April 4 in History

James Earl Ray fired from a bathroom window of Bessie Brewer's rooming house at 422.5 South Main Street in Memphis, striking Martin Luther King Jr. as he stood on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel at 6:01 PM on April 4, 1968. The bullet entered King's right cheek, shattered his jaw, traveled down his spinal cord, and lodged in his shoulder. He was 39 years old. Ray fled to Canada, then to London, where he was arrested at Heathrow Airport on June 8. He pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty and received a 99-year sentence. Riots erupted in over 100 American cities. Five days later, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which King had been advocating for.

Bill Gates was 19 and Paul Allen was 22 when they founded Microsoft on April 4, 1975, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to sell a BASIC interpreter for the MITS Altair 8800 microcomputer. They chose Albuquerque because MITS was headquartered there. The company's first year revenue was $16,005. Allen had spotted the Altair on the cover of Popular Electronics and convinced Gates to drop out of Harvard to write software for it. Their big break came in 1980 when IBM needed an operating system for its personal computer. Microsoft bought QDOS from Seattle Computer Products for $50,000, adapted it as MS-DOS, and licensed it non-exclusively, meaning they could sell it to IBM's competitors. That single licensing decision built the Microsoft empire.

Martin Luther King Jr. was 39 years old when he was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968. He was there supporting striking sanitation workers. The night before, he'd given the 'I've Been to the Mountaintop' speech, which ended: 'I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you.' He'd been in a low period — the Poor People's Campaign was struggling, his opposition to the Vietnam War had cost him allies, and FBI surveillance had included a letter urging him to commit suicide. He was shot at 6:01 p.m. James Earl Ray fired from a bathroom window across the street. King died at St. Joseph's Hospital one hour later.

A suspicious blaze tore through the Cambridgeshire village of Cottenham, reducing much of its thatched-roof housing to ash in a single afternoon. The devastation left hundreds homeless and fueled demands for arson investigations and stricter building regulations in rural England.

A U.S. Air Force C-5A Galaxy, the largest aircraft in the American fleet, crashed into a rice paddy two miles from Saigon's Tan Son Nhut airport on April 4, 1975, during Operation Babylift. The rear cargo door blew out at 23,000 feet, severing control cables. The pilot managed to circle back to the airport but the plane broke apart on impact. Of the 328 people aboard, 138 died, including 78 children. The crash was the deadliest in C-5 history. Despite the disaster, Operation Babylift continued for three more weeks, ultimately evacuating over 3,300 orphans to the United States, Australia, France, and Canada before Saigon fell on April 30.

South Korea's Constitutional Court unanimously upheld the impeachment of President Yoon Suk Yeol on April 4, 2025, removing him from office over his extraordinary declaration of martial law in December 2024. Yoon had deployed troops to seal the National Assembly and suspended civil liberties for several hours before lawmakers voted to lift the decree. The martial law declaration was the first in South Korea since 1980 and provoked mass protests. The Court ruled that Yoon had violated the constitutional order. His removal triggered a snap presidential election within 60 days and reinforced the strength of South Korea's democratic institutions in a region where authoritarian backsliding has accelerated.

William Henry Harrison delivered the longest inaugural address in American history on March 4, 1841, speaking for one hour and forty minutes in cold, wet weather without a hat or overcoat. He developed pneumonia and died exactly 31 days later on April 4, becoming the first president to die in office and the shortest-serving in history. The crisis exposed a constitutional ambiguity: did the Vice President become President or merely Acting President? John Tyler settled the question by immediately taking the full oath and refusing to open mail addressed to "Acting President Tyler." This precedent, later codified in the 25th Amendment, established that the Vice President assumes the complete office, not just its duties.