MLK's Final Speech: "I've Been to the Mountaintop"

On the evening of April 3, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered what became his final public address at Mason Temple, the headquarters of the Church of God in Christ in Memphis, Tennessee. He spoke to support the city’s sanitation workers, who had been on strike since February over unsafe conditions, poverty wages, and the deaths of two colleagues crushed by a malfunctioning garbage truck. King had come to Memphis to lend the moment his organizing weight and to lead a planned march in solidarity with the strikers.

King nearly skipped the appearance. Exhausted and unwell after a turbulent day, he had sent Ralph Abernathy to speak in his place, but the crowd’s response convinced Abernathy to call King and ask him to come anyway. King arrived to a full sanctuary and, without prepared remarks, delivered an extended, extemporaneous address as a violent storm rattled the building outside, its thunder occasionally audible in recordings of the speech punctuating his words.

The speech ranged widely: King reviewed the long history of the freedom struggle, urged the crowd toward economic pressure tactics like a boycott of businesses hostile to the strikers, and called for unity and nonviolent discipline in the fight ahead. Its most remembered passage came at the close, when King described the death threats he had received on his flight into Memphis that day and reflected on his own mortality with unusual directness. He told the crowd that, like the biblical Moses, he had “been to the mountaintop” and “seen the promised land,” and that although he might not get there with his people, he was not afraid, because his eyes had seen “the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

King was shot and killed on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis the following evening, April 4, 1968. The proximity of his death to those closing lines, delivered with no indication he expected an attack imminently, gave the speech a haunting quality that commentators and historians have noted ever since; it is now remembered as much for that eerie foreshadowing as for its content on the sanitation strike itself. The speech is widely regarded as one of the defining texts of King’s career, a summation of the moral and strategic vision he had built over more than a decade of civil rights leadership, delivered on the last night of his life.