Cable TV’s Smithsonian Channel is offering a look at the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. from the time in which it occurred.

The network said yesterday that it will air a documentary in February culled primarily from local news footage in Memphis, Tenn., where the civil rights leader was murdered April 4, 1968.

Most of the footage hasn’t been seen on television since it originally aired.

Some University of Memphis professors sensed in March 1968 that civil rights history was happening with a strike of local sanitation workers, the event that drew King to Memphis, and they collected footage of the events.