Memphis, Tennessee, from the portfolio Countdown to Eternity: Photographs of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s

The photographer Benedict J. Fernandez documented the last year of Martin Luther King’s life, compiling these photographs into a portfolio entitled Countdown to Eternity. King (1929–1968) was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968. He had come to the city to support an African American sanitation workers’ union strike, whose members were protesting racial discrimination and unsafe working conditions. Taken days after King’s assassination, the two photographs shown here feature protestors with placards that addressed the mournful moment. In the lower image, the sanitation union’s iconic “I AM A MAN” placard appears to have tumbled to the bottom of the stairs, metaphorically felled in the wake of King’s death.