Fifty years ago, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr travelled to Memphis, Tennessee, in support of striking African-American sanitation workers 1. On 3 April, with a storm raging outside, he delivered a moving speech, loaded with words of hope and encouragement: “I’ve been to the mountaintop,” he declared, “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!”
In hindsight, his words appear to foreshadow his imminent fate. Just after 6pm next evening, as he was talking to friends from the balcony outside room 306 at the Lorraine Motel, he was gunned down by an assassin, James Earl Ray, who used a high-velocity rifle fitted with a telescopic sight.…