Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally
shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room
at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The civil rights leader
was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers’ strike and was on
his way to dinner when a bullet struck him in the jaw and severed
his spinal cord. King was pronounced dead after his arrival at a
Memphis hospital. He was only 39 years old.

The balcony of the Lorraine Motel, Mulberry Street, Memphis, Tenn., April 6, 1968, just after the Rev. Martin Luther King
Jr.’s assassination.

Martin Luther King Jr.  (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968)