Roads to Memphis: American Experience

Pictured: Dr. Martian Luther King

Credit: ©Flip Schulke/CORBIS

The wildly disparate yet fatefully entwined stories of assassin James Earl Ray and his target, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

A riveting crosscut narrative of a killer and his prey, Roads to Memphis is the fateful story of an assassin and his victim set against the seething, turbulent forces in American society that drove two men to their violent and tragic collision on April 4, 1968. Following the inexorably converging paths of James Earl Ray and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Roads to Memphis is both an incisive portrait of an America on edge in that crisis-laden year and a cautionary tale of how the course of history can be forever altered by the actions of one individual. Roads to Memphis: American Experience airs Monday, January 18 at 4 p.m. on WXXI-WORLD.

Roads to Memphis is told through eyewitness testimony from King’s inner circle and the officials involved in Ray’s capture and prosecution following an intense two-month international manhunt.

When James Earl Ray was arrested in July 1969, he was the most wanted suspect in the world. Who was this “four-time loser” who was able to assassinate Dr. Martin Luther King, the Nobel Prize-winning, charismatic leader of the civil rights movement? How did Ray manage to escape and elude authorities for months? What motivated him to kill? Roads to Memphis reveals a mysterious and misunderstood loner who remains an enigma even today.