Forty years have passed since that day, April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, at 39.

King was booked in room 306 at the Lorraine Motel, owned by Walter Bailey, in Memphis. The Reverend Ralph Abernathy, King’s close friend and colleague who was present at the assassination, swore under oath to the HSCA that King and his entourage stayed at room 306 at the Lorraine Motel so often it was known as the ‘King-Abernathy suite.’ While King was standing on the motel’s 2nd floor balcony, James Earl Ray (is believed to have) shot him at 6:01 p.m. April 4, 1968. The bullet entered through his right cheek smashing his jaw and then traveling down his spinal cord before lodging in his shoulder. According to biographer Taylor Branch, and also Jesse Jackson, who was present, King’s last words on the balcony were to musician Ben Branch (no relation to Taylor Branch) who was scheduled to perform that night at an event King was attending: “Ben, make sure you play Take My Hand, Precious Lord in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty.” Abernathy was inside the motel room heard the shot and ran to the balcony to find King on the floor. Local Rev. Samuel “Billy” Kyles, whose house King was on his way to visit, remembers that upon seeing King go down he ran into a hotel room to call an ambulance. Nobody was on the switchboard, so Kyles ran back out and yelled to the police to get one on their radios. It was later revealed that the hotel switchboard operator, upon seeing King shot, had had a fatal heart attack and could not operate the phones. King was pronounced dead at St. Joseph’s Hospital at 7:05 p.m. The assassination led to a nationwide wave of riots in more than 100 cities. (Source.)

Martin Luther King, Jr. with President Lyndon B. Johnson

As an L.A. Times editorial notes, there is a moratorium on violence in LA.

You’d better not kill anybody after 6:01 p.m. today, or you’ll really rile the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. It has passed a resolution declaring a 40-hour moratorium on violence, starting at a time that marks to the minute the 40th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

That the anniversary of King’s shocking murder attracts this kind of silliness is no great surprise. In the two-score years since his death, he has become, in the mold of other great Americans like George Washington or Mark Twain, a figure more legend than human, his story so simplified and sugarcoated for easy digestion by schoolchildren that even adults who lived through the troubled 1960s have a tough time separating their memories of the man from the myth.

We don’t need to canonize King to appreciate his many accomplishments, nor declare time-wasting moratoriums to mourn his passing. He was a complex man with messy personal affairs who unified people of all races on the issue of civil rights, while dividing many with his controversial stance on the Vietnam War — he claimed in one major speech that the U.S. government was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” a comment as controversial then as the “God damn America” sermon from presidential candidate Barack Obama’s pastor, now making the rounds on YouTube, is today. (More.)

Martin Luther King Jr, with Coretta Scott King and NYC Mayor Robert F. Wagner

The Washington Post interviewed Jesse Jackson and others who were with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the last hours and minutes of his life. Here is a brief excerpt of the article.

In his last public address, King told a packed house at Mason Temple in Memphis that he had been to the mountaintop and 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,” he shouted to thunderous applause. “And I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man.”

The “mountaintop speech” on April 3 and King’s apparent reference to the possibility of an early death showed he was under more stress than even those closest to him had realized.

“We had no way of knowing how much pain … he was internalizing. How much more he knew than we knew about the threats,” Jackson said. “But his courage rose above the threats.” (More.)

Time Magazine in a story entitled “The Witnesses , interviewed the four aids who were with Martin Luther King, Jr. when he was assassinated; Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, James Bevel, and Samuel “Billy” Kyles.

As Jake Tapper notes, Robert F. Kennedy, in a speech, “”The Awful Grace of God” eloquent in its own right, informed a gathering in Indianapolis of Martin Luther King, Jr’s assassination. Here is an excerpt.

“Ladies and Gentlemen - I’m only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening. Because 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 in Memphis, Tennessee.

“Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.

“For those of you who are black - considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible - you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.

“We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization - black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love.

“For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

“But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond these rather difficult times.

“My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: ‘Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’

You can listen to the audio of that speech here, accompanied by a photo montage of the 1950s and 1960s Civil Rights era.

The speech that we all know and remember, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream,” speech is arguably one of the greatest speeches of all time. Read an analysis of it here. Watch it here.

The audio and transcript of the last speech of Martin Luther King, Jr., “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” is here.

Here is a video excerpt Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last speech.