On Tuesday, March 19, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a number of his aides came to Batesville to enlist participants in a planned Washington camp-in. While in Batesville, Dr. King spoke at Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church to explain how the march on Washington was designed to bring awareness to the working and living conditions of underprivileged Americans and demand that the federal government seek to improve those conditions. Dr. King was assassinated two weeks later in Memphis, Tennessee.
