Comedian & film maker Mel Brooks is 96 today.
(born Melvin Kaminsky in New York City)
President Abraham Lincoln was shot in the head at Ford’s
Theatre in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865. The assassin,
actor John Wilkes Booth (below), shouted, “Sic semper
tyrannies! (Ever thus to tyrants!) The South is avenged,” as
he jumped onto the stage and fled on horseback. Lincoln
died the next morning.
John Wilkes Booth’s pistol used to kill President Abraham Lincoln is displayed at a new exhibit at the Ford’s Center for Education and Leadership.
The box where Abraham Lincoln was shot is seen at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC on April 1, 2015.
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)