Photographer Captured ‘Extremely Emotional’ Scene in Martin Luther King’s Motel Room Hours After Assassination (Exclusive)

Steve Schapiro spent his decades-long career photographing some of Hollywood’s biggest names, but the photographs that meant the most to the late photographer were the ones he took of the leading voices in the Civil Rights Movement. 

In the new film Steve Schapiro: Being Everywhere, director Maura Smith looks back on the photographer’s wide-ranging career through interviews with Schapiro, who died in 2022 at age 87. 

Schapiro was on the scene to document many history-making moments during the Civil Rights Movement, including the third march on Selma, Ala., in March 1965, as well as Martin Luther King Jr.‘s room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., just hours after he was shot and killed on the balcony outside of it. 

Reflecting on the third Selma march, which led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 being signed into law, Schapiro shares that Andrew Young, the future congressman and mayor of Atlanta who worked closely with King at the time, decided that everyone in the front row of the march should wear black. He didn’t want them to distinguish themselves from one another out of fear that someone “might try to take a shot” at King. 

Schapiro captured King on various occasions and recalled that years after his death he went through some of the images and noticed things he hadn’t seen before. 

“I looked more closely at all of the images I had of Martin Luther King, and the thing that surprised me was that so often his eyes were not in front but were on the sides, and there’s some sense of slight fear in his eyes,” he says in the film. “Martin Luther King was getting death threats daily, and so many of these pictures I felt he was going through the crowd wondering, ‘Who would be the one?’ ”

King was killed on April 4, 1968 on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Schapiro says he was “crestfallen” upon learning the news from a Life magazine editor who asked him to travel to Memphis “immediately.”

Once at the scene of the crime, Schapiro made his way across the street to a rooming house from where he was told the gunman had shot King.

“I got to the rooming house, and I was surprised there was no one there. There was just a strip of yellow caution tape against the door. I sort of slipped under it and went inside,” he says. Schapiro then went into a communal bathroom.  

“The first thing I saw was a black handprint on the wall — a black dirty handprint — which could only have been made by someone standing in the bathtub. I took a picture of that handprint, and Life ran it as a full page the next week. Apparently, the assailant had stood in the bathtub and leveled his gun on the window sill and fired one shot,” he says. “I walked out of the bathroom. There’s a sense of evil in this place it just felt that way.”

He then made his way over to the Lorraine Motel, where one of King’s aides let him into room 306, the one in which King had been staying. 

“The first thing I saw was on a ledge right near the door, Dr. King’s attaché case, and there were two books in it. One of them I had done the cover for. Right next to the attaché case was some rumpled shirts and some old styrofoam cups and a half-eaten sandwich and above all of that was a television set, and in the foreground of that was an announcer talking about Dr. King and then Dr. King’s image appeared behind the announcer,” he says describing the scene. 

“I photographed all of this.… And for me, it was extremely emotional because the physical man was gone as material things remained, and I knew that his spirit and message would live on forever,” Schapiro continues.

The film is executive produced by Michael Rosenberg, Sid Ganis and Rob Friedman, Hollywood executives who all knew Schapiro for decades. In an interview with PEOPLE, they agree that while all Schapiro’s work is impressive, the photographs from his time spent with leaders of the Civil Rights Movement stand out the most. 

“It’s one thing to get excited about Steve Martin holding two kids upside down for a poster on Parenthood; it’s another to see history — to see one photograph define a period of time in our country that was in such turmoil,” says Rosenberg, referencing the images Schapiro took for Martin’s 1989 film. “

“We’re not minimizing the movies — not at all,” Ganis adds. “But there’s more important stuff that Steve did. And he did both.”

Steve Schapiro: Being Everywhere is in theaters nationwide, beginning with a week-long engagement in New York City from Nov. 14.