Samuel L Jackson

Sharing a personal account on the 50th anniversary of Dr Martin Luther King Jr's assassination, Hollywood veteran Samuel L Jackson today revealed how the murder of the civil rights champion led him to embrace political activism. In a guest column for The Hollywood Reporter, the 69-year-old actor recalled the time he was a sophomore at Morehouse College in Atlanta when he received the news of King's death. King was assassinated by James Earl Ray on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee when he was planning a national occupation of Washington, DC, called the 'Poor People's Campaign', which led to riots in many cities of America. Jackson said he was watching "John Goldfarb, Please Come Home" at campus movie night, when "The cashier said, 'Dr King got shot.' I said, 'Is he dead?' And he said, 'No, not yet'."