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Back at the Lorraine, King and his aides were finishing a long, hot day of tactical planning for the next week's march—one that would be carried out in defiance of a federal district court injunction. In the course of the conference, King had assured his colleagues that, despite death threats, he was not afraid. "Maybe I've got the advantage over most people," he mused. "I've conquered the fear of death." King was well aware of his vulnerability. After the strategy session, King washed and dressed for dinner. Then he walked out of Room 306 onto the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine to take the evening air. Leaning casually on the green iron railing he chatted with his co-workers readying his Cadillac sedan in the dusk below.
"A Stick of Dynamite." To Soul Singer Ben Branch, who was to perform at a Claiborne Temple rally later that evening, King made a special request: "I want you to sing that song Precious Lord *for me—sing it real pretty." When Chauffeur Solomon Jones naggingly advised King to don his topcoat against the evening's chill, the muscular Atlantan grinned and allowed: "O.K., I will."
Then, from a window of the rooming house across the way, came a single shot. "It was like a stick of dynamite," recalled one aide. "It sounded like a firecracker, and I thought it was a pretty poor joke," said another. All of the aides hit the deck. The heavy-caliber bullet smashed through King's neck, exploded against his lower right jaw, severing his spinal cord and slamming him away from the rail, up against the wall, with hands drawn tautly toward his head. "Oh Lord!" moaned one of his lieutenants as he saw the blood flowing over King's white, button-down shirt.
His aides tenderly laid towels over the gaping wound; some 30 hard-hatted Memphis police swiftly converged on the motel in response to the shot. In doing so, they missed the assassin, whose weapon (a scope-sighted 30.06-cal. Remington pump rifle), binoculars and suitcase were found near the rooming house. A spent cartridge casing was left in the grimy lavatory. The range from window to balcony: an easy 205 ft.
An ambulance came quickly, and raced him to St. Joseph's Hospital H miles away. Moribund as he entered the emergency ward, Martin Luther King Jr., 39, was pronounced dead within an hour of the shooting. His death was the twelfth major assassination and the most traumatic in the civil rights struggle since 1963.