Events in Memphis, Atlanta, D.C. to honor MLK on 54th anniversary of his death

April 4 (UPI) -- Events nationwide on Monday will remember civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. on the 54th anniversary of his assassination in Memphis, Tenn.

King was shot as he stood on a terrace at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on the evening of April 4, 1968. He'd gone to Memphis to support a sanitation workers strike. He was just 39 when he died.

Monday, there will be events in Memphis, Atlanta and Washington, D.C., recognizing King's death.

Most prominently, there will be a memorial event at the National Civil Rights Museum -- which is actually the former Lorraine Motel where King was shot while standing on the second floor just outside room 306. The former motel site was opened as a museum in 1991 and reopened in 2014 after it was remodeled.

Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, who was himself assassinated two months after King while running for president, will speak at National Civil Rights Museum as part of the ceremony Monday afternoon. Also speaking will be Leslie Callahan, dean of the Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel and executive officer for religious affairs at Howard University.

The memorial at the museum is scheduled to begin at 5:30 p.m. EDT and will be live streamed via the museum's website.

Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was at the motel and standing near King when he was shot in 1968, will participate in a community rally at Mount Olive CME Church in Memphis on Monday.

In Atlanta, King's daughter Rev. Bernice King will lead a program at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.

King and other members of the family will take part in a wreath-laying ceremony and program that will include an address by Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens.

The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Foundation in Washington, D.C., will hold a candlelight vigil at the MLK Memorial at 7 p.m. EDT.

Similar to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Robert Kennedy, King's death for decades has also been shrouded in mystery as to whether a conspiracy was involved to kill the civil rights leader. James Earl Ray pleaded guilty to killing King and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. He died behind bars in 1998 at the age of 70.

After he pleaded guilty and was sent to prison, Ray later claimed that he was part of a conspiracy to kill King with a shadowy figure named "Raoul." No solid evidence, however, has ever turned up to support his claims.

Then-President Lyndon B. Johnson, who'd announced just four days earlier that he would not seek re-election, urged Americans to mourn King's death without more violence.

"Men who are white, men who are black must and will join together now, as never in the past, to let all the forces of division know that America shall not be ruled by bullet but only by the ballot," he said, UPI's Merriman Smith reported on the day after King's death.