought the enforcement of the Fair Housing Act even more squarely under the control of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which sends complaints regarding housing discrimination to be investigated by its Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (FHEO).

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Fair Housing Act - 1968, Federal & Definition | HISTORY

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The Fair Housing Act, which prohibited discrimination in the sale, rental and financing of housing, was the final legislative triumph of the civil rights era.

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Carl Stokes was the first African American mayor in Cleveland, Ohio. The first time he ran for Mayor he lost. This was a very big deal because Cleveland is a very white town and a colored person was in charge. After he was Mayor, he was a New York News anchor. This shows that an African American can have a very successful life and that was a shock to man American people.

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Stokes served as a prosecuting attorney until 1962, when he joined his brother, Louis Stokes, in establishing the law firm Stokes, Stokes, Character, and Terry. In that same year, Carl Stokes was elected to the Ohio House of Representatives and served three terms. He was the first African American member of the Democratic Party elected to the Ohio House.

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Martin Luther King Junior was one of the leaders of the Civil Rights movement.He was very involved He was assassinated when he was going to Memphis Tn to support a workers strike. He was on a balcony when he was shot by a sniper in the neck. His death called many riots.

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Thurgood Marshall was the first black man to be appointed to the Supreme Court. This impacted and inspired many African Americans that just because they are a different color, they could be successful. Marshall went to an all black college and graduated with all honors. He then wanted to go to University of Maryland, but he couldn’t because he was black. He won the case that ended segregation in public schools. JFK appointed him.

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Who Was Thurgood Marshall?

Thurgood Marshall (July 2, 1908 to January 24, 1993) was an American lawyer who was appointed as an associate justice of the Supreme Court in 1967. He was the first African-American to hold the position and served for 24 years, until 1991. Marshall studied law at Howard University. As counsel to the NAACP, he utilized the judiciary to champion equality for African Americans. In 1954, he won the Brown v. Board of Education case, in which the Supreme Court ended racial segregation in public schools.

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(Photo: Stock Montage/Getty Images)

Movie on Thurgood Marshall

In 2017, the biopic film Marshall was released. Starring Chadwick Boseman, Josh Gad and Kate Hudson, the movie focuses on an obscure 1941 rape case brought by Eleanor Strubing, a 32-year-old white woman, against her 32-year-old black chauffeur, Joseph Spell. While Spell initially confessed to the crime after 16 hours of interrogation, he later said the encounter was consensual. During the trial, the judge allowed Thurgood Marshall to assist his white co-attorney but banned him from speaking a single word. Following 12 hours of deliberation, the jury of six men and six women came back with a not guilty verdict.

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Thurgood Marshall's Wife and Kids

Marshall married Vivian "Buster" Burey in 1929, and the couple remained married until her death in 1955. Shortly thereafter, Marshall married Cecilia Suyat, his secretary at the NAACP. The couple had two sons together, Thurgood Jr. and John Marshall.

When and Where Was Thurgood Marshall Born?

Thurgood Marshall was born on July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Family and Early Life

Thurgood Marshall's father was William Marshall, the grandson of a slave who worked as a steward at an exclusive club. His mother, Norma, was a kindergarten teacher.

One of William Marshall's favorite pastimes was to listen to cases at the local courthouse before returning home to rehash the lawyers' arguments with his sons. Thurgood Marshall later recalled, "Now you want to know how I got involved in law? I don't know. The nearest I can get is that my dad, my brother and I had the most violent arguments you ever heard about anything. I guess we argued five out of seven nights at the dinner table."

Education

Thurgood Marshall attended Baltimore's Colored High and Training School (later renamed Frederick Douglass High School), where he was an above-average student and put his finely honed skills of argument to use as a star member of the debate team. The teenage Marshall was also something of a mischievous troublemaker. His greatest high school accomplishment, memorizing the entire United States Constitution, was actually a teacher's punishment for misbehaving in class.

After graduating from high school in 1926, Marshall attended Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania. There, he joined a remarkably distinguished student body that included Kwame Nkrumah, the future president of Ghana; Langston Hughes, the great poet; and Cab Calloway, the famous jazz singer.

After graduating from Lincoln with honors in 1930, Marshall applied to the University of Maryland Law School. Despite being overqualified academically, Marshall was rejected because of his race. This firsthand experience with discrimination in education made a lasting impression on Marshall and helped determine the future course of his career.

Instead of Maryland, Marshall attended law school in Washington, D.C. at Howard University, another historically black school. The dean of Howard Law School at the time was the pioneering civil rights lawyer Charles Houston. Marshall quickly fell under the tutelage of Houston, a notorious disciplinarian and extraordinarily demanding professor. Marshall recalled of Houston, "He would not be satisfied until he went to a dance on the campus and found all of his students sitting around the wall reading law books instead of partying."

