(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-04-04 19:17

MEMPHIS - On the 40th anniversary of his assassination, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is to be honored as a champion of peace in the city where he died.

This April 1968 photo released by the MLK Jr. National Historic Site, Martin Luther King Jr.s [Agencies]

"Here was a man who understood nonviolence at a depth that I had never known before," said C.T. Vivian, a former King associate.

Presidential candidates, civil rights leaders, labor activists and thousands of citizens were expected to come together Friday in Memphis to honor King for his devotion to racial equality and economic justice.

"The whole nation flinched" when King was killed by a rifle shot on April 4, 1968, said writer Cynthia Griggs Fleming, one of the many historians, commentators and activists in town for panel discussions and lectures on King's legacy.

King advised his followers to keep working for equal rights for all citizens, "to keep on moving," no matter what obstacles they faced, Fleming said in a talk Thursday at a Memphis church.

"Don't be so consumed by the pain that you don't hear the message," she said.

Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John McCain were scheduled to take part in the anniversary day events that were to include a "recommitment march" through Memphis and the laying of wreaths at the site of King's assassination. Sen. Barack Obama will be campaigning in Indiana.

King was cut down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel while helping organize a strike by Memphis sanitation workers, then some of the poorest of the city's working poor.

The National Civil Rights Museum opened in 1991 at the former motel, which now holds most of the exhibits tracing the history of America's struggle for equal rights. The museum also encompasses the flophouse across the street from which confessed killer James Earl Ray admitted firing the fatal shot. Ray died in prison in 1998.

King was a champion of nonviolent protest for social change, and his writings and speeches still stir older followers and new ones alike, said Vivian, who helped organize lunch-counter sit-ins in Nashville in 1960 and rode on a "freedom bus" through Mississippi.

"The world still listens to Martin," he said. "There are people who didn't reach for him then who reach for him now. They want to know this man. What did he say? What did he think?"

Other tributes were being held around the country. In Congress, House and Senate leaders and lawmakers who once worked with the civil rights leader marked the anniversary with a tribute Thursday in the Capitol's Statuary Hall.

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