Today in History: April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated in Memphis

Today is Saturday, April 4, the 94th day of 2026. There are 271 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., 39, was shot and killed while standing on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. King’s death triggered a wave of unrest in cities across the United States that killed 43 people and injured more than 3,000.

Also on this date:

In 1841, President William Henry Harrison succumbed to pneumonia one month after his inauguration, becoming the first U.S. chief executive to die in office; Harrison’s vice president, John Tyler, was sworn in as president two days later.

In 1949, 12 nations, including the United States, signed the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington, D.C., establishing NATO.

In 1973, the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center were officially dedicated.

In 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

In 1991, Republican Sen. John Heinz of Pennsylvania and six other people, including two children, were killed when a helicopter collided with Heinz’s plane over a schoolyard in Merion, Pennsylvania.

In 2002, a ceasefire accord was signed by the Angolan government and UNITA, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, clearing the way for achieving a final settlement to end a 27-year civil war that devastated much of the southern African nation at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.

In 2012, a federal judge sentenced five former New Orleans police officers to prison for the deadly Danziger Bridge shootings in the chaotic days following Hurricane Katrina. (The verdicts in the case were later set aside by the judge, who cited prosecutorial misconduct; the officers...