At 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., was struck in the face by a bullet as he was leaning over the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

An hour later he was declared dead at nearby St. Joseph’s Hospital.

King had come to Memphis as part of his poor people’s campaign to support a sanitation workers strike. The civil rights leader was increasingly promoting socialist views, had become more outspoken in criticizing the war in Vietnam and had been running for president on an anti-war ticket with Benjamin Spock.

After King had given a speech denouncing the Vietnam War at New York’s Riverside Church one year before his assassination, U.S. Army spies recorded Black radical Stokely Carmichael warning him: “The man don’t care you call ghettos concentration camps, but when you tell him his war machine is nothing but hired killers, you got trouble.”

Carmichael, unfortunately, was right.