James Earl Ray fired a single rifle shot that struck King on the balcony of Room 306, where he had stepped out to talk with colleagues before dinner. King died within the hour at St. Joseph's Hospital. The assassination, coming just a day after his 'I've Been to the Mountaintop' speech, triggered uprisings in Washington, Chicago, Baltimore, and dozens of other cities, and accelerated passage of the Fair Housing Act.
King had traveled to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers, and the night before he was killed he delivered an eerily prophetic sermon: '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.' Twenty-four hours later he was dead, killed by a single bullet fired from a rooming house across the street.
His aides, including Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy, cradled him on the balcony as he bled out, and photographers captured the moment they pointed toward the source of the shot. James Earl Ray, an escaped convict, fled to London and was captured two months later; he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 99 years, later claiming he had been part of a larger conspiracy, a claim King's own family came to believe.
The killing ignited the largest wave of social unrest in the United States since the Civil War, with National Guard troops occupying Washington D.C. within blocks of the Capitol. President Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act exactly one week later, a bill that had stalled in Congress for years.