MARTIN UTHER KING ASSASSINATED

NEW YORK, April 5. Dr. Martin Luther King, 39, died in Memphis, Tennessee today, victim of a White assassin’s bullet.

Dr. King has been participating in the Negro movement in Memphis and was shot in the neck on the balcony of a hotel where he was staying.

Dr. King, educated at Boston, has been responsible for the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and was the chief exponent of militancy in the fighting against racial discrimination but a militancy based on non-violence.

He went to India in the fifties to study Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy and in 1955, at the age of 26, led in Montgomery, Alabama, the Negro struggle against segregation in buses and ultimately won a momentous victory. Since then he had been in the forefront of Negro struggle.

For the last year or so Dr. King had been in considerable difficulties facing pressures from Negro extremists and Black power advocates who spurn non-violence and White sections of the community who believe that the Negro Civil Rights Movement is moving too fast.

Dr. King, who had been seeing for the last two years promise of Negro Civil Rights advance and measures to rectify his abject poverty all being blunted by America’s involvement in Vietnam, raised his voice against the Vietnam War.

He argued against the Vietnam War both on grounds of morality and on the need for America to use its resources to tackle its domestic problems.