In 1965, during the March to Selma, a young COGIC minister Charles E. Blake, (current COGIC Presiding Bishop) was studying at the Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC) in Atlanta, GA. He led a group of students to participate in the March on Selma. In 1968, Two sanitation workers who were also COGIC members, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death in a garbage compactor where they were taking shelter from the rain. Their pastor was then elder Gilbert Earl Patterson, who also became a COGIC Presiding Bishop, at Holy Temple COGIC in Memphis, Tennessee. He was one of the nine members of the strategy committee that organized the sanitation strike in Memphis. Holy Temple COGIC was the first church to open its doors to the garbage workers. On April 3, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I've Been To The Mountaintop" speech, at Mason Temple Church Of God in Christ in Memphis. He was assassinated the next day, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.