 April went to Memphis TN to show support for the all black sanitation workers  He was well known and in some circles a hated man.  He received regular death threats.

 On the evening of April 3 rd, 1968, in a speech, he said:  “Well I don’t know what will happen now. But it really doesn’t matter with me. Because I have been to the mountaintop. And I have seen the Promised Land…Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”  The next day King was fatally shot in front of several witnesses while standing on an open walkway at his Memphis Hotel.

 At his funeral on April 9 th, over 100,000 people walked beside his casket which was a cart pulled by two mules, to the graveside.  They thought of this as his last “freedom march.”

 He was also assassinated.  He was a senator.  He was the brother of JFK.  He was seeking to run for President on the Democratic ticket.  He won support of large groups such as Mexican Americans when he attended a Catholic mass with Cesar Chavez.

 After a speech in California, Sirhan Sirhan, a Jordanian, shot Kennedy.  Three other people around him were wounded.  When his body was returned to NYC to lie in state, Jackie Kennedy and Coretta Scott King, both widows themselves, joined his widow on the plane.  One black woman made the comment, “Seems like anyone speaks up for us, they get killed.”  In the span of eight weeks, the nation saw the assassinations of two outspoken, determined civil rights activists.