Clara Ester recounts the chain of events leading up to the 1968 assassination of a Civil Rights icon
Nana Gyamfi of “The Asafo Edition” interviews one of the few people to see Civil Rights icon, Martin Luther King, Jr., alive just moments before his tragic ending.
In 1968, Clara Ester was a 20-year-old college student volunteering in a labor strike to fight for better working conditions for black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. At the time, she was charged to transport Civil Rights workers around the city – one of them was King.
Clara EsterIn his last days, Ester learned of the tight unit formed by those who surrounded King and some of the trauma they endured. When King was shot by a high-powered rifle at the Lorraine Motel, it was Ester who first checked his pulse and ordered a nearby person to retrieve towels from the hotel’s laundry bin to stop the blood. The experience is still vivid.
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Nana Gyamfi is a human and civil rights attorney and an adjunct professor at California State University Los Angeles. Affectionately called “The People’s Attorney,” she hosts two radio shows.
