Coretta Scott King, accompanied by her children and civil rights leaders including Ralph Abernathy, led a silent memorial march through downtown Memphis in support of the striking sanitation workers her husband had come to champion before his assassination on April 4. The march proceeded peacefully, in stark contrast to the violence that had erupted during an earlier demonstration King had led.
Martin Luther King Jr. had traveled to Memphis to support roughly 1,300 Black sanitation workers striking for better pay and safer conditions after two colleagues were crushed to death in a garbage truck. An earlier march he led on March 28 had descended into violence, and King returned in April intending to lead a peaceful demonstration to redeem that failure. He was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel on April 4, before he could do so.
On April 8, just four days later, his widow Coretta Scott King chose to carry out his unfinished plan. She flew to Memphis with three of her four children and, alongside Ralph Abernathy, Harry Belafonte, and tens of thousands of marchers estimated at 42,000, walked in silence through the city's streets carrying signs demanding recognition of the sanitation workers' union and an end to the strike.
The march proceeded without violence, a deliberate and symbolically powerful contrast to two weeks earlier. Coretta Scott King's composed leadership that day, delivered while she was still raw with grief, marked the beginning of her own decades-long public role carrying forward her husband's unfinished work, including the Poor People's Campaign he had been organizing at the time of his death.
Key people: Coretta Scott King, Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King Jr.