Early evening, April four, a shot rings out in the Memphis sky

April 4, 1968 –
55 years ago today, civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a rifleman (possibly James Earl Ray) while standing on the second-story balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He had come to Tennessee to support a strike by the city’s sanitation workers.

The night before he died, he gave a speech at the Memphis Temple Church in which he said, “I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.“

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