NPR

An 'Exhausted' Martin Luther King Jr.'s Final 31 Hours

A bomb threat, a march turned violent and a militant black power group all weighed heavily on the civil rights leader during his last speech in 1968, says Redemption author David Rosenbloom.

When Martin Luther King, Jr. flew from Atlanta to Memphis on the morning of April 3, 1968, he was not in a particularly good state of mind.

"While the plane was about to take off, there was a bomb threat that was specifically targeted at King and that delayed the departure of the flight," says Joseph Rosenbloom, author of the new book"They brought dogs onto the plane, they evacuated the passengers. And so the plane arrived an hour or so late in Memphis."

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