4/5/1968 - PHILADELPHIA NEWSPAPER - MARTIN LUTHER KING ASSASSINATED IN MEMPHIS

Description

Item up for sale is the original ( partial,) April 5th, 1968, edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper. Front 12 page section is being sold here. The lead story of the day was of the assassination of Civil Rights icon, Dr. Martin Luther King, who had been gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. King had gone there to lend his support to the black sanitary public works employees who were represented by AFSCME local 1733, and were on a long drawn out strike. His killer James Earl Ray had fled the scene after shooting Martin Luther king with a .30-06 caliber rifle. The murder of King led to multiple riots within the inner cities of major urban centers throughout the United States; chief among the riots was in the nations capital, Washington, D.C., which would see 4 consecutive days of unrest. The office of the president dispatched over 11,000 troops to patrol the city which included federal troops and federalized National Guard. April 8th, would see the end of the riots as order began to be restored. But, the nation would sustain a wound not easily closed. As the years passed, Martin Luther king's legacy would be that of a modern day martyr. His death would galvanize men and women, and a new understand between the races was birthed. The malignant specter of Jim Crow would fade into oblivion as the years progressed, and the volatile era of the 1960's would seem to have reached its peak with the assassinations of Martin Luther king and Robert F. Kennedy and the 1967 riots, the year before that permeated America. This is an original, partial, (12 page) newspaper, that's in very good shape for its age. It is an important piece of history, particularly in the area of race relations and Civil Rights.