On this day in the pivotal and tragic year of 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by James Earl Ray.
From a poor and highly troubled background Ray had fallen into increasingly racist views in the years prior to the assassination. Following his murderous act he fled to Canada and then to Europe, using false names, before being arrested in the United Kingdom in June. He admitted guilt for the crime.
Dr. King's assassination in some ways punctuated the increasingly violent nature of the times, with his emphasis on non violence then being challenged by more radical individuals. A central figure in the Civil Rights Movement, his death left it in some ways without a central figure to complete the process of desegregation that had commenced in the second half of the 1940s. His speech of the prior day in some eerie way almost seems to have predicted what followed on this day in 1968.
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