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The Civil Rights Icon Killed on Dr. Maya Angelou's Birthday

Season 4
Aired on 01/04/2015 | CC tv-14
Editor's note: We were deeply saddened to learn of Dr. Maya Angelou's passing. The following is from Dr. Angelou's January 2011 appearance on Oprah's Master Class.

On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while standing on a hotel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. Dr. Maya Angelou never forgot the date for many reasons, one of them being that it was her 40th birthday.

Shortly before Dr. King was murdered, Dr. Angelou says he asked her to go around the country with him for one month, asking preachers to give one Sunday's collection to his movement, the Poor People's March. "I said yes, but the only thing, I said, 'I will go, but I will not go until after my birthday,'" Dr. Angelou recalls.

Watch as Dr. Angelou shares how she learned of Dr. King's death.

More from Dr. Maya Angelou