Marshall graduated magna cum laude from Howard in 1933. He briefly attempted to establish his own practice in Baltimore, but without experience he failed to land any significant cases.

Thurgood Marshall's Court Cases

In 1934, Thurgood Marshall began working for the Baltimore branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1936, Marshall moved to New York City to work full time as legal counsel for the NAACP. Over several decades, Marshall argued and won a variety of cases to strike down many forms of legalized racism, helping to inspire the American civil rights movement.

Murray v. Pearson

In one of Marshall's first cases - which he argued alongside his mentor, Charles Houston - he defended another well-qualified undergraduate, Donald Murray, who like himself had been denied entrance to the University of Maryland Law School. Marshall and Houston won Murray v. Pearson in January 1936, the first in a long string of cases designed to undermine the legal basis for de jure racial segregation in the United States.

Chambers v. Florida

Marshall's first victory before the Supreme Court came in Chambers v. Florida (1940), in which he successfully defended four black men who had been convicted of murder on the basis of confessions coerced from them by police.

Smith v. Allwright

Another crucial Supreme Court victory for Marshall came in the 1944 case of Smith v. Allwright, in which the Court struck down the Democratic Party's use of whites-only primary elections in various Southern states.

Brown v. Board of Education

The great achievement of Marshall's career as a civil-rights lawyer was his victory in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of a group of black parents in Topeka, Kansas, whose children were forced to attend all-black segregated schools. Through Brown v. Board, one of the most important cases of the 20th century, Marshall challenged head-on the legal underpinning of racial segregation, the doctrine of "separate but equal" established by the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson.

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," and therefore racial segregation of public schools violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

While enforcement of the Court's ruling proved to be uneven and painfully slow, Brown v. Board provided the legal foundation, and much of the inspiration, for the American civil rights movement that unfolded over the next decade. At the same time, the case established Marshall as one of the most successful and prominent lawyers in America.

Circuit Court Judge & Solicitor General

In 1961, newly-elected President John F. Kennedy appointed Thurgood Marshall as a judge for the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Serving as a circuit court judge over the next four years, Marshall issued more than 100 decisions, none of which was overturned by the Supreme Court.

In 1965, Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, appointed Marshall to serve as the first black U.S. solicitor general, the attorney designated to argue on behalf of the federal government before the Supreme Court. During his two years as solicitor general, Marshall won 14 of the 19 cases that he argued before the Supreme Court.

Supreme Court Justice

In 1967, President Johnson nominated Marshall to serve on the bench before which he had successfully argued so many times before: the United States Supreme Court. On October 2, 1967, Marshall was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice, becoming the first African American to serve on the nation's highest court. Marshall joined a liberal Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, which aligned with Marshall's views on politics and the Constitution.

As a Supreme Court justice, Marshall consistently supported rulings upholding a strong protection of individual rights and liberal interpretations of controversial social issues. He was part of the majority that ruled in favor of the right to abortion in the landmark 1973 case Roe v. Wade, among several other cases. In the 1972 case Furman v. Georgia, which led to a de facto moratorium on the death penalty, Marshall articulated his opinion that the death penalty was unconstitutional in all circumstances.

Throughout Marshall's 24-year tenure on the Court, Republican presidents appointed eight consecutive justices, and Marshall gradually became an isolated liberal member of an increasingly conservative Court.

For the latter part of his time on the bench, Marshall was largely relegated to issuing strongly-worded dissents, as the Court reinstated the death penalty and limited affirmative action measures and abortion rights. Marshall retired from the Supreme Court in 1991; Justice Clarence Thomas replaced him.

When Did Thurgood Marshall Die?

Thurgood Marshall died on January 24, 1993, at the age of 84.

Thurgood Marshall V. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X

Thurgood Marshall stands alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as one of the greatest and most important figures of the American civil rights movement. Although he may be the least popularly celebrated of the three, Marshall was arguably the most instrumental in the movement's achievements toward racial equality.

Marshall's strategy of attacking racial inequality through the courts represented a third way of pursuing racial equality, more pragmatic than King's soaring rhetoric and less polemical than Malcolm X's strident separatism. In the aftermath of Marshall's death, an obituary read: "We make movies about Malcolm X, we get a holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, but every day we live with the legacy of Justice Thurgood Marshall."

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Thurgood Marshall (July 2, 1908 to January 24, 1993) was an American lawyer who was appointed as an associate justice of the Supreme Court in 1967. He was the first African-American to hold the position and served for 24 years, until 1991. Marshall studied law at Howard University.

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1967 Detroit Riots - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com

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Find out more about the history of 1967 Detroit Riots, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com

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Table of Contents

1. King Assassination: Background

2. Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

3. King Assassination Conspiracy

4. Impact of the King Assassination

Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, an event that sent shock waves reverberating around the world. A Baptist minister and founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), King had led the civil rights movement since the mid-1950s, using a combination of impassioned speeches and nonviolent protests to fight segregation and achieve significant civil rights advances for African Americans. His assassination led to an outpouring of anger among Black Americans, as well as a period of national mourning that helped speed the way for an equal housing bill that would be the last significant legislative achievement of the civil rights era.

