Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated

1968MajorContested

King is shot in Memphis on 4 April 1968. James Earl Ray pleads guilty, then recants. Questions about a wider conspiracy have never fully gone away.

Longest chain: The Big Bang → First stars ignite → Supernovae seed heavy elements → The Sun forms → Earth forms → First oceans → First life → Photosynthesis evolves → Great Oxidation Event → Complex cells (eukaryotes) → Multicellular life → First animals → Cambrian Explosion → First vertebrates → Jawed fish → Fish walk onto land → The amniotic egg → The Great Dying → Dinosaurs appear → Asteroid ends the dinosaurs → Early primates → Apes split from monkeys → Human line splits from chimpanzees → Walking upright → First stone tools → Genus Homo appears → Homo erectus → Control of fire → Habitual fire and cooking → Homo sapiens appears → Complex language → Natufian villages → Oldest known bread → Agriculture begins → Irrigation → Uruk and the first cities → Cylinder seals → Writing (cuneiform) → Babylonian mathematics → Babylonian astronomical diaries → Thales and natural philosophy → Trial and death of Socrates → Plato's Academy → Aristotle's Lyceum → Alexander's conquests → Alexandria founded → Library of Alexandria → House of Wisdom → Al-Khwarizmi and algebra → Fibonacci's Liber Abaci → Bills of exchange → Medici Bank → Double-entry bookkeeping → Muscovy Company → English East India Company → Seven Years' War → American Revolution → Declaration of Independence → U.S. Constitution → U.S. Civil War → Emancipation Proclamation → 13th Amendment abolishes slavery → Brown v. Board of Education → Montgomery bus boycott → March on Washington → Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated

Contested history

Consensus: James Earl Ray pleaded guilty in 1969 and recanted days later. A 1999 civil jury in Memphis (King v. Jowers) found that King was the victim of a conspiracy. A 2000 Justice Department review found no reliable evidence for that verdict.

Ray fired the shotEstablished

Ray's fingerprints were on the rifle and scope found near the scene, and his guilty plea stood.

Ray had helpDebated

The 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded Ray likely did not act entirely alone and pointed to a possible bounty offer.

Government involvement in the killingUnsupported

The FBI's surveillance and harassment of King under COINTELPRO is documented. No evidence ties the government to the killing itself.

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Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Stanford King Institute) ↗