What you need to know about Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination

A half-century ago, Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to Memphis to support and bring attention to a strike by more than 1,300 city sanitation workers, but the journey to Tennessee would cost him his life.

Fifty years have passed since one of the nation’s most harrowing episodes unfolded, when at 6:05 p.m. an assassin named James Earl Ray took aim with a Remington .30-06 rifle and squeezed off a single shot that changed the trajectory of the civil rights movement.

ABC News created a timeline of events leading up to Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, including why he was in Memphis and what happened in the days and years following his death.