Today marks 51 years since since Dr Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated.

His friend, Rev Jesse Jackson, was with Dr King when he was brutally gunned down.

Jackson was making dinner plans when the bullet struck the civil rights leader at 6.01pm on April 4, 1968.

“There Was Blood Everywhere”

Jackson was only 26-years-old when he accompanied Dr King to Memphis, Tennessee. They were leading demonstrations for workers’ rights for black refuse collectors. 

39-year-old Dr King was standing on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel as he spoke to Jackson.

“Dr King joked, ‘You don’t even have a shirt and tie’,” Jackson tells The Mirror.

“And I said, ‘All you need is an appetite, not a tie, to eat.’ And we laughed.

“And then – pow,” he continues, closing his eyes for a long time, as if witnessing it all over again. “I saw it. It knocked him back against the wall. It severed his necktie.

“I ran up the narrow walkway and the bullet had knocked him against the wall and he lay, his foot across the bannister.

There was blood everywhere. I touched him, I tried to comfort him, but things were happening so fast.

“It was a tremendous impact – he never had a chance, you know?” he says, soft

“I can never turn the sound of the bullet hitting him in his neck loose – I can never turn it loose.”

Rev Jesse Jackson Has Parkinsons

Since Dr King’s tragic death, Jackson has never stopped campaigning for equal rights.

He became of the first African Americans to run to be a presidential nominee, which he did in 1984 and 1988.

recently revealed he is suffering from Parkinson’s disease.

But he is far from stopping working and driving for equality, which includes commemorating the man he describes as “a father figure” which often includes returning to the spot he was killed.

Rev Jackson says: “It is always difficult to go back. Almost every time I go it takes the scab off the wound.

“It’s hard to look at – 39 years old, so young, so full of life, so full of hope and possibility.

“One of America’s great friends – they killed him so viciously.”

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