By TMH CrawfordThe Birmingham Times
“I have some very sad news for all of you, and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world; and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight …,” said former U.S. Attorney General and 1968 Democratic Party presidential nominee Robert F. Kennedy to a shocked, saddened Indianapolis crowd.
At 6:01 p.m. on Thursday, April 4, 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while standing on a balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn. He was there to support a sanitation workers’ strike and was on his way to dinner when a bullet struck him; he was pronounced dead after his arrival at a local hospital.
Fifty years after King’s life and light were extinguished by an assassin’s bullet – less than three months after the icon’s 39th birthday – his legacy still resonates around the globe, across America and in Birmingham. “I’ve had African-American bosses, which would have never happened in 1968,” said Pamela King, a University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) history professor who specializes in studies related to Birmingham, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement. “I’ve dated outside of my race. It may not seem like a lot, but those things were taboo in 1968. You would not go to the theater, restaurants, or do anything else with black people. That’s just a huge, huge change by itself.”
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