King Assassination: Background

In the last years of his life, Dr. King faced mounting criticism from young African American activists who favored a more confrontational approach to seeking change. These young radicals stuck closer to the ideals of the Black nationalist leader Malcolm X ( himself assassinated in 1965), who had condemned King's advocacy of nonviolence as "criminal" in the face of the continuing repression suffered by African Americans.

As a result of this opposition, King sought to widen his appeal beyond his own race, speaking out publicly against the Vietnam War and working to form a coalition of poor Americans-Black and white alike-to address such issues as poverty and unemployment.

Did you know? Among the witnesses at King's assassination was Jesse Jackson, one of his closest aides. Ordained as a minister soon after King's death, Jackson went on to form Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) and to run twice for U.S. president, in 1984 and 1988.

In the spring of 1968, while preparing for a planned march to Washington to lobby Congress on behalf of the poor, King and other SCLC members were called to Memphis, Tennessee, to support a sanitation workers' strike. On the night of April 3, King gave a speech at the Mason Temple Church in Memphis.

In his speech, King seemed to foreshadow his own untimely passing, or at least to strike a particularly reflective note, ending with these now-historic words: "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. And I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

In fact, King had already survived an assassination attempt in the shoe section of a Harlem department store on September 20, 1958. The incident only affirmed his belief in non-violence.

Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

At 6:05 p.m. the following day, King was standing on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where he and his associates were staying, when a sniper's bullet struck him in the neck. He was rushed to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead about an hour later, at the age of 39.

Shock and distress over the news of King's death sparked rioting in more than 100 cities around the country, including burning and looting. Amid a wave of national mourning, President Lyndon B. Johnson urged Americans to "reject the blind violence" that had killed King, whom he called the "apostle of nonviolence."

He also called on Congress to speedily pass the civil rights legislation then entering the House of Representatives for debate, calling it a fitting legacy to King and his life's work. On April 11, Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act, a major piece of civil rights legislation that prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin or sex. It is considered an important follow-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

King Assassination Conspiracy

On June 8, authorities apprehended the suspect in King's murder, a small-time criminal named James Earl Ray, at London's Heathrow Airport. Witnesses had seen him running from a boarding house near the Lorraine Motel carrying a bundle; prosecutors said he fired the fatal bullet from a bathroom in that building. Authorities found Ray's fingerprints on the rifle used to kill King, a scope and a pair of binoculars.

On March 10, 1969, Ray pleaded guilty to King's murder and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. No testimony was heard in his trial. Shortly afterwards, however, Ray recanted his confession, claiming he was the victim of a conspiracy. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (who also investigated the assassination of JFK) maintained that Ray's shot killed king.

Ray later found sympathy in an unlikely place: Members of King's family, including his son Dexter, who publicly met with Ray in 1977 and began arguing for a reopening of his case. Though the U.S. government conducted several investigations into the trial-each time confirming Ray's guilt as the sole assassin-controversy still surrounds the assassination.

At the time of Ray's death in 1998, King's widow Coretta Scott King (who in the weeks after her husband's death had courageously continued the campaign to aid the striking Memphis sanitation workers and carried on his mission of social change through nonviolent means) publicly lamented that "America will never have the benefit of Mr. Ray's trial, which would have produced new revelations about the assassination...as well as establish the facts concerning Mr. Ray's innocence."

Impact of the King Assassination

Though Black and white people alike mourned King's passing, the killing in some ways served to widen the rift between Black and white Americans, as many Black people saw King's assassination as a rejection of their vigorous pursuit of equality through the nonviolent resistance he had championed.

His murder, like the killing of Malcolm X in 1965, radicalized many moderate African American activists, fueling the growth of the Black Power movement and the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

King has remained the most widely known African American leader of his era, and the most public face of the civil rights movement, along with its most eloquent voice.

A campaign to establish a national holiday in his honor began almost immediately after his death, and its proponents overcame significant opposition-critics pointed to FBI surveillance files suggesting King's adultery and his influence by Communists-before President Ronald Reagan signed the King holiday bill into law in 1983.

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Martin Luther King Jr. Assassination - Facts, Reaction & Impact | HISTORY

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Baptist minister and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968. His murder led to an outpouring of anger among Black Americans, as well as a period of national mourning that helped speed the way for lasting civil rights legislation.

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At least 177 people were killed and thousands injured. This year contained riots for more than 100 cities in the US. Thousands of african americans were arrested. They were some of the most violent riots in US history. They broke out in july and begun in cities in the north like Detroit, New York and Michigan.