Martin Luther King Jr.

On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, by James Earl Ray. King had been organizing the Poor People's Campaign and supporting striking sanitation workers. His murder ignited uprisings across more than one hundred American cities and shattered the consensus around nonviolent resistance, accelerating the rise of the Black Power movement. The national trauma pressured Congress to overcome legislative gridlock and pass the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (the Fair Housing Act), while the ensuing urban unrest fueled a conservative political backlash that propelled Richard Nixon to the presidency later that year.