I think the strongest hypothesis is that he combined the anti war movement and black freedom struggles. He was assassinated one year after his historic “beyond Vietnam” speech. https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksil...

James Earl Ray shot him from his apartment across the street, presumably as an act of racial hatred. Maybe he had economic views but I don't think they're relevant, he was a convict and a bad person who acted alone.

There's some pretty compelling evidence that Ray's inception of the idea may have come from hearing about a bounty on MLK's head. See https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/12/martin-luther-ki...

If true I wouldn't consider Ray to have been acting on behalf of a conspiracy (even if the bounty itself was a conspiracy), but it's not quite acting alone, either. It's sort of like if someone got the idea for doing something from gossip on 4Chan. They may have already been primed to do something horrendous, but there's an element of but-for causation regarding the particulars and follow-through.

Maybe, it's not quite that simple. https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/select-committee-repor...