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