April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated in Memphis

Today is Friday, April 4, the 94th day of 2025. 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 of 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, Sen. John Heinz, R-Pa., and six other people, including two children, were killed when a helicopter collided with Heinz’s plane over a schoolyard in Merion, Pennsylvania.

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 pleaded guilty in 2016 to reduced charges.)

In 2015, in North Charleston, South Carolina, Walter Scott, a 50-year-old Black motorist, was shot to death while running away from a traffic stop; Officer Michael Thomas Slager, seen in a cellphone video opening fire at Scott, was charged with murder. (The charge, which lingered after a first state trial ended in a mistrial, was dropped as part of a deal under which Slager pleaded guilty to a federal civil rights violation; he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.)

In 2023, Prosecutors in New York unsealed a historic 34-count felony indictment of Donald Trump, alleging that he conspired to illegally influence the 2016 election through a series of hush money payments designed to stifle claims that could be harmful to his candidacy. Trump became the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges. (He would be found guilty on all counts the following month.)