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.