Clara Ester, Lay Minister and Eyewitness to the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dies at 78
Clara Ester, a civil rights activist and lay minister who was among the last surviving eyewitnesses to the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., died on July 9 in Mobile, Alabama, at the age of 78, according to her brother, Ronald Ester, who stated she passed away in a hospital from complications following a stroke. With her passing and the death of the Rev. Jesse Jackson in February, Andrew Young remains believed to be the only prominent surviving eyewitness to the 1968 assassination. As a 20-year-old college junior in Memphis, Ms. Ester had been actively involved as a student organizer marching in support of 1,300 striking Black sanitation workers, and she witnessed Dr. King’s final “I’ve been to the mountaintop” address at Mason Temple on April 3.
The following afternoon on April 4, Ms. Ester drove her parents’ white Pontiac Tempest to the Lorraine Motel alongside a friend, Mary Hunt, ostensibly seeking a dinner special for catfish before encountering Dr. King standing casually on the second-floor walkway outside room No. 306. Shortly after 6 p.m., while standing in the parking lot, she heard what sounded like a truck backfiring—a high-powered rifle shot—and watched the impact propel Dr. King into the air before he collapsed onto the concrete walkway. Alongside Ms. Hunt, she immediately rushed to his side to check for a pulse, noting that he was breathing very slowly with open eyes, and requested motel towels to stanch the severe wound on the right side of his face and neck.
Following Dr. King’s transportation to St. Joseph’s Hospital and his pronouncement of death about an hour later, nationwide civil unrest ensued, and James Earl Ray ultimately pleaded guilty before later recanting his confession and dying in prison in 1998. Ms. Ester’s presence on the walkway was corroborated by an F.B.I. report and photographs showing her partially obscured from behind, while her friend Ms. Hunt appeared prominently in Joseph Louw’s historical photograph wearing bobby socks. Reflecting on the tragedy in a 2016 essay, Ms. Ester wrote that the event forever changed her life and that she was no longer the same person she had been.
Born Clara Jean Ester in Memphis on Feb. 17, 1948, to railroad worker Anderson Ester and community center worker Willie (Love) Ester, she experienced her early awakening to racial injustice at age 7 when she witnessed her mother being chastised at a train station for using facilities designated for white people. After earning a bachelor’s degree in elementary school education from LeMoyne-Owen College in 1970, she relocated to Mobile where she spent her final 50 years serving as a deaconess or lay minister in the United Methodist Church and running a community center that assisted the blind, deaf, and homeless mothers and children, while also being survived by her brother Ronald and son Reginald Ester.
