[2] The King family and others believe that the assassination was the result of a conspiracy involving the U.S. government, the mafia, and Memphis police, as alleged by Loyd Jowers in 1993.

During Loeb's tenure as mayor, conditions did not significantly improve, and the gruesome February 1968 deaths of two workers in a garbage-compacting truck turned mounting tensions into a strike.

His airline flight to Memphis was delayed by a bomb threat, but he arrived in time to make a planned speech to a gathering at the Mason Temple (world headquarters of the Church of God in Christ).

In it, he recalled his 1958 attempted assassination, noting that the doctor who treated him had said that because the knife used to stab him was so close to his aorta, any sudden movement, even a sneeze, might have killed him.

Ralph Abernathy, a colleague and friend, later told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he and King had stayed in Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel so often that it was known as the "King–Abernathy Suite".

[21] Abernathy heard the shot from inside the motel room and ran to the balcony to find King on the deck, bleeding profusely from the wound in his cheek.

[26] Shortly after the shot was fired, witnesses saw a man, later believed to be James Earl Ray, fleeing from a rooming-house across the street from the Lorraine Motel.

[34] During the day of the assassination while on the campaign trail for the Democratic presidential nomination in Indiana, Senator Robert F. Kennedy learned of the shooting before boarding a plane to Indianapolis.

[38] The Indianapolis chief of police advised Kennedy that he could not provide him protection and was worried that he would be at risk when talking about King's death before the predominantly black crowd.

[citation needed] Kennedy's speech was credited with assisting in the prevention of post-assassination rioting in Indianapolis on a night when such events broke out in major cities across the country.

A funeral procession transported King's body for 3+1⁄2 miles (5.6 km) through the streets of Atlanta, followed by more than 100,000 mourners, from the church to his alma mater, Morehouse College.

David Halberstam, who reported on King's funeral, recounted a comment heard at an affluent white dinner party: One of the wives—station wagon, three children, forty-five-thousand-dollar house—leaned over and said, "I wish you had spit in his face for me."

[32] But Governor Lester Maddox of Georgia called King "an enemy of our country" and threatened to "personally raise" the state capitol flag back from half-staff.

J. Edgar Hoover, who had previously made efforts to undermine King's reputation, told President Johnson that his agency would attempt to find the culprit(s).

In that sermon, he asked that, at his funeral, no mention of his awards and honors be made, but that it be said he tried to "feed the hungry", "clothe the naked", "be right on the [Vietnam] war question", and "love and serve humanity".

[60] Two months after assassinating King, Ray was captured at London's Heathrow Airport while he was trying to depart the United Kingdom for Angola, Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe) or South Africa[61] on a false Canadian passport in the name of Ramon George Sneyd.

[citation needed] Ray worked for the remainder of his life unsuccessfully attempting to withdraw his guilty plea and secure a full trial.

In December 1993, Loyd Jowers, a white man from Memphis with business interests in the vicinity of the assassination site, appeared on ABC's Prime Time Live.

[citation needed] Attorney William Francis Pepper, representing the King family, presented evidence from 70 witnesses and 4,000 pages of transcripts.

Pepper alleges in his book An Act of State (2003) that the evidence implicated the FBI, the CIA, the U.S. Army, the Memphis Police Department, and organized crime in the murder.

[3] The jury of six blacks and six whites decided that King had been the victim of a conspiracy involving the Memphis police and federal agencies, finding Jowers and unknown co-defendants civilly liable and awarding the family $100.

[4] This civil verdict against Jowers has been claimed by some to have established Ray's criminal innocence, which the King family has always maintained, but it has no bearing on his guilty plea.

[77] At a press conference following the trial, he and his mother Coretta Scott King told reporters that they believed the mafia and state, local, and federal government agencies had conspired to plan the assassination and frame Ray as the shooter.

[78] When asked whom the family believed was the true assassin, Dexter King said that Jowers had identified Lt. Earl Clark of the Memphis Police Department as the shooter.

[72] In response to the 1999 verdict in King vs. Jowers, Posner told The New York Times, "It distresses me greatly that the legal system was used in such a callous and farcical manner in Memphis.

[85][86] Some witnesses with King at the moment of the shooting said that the shot had been fired from a different location and not from Ray's window; they believed that the source was a spot behind thick shrubbery near the rooming house.

[87] King's friend and SCLC organizer Reverend James Lawson has suggested that the impending occupation of Washington, D.C. by the Poor People's Campaign was a primary motive for the assassination.

[3] Lawson also noted during the civil trial that King alienated President Johnson and other powerful government actors when he repudiated the Vietnam War on April 4, 1967—exactly one year before the assassination.

[74] Some evidence has suggested that King had been targeted by COINTELPRO[88] and had also been under surveillance by military intelligence agencies during the period leading up to his assassination under the code name Operation Lantern Spike.

[92]According to biographer Taylor Branch, King's friend and colleague James Bevel put it more bluntly: "There is no way a ten-cent white boy could develop a plan to kill a million-dollar black man.