Video: 'James Earl Ray's Arrival in Memphis, July 19, 1968'

(Friday, July 19, 1968, 3:48 a.m. CDT; during the Civil rights movement) — James Earl Ray, a fugitive from the Missouri State Penitentiary wanted in the Apr. 4, 1968, assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., arrived back in the United States today on a U.S. Air Force C-135 after almost six weeks incarceration in London’s Wandsworth Prison.

After the C-135 landed in Memphis, Tennessee, FBI agents handed him over to Tennessee law enforcement officials who placed him in an armored car and transported him to a specially constructed cell on the third floor of the Shelby County Jail.

Ray was arrested June 8, 1968, at London’s Heathrow Airport while attempting to leave the United Kingdom for Brussels (on his way to either Angola, Rhodesia or apartheid South Africa) on a false Canadian passport.