On the evening of April 4, 1968, Clara Ester was walking into the parking lot of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis when she heard what she took for a truck backfiring. It was a gunshot, and the man she looked up to see thrown back against the balcony railing was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Ester, the 20-year-old college student who ran up the motel stairs and tried to stop his bleeding, died July 9, 2026, at 78, one of the last living witnesses to the assassination that reshaped the civil rights movement.

In an essay she later wrote for United Women in Faith, Ester described running toward King with her friend Mary Hunter the instant they heard the shot. "I saw Dr. King thrown up in the air and then back down, hitting the pavement," she wrote, recalling how she unbuckled his belt and called for towels while they waited for an ambulance. Police held her at the motel for questioning before she was allowed to leave, according to The Washington Times.

Ester was born February 17, 1948, in Memphis to Anderson Ester Sr. and Willie Love Ester, and grew up at Centenary United Methodist Church, where the pastor was the Rev. James Lawson, a chief strategist of the nonviolent civil rights movement. She graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in 1965 and enrolled at LeMoyne-Owen College, where she threw herself into the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike that had drawn King to the city that spring. "I got to the point that I didn't miss a mass meeting. I picketed every day that the picket lines were up," she recalled.

After finishing school, Ester moved to Mobile, Alabama, and began work as a neighborhood organizer at the Dumas Wesley Community Center, a ministry serving children, seniors and people experiencing homelessness. She spent 36 years there, rising to executive director and leading the center until she retired in 2006, according to UM News. In 1986 she was commissioned a deaconess of the United Methodist Church, a vocation of service she carried with her into the wider denomination for the rest of her life.

She went on to serve as national vice president of United Methodist Women from 2016 to 2020, the same year she addressed the denomination's General Conference in Portland, Oregon. She later chaired the National Association of Deaconess, Home Missioner, Home Missionary, and in 2024 she joined the church's General Commission on Religion and Race, extending into her seventies the same insistence on justice that had put her on a Memphis balcony half a century before.

Ester died July 9, 2026, at 78, according to B.E. Brown & Co. Mortuary, which handled her Mobile arrangements. She was survived by her son, Reginald Ester, and her brother, Ronald Ester Sr., of Chicago. Funeral services were held in Mobile on July 17 and in Memphis on July 20, with burial at Elmwood Cemetery. Her death came months after the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr.'s death earlier in 2026, leaving former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young as believed to be the last surviving eyewitness to King's assassination.

Bishop David W. Graves, who came to know Ester when he was assigned to the Alabama-West Florida Conference, wrote simply, "My Clara Ester stories are endless ... Love you, Clara!" Lindsey Buttram Middleton, a fellow General Conference delegate, said her death felt as if "gravity has somehow shifted." Deaconess M. Garlinda Burton, a retired denominational leader, said her own faith was "stronger because of her example."

What persists is not a monument but a chain of practice: the Dumas Wesley Community Center she ran for a generation of Mobile families, the deaconesses and home missioners she helped commission and mentor through the National Association of Deaconess, Home Missioner, Home Missionary, and the plain fact, set down in her own handwriting years later, of what a twenty-year-old college student did on a motel balcony in Memphis instead of running the other way.