CAMILLE BOHANNON

CAMILLE BOHANNON

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)

On March 15, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a
joint session of Congress to urge the passage of legislation
guaranteeing voting rights for all.

Using the phrase “we shall overcome,” borrowed from African
American leaders struggling for equal rights, Johnson declares
that “every American citizen must have an equal right to vote.”

Johnson reminds the nation that the Fifteenth Amendment, which
was passed after the Civil War, gave all citizens the right to vote
regardless of race or color.

President Johnson (right) meeting with civil rights leaders.

President Lyndon Johnson signing the 1965
Civil Rights Bill, also known as The Voting
Rights Act.

Niagara Movement members began meeting on the Canadian side of the
Niagara Falls on this day in 1905. This all-African American group of
scholars, lawyers and businessmen came together for three days to
create what would soon become a powerful post-slavery Black rights
organization. Although it only lasted five years, the Niagara Movement
was an influential precursor to the civil rights movement of the mid-20th
century.

Booker Taliaferro Washington
(April 18, 1856 – November 14, 1915)