April 4, 1968

He was in Memphis for the dustmen. Two of them, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, had sheltered from the rain in the back of a truck in February and been crushed by the compactor, and thirteen hundred men had walked out. They carried signs that said I AM A MAN.

He had spoken the night before at Mason Temple, in a thunderstorm, to a hall that was not full because of the weather. He had not meant to speak at all - he was tired and unwell and had sent somebody else - and they sent back for him because the crowd was waiting. He talked about having been to the mountaintop, and about not minding what happened now.

The next evening he was standing on the balcony outside room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, leaning on the rail, talking to the men in the car park below about what they would play at the meeting that night. He was shot once at one minute past six. He was thirty-nine.

Riots broke out in more than a hundred cities. Robert Kennedy, campaigning in Indianapolis, was told on the aircraft and stood on the back of a flatbed truck that night to tell a crowd who had not yet heard. Indianapolis did not burn. Kennedy himself was killed nine weeks later.

The Fair Housing Act, which had been stuck, passed seven days after he died.