“I’ve been to the mountaintop…And I’ve seen the promised land.” – Martin Luther King, April 3, 1968
It is widely known that Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968. But many have no idea why King was in Memphis or know much about his final speech.
King came to Memphis to support 1,300 striking black sanitation workers in the city. Among the strikers’ grievances was an incident a few months earlier in which 22 black workers were sent home without pay during a period of bad weather while all white workers were allowed to remain on the job. Memphis officials refused to negotiate with the strikers.
This was King’s third strike-related visit to Memphis in 1968. A few weeks earlier he had spoken to a large audience and over a week later he returned to lead a march, which to his great disappointment, was marked by chaos and looting among some of his fellow marchers. King arrived in Memphis on April 3 in preparation for a planned April 8 march. His flight into Memphis was delayed because of concern about a bomb on the small plane in which he was traveling.
King’s final speech at Memphis’s Mason Temple called for unity and support for the striking sanitation workers as well as an emphasis on economic boycott and nonviolent protest. But it was more remarkable for King’s focus on his own mortality. He noted the bomb threat from earlier in the day and also discussed an incident from 1958 when he was stabbed by a deranged black woman while he was at a book signing in New York City. Doctors had explained to him later that the wound was close enough to his aorta that he might have died if he had so much as sneezed. King repeatedly began paragraphs in the speech with the words “If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have [been around to witness] the end of segregation in inter-state travel…when Negroes decided to straighten their backs up…the civil rights bill…[telling] America about the dream I had…the great movement in Selma, Alabama…a community [Memphis] rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering.”
He concluded his speech with a somber conception of his death and a stirring insistence that this must not and would not stand in the way of inevitable progress in the quest for civil rights.
Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. 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. 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.
King spent the next day, April 4, in Memphis. In the early evening he was preparing to leave from the Lorraine Motel with friends and colleagues for dinner. At 6:01, soon after stepping out onto the hotel’s balcony, he was shot once through the jaw. The bullet severed his spinal cord and lodged in his shoulder. King was rushed to St. Joseph’s Hospital for emergency surgery, which failed to save his life.
Martin Luther King was pronounced dead at 7:05. He was 39 years old.
