CAMILLE
BOHANNON

With the world anxiously watching, Apollo 13, a U.S. lunar
spacecraft that suffered a severe malfunction on its journey
to the moon, safely returns to Earth on April 17, 1970.

On April 11, the third manned lunar landing mission was
launched from Florida, carrying astronauts James A. Lovell,
John L. Swigert and Fred W. Haise. The mission was headed f
or a landing on the Fra Mauro highlands of the moon. However,
two days into the mission, disaster struck 200,000 miles from
Earth when oxygen tank No. 2 blew up in the spacecraft.

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.

On April 8, 1974, Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves hit his 715th
career home run, breaking Babe Ruth’s legendary record of 714
homers. A crowd of 53,775 people, the largest in the history of
Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, was with Aaron that night to
cheer when he hit a 4th inning pitch off the Los Angeles Dodgers’
Al Downing. However, as Aaron was an African American who
had received death threats and racist hate mail during his pursuit
of one of baseball’s most distinguished records, the achievement
was bittersweet.

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)