Clara Ester, Who Rushed to Help King After He Was Shot, Dies

Clara Ester, an activist who as a 20-year-old college student rushed to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s side when he was shot, has died. Ester, who died on July 9 at 78, was among a few remaining witnesses to King's assassination and its immediate aftermath in Memphis, the AP reports. With the deaths of the Rev. Jesse Jackson in February and Ester this month, King aide and former UN ambassador Andrew Young is believed to be the last surviving eyewitness to the shooting. After the assassination, Ester had to stay at the Lorraine Motel to be questioned by police. When she was finally allowed to go home, her parents asked if she was OK. "No, I'm not OK," she told them. "There's something wrong with this."

Ester grew up in Memphis attending Centenary United Methodist Church, where her pastor was the Rev. James Lawson, a civil rights leader. "We used to joke about colored water being Kool-Aid and the white water just being water, and so that satisfied us as children," Ester told the AP in 2018. "But until you see the racism, until you see what has been withheld from you because of your color—is what started to really truly anger me. And I knew if there was a movement that could help change any of that, I had to be in it." Even 50 years later, she clearly remembered the impact of hearing King's speech at the Mason Temple the night before he was killed and how it seemed to foreshadow his death the next day. "He had seen the mountaintop," Ester said. "It was evident on the balcony—how calm."

Ester had gone to the Lorraine Motel for dinner on April 4, 1968, when she saw King on the balcony chatting with people below. Then she heard a shot. "He was speaking calmly and pleasantly to a crowd," she said. "And so he was happy at that moment." Ester said she ran to King and saw he was struggling for air. She tried to loosen his belt and asked someone to bring towels to try to staunch the bleeding. Months later, she said, "I just broke down." She left Memphis to work elsewhere that summer, and when she finished school, she left for good. "It hurt me that it happened, but it hurt me that it happened in my hometown, that that's the legacy for this city," she said. Ester moved to Mobile, Alabama, becoming a neighborhood organizer at the Dumas Wesley Community Center, a Christian service program. She retired as executive director in 2006.