The church where MLK gave his final speech is getting a $1.2 million renovation

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Standing in the spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his final speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Church of God in Christ leaders said Monday that a $1.2 million federal grant will be used to modernize the treasured piece of the Civil Rights Movement.

Located near the former Lorraine Motel, where King was fatally shot on the evening of April 4, 1968, Mason Temple is the site of King’s stirring sermon known as the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” address. Fighting an illness, King made the speech as a storm blew outside the church the night before he was assassinated.

Presiding Bishop J. Drew Sheard, who was joined at a news conference by U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen and Memphis Mayor Paul Young, called the church a place “where faith has always met history, and where the ordinary has always produced the extraordinary.”

“It is the living witness of a movement that changed the entire world,” Sheard said. “As long as the Church of God in Christ exists, we will honor that witness.”

Bishop Melton Timmons, superintendent of national properties for the religious organization, said the funding will be used to upgrade the church’s sound system and other technology. Timmons said the church’s foundation will be inspected, and structural improvements also are planned for the remodeling effort.

The Mason Temple was completed in 1945 following the destruction of the original church by fire. Today, the church serves as the world headquarters for the Church of God in Christ.

Cohen and Young, both Democrats, worked together to help secure the federal funding, which is part of a nearly $18 million package for Memphis projects included in the annual congressional appropriations process.

The package also includes $3.1 million for the restoration of historic Clayborn Temple, the staging area for the 1968 sanitation workers strike that brought King to Memphis. It was heavily damaged by a fire investigators say was intentionally set in April 2025.

In the “Mountaintop” speech, King, 39, gave an impassioned account of his life experiences and seemed to foretell his own death.

“I’ve seen the Promised Land. … I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land,” King said.

In a 2018 Associated Press story about the 50th anniversary of King’s assassination, witnesses described how King captivated the audience in the packed church during a thunderstorm.

“It’s a tin roof, so that’s banging. There’s rafters up there above us, and the rafters are blowing with the wind and hitting each other and hitting the walls from the fierceness of the wind and the rain,” said the Rev. James Lawson, a prominent civil rights activist.

When he finished, King slumped into a chair. To Mike Cody, one of King’s lawyers, he looked like a “toy that had the air taken out of it.”

“Ministers, men were crying,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson told the AP in the 2018 story.

The Mason Temple was also the site of a January 2023 memorial service for Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who died after he was brutally beaten by Memphis police officers after he fled from a traffic stop.