Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

On this day in 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. In 1991, the Lorraine Motel was converted into the National Civil Rights Museum. Rooms 306 and 308 – rooms King often stayed in – were preserved, as was the motel’s exterior.