Source: Michael Ochs Archives / Getty
Fifty years ago, a single gunshot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn. changed the course of the Civil Rights Movement.
It’s April 4, 1968, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. steps outside his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, and leans over the balcony to speak to one of his followers.
Across the street, a man raises his rifle in the narrow bathroom of a derelict rooming house and points it at King. It is 6:01 p.m.
Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated outside his room on April 4, 1968, surrounded by other civil rights leaders.
Rev. Jesse Jackson remembers, “The bullet hit him and severed his tie and then the bullet when down. I heard someone say ‘get low, get low’ because we thought they were stray bullets. We didn’t know, we were running toward the steps,” Jackson said.
Read more about King’s last days at CNN.com
We remember Dr. King in Pictures.
