April 4 · This Day in America
It is early evening. Dr. King steps out of room 306 onto the balcony of the Lorraine Motel to lean on the rail and talk with friends in the parking lot below. He is thirty-nine years old. He has come to Memphis for sanitation workers asking only to be paid like men. At 6:01 a single shot ends his life. He is gone within the hour. The night before, he had told a church he had been to the mountaintop and was not afraid. The grief breaks open more than a hundred cities. But the work he named does not die with him — the right to vote, the dignity of labor, the unfinished American promise that all are created equal. We told the truth straight here because he did. The country is still trying to be worthy of the man it lost on that balcony.
Source: kinginstitute.stanford.edu
Also on this day · 1949
In a Washington auditorium, the United States and eleven allies sign the North Atlantic Treaty, pledging that an attack on one is an attack on all. For a nation that had spent its history avoiding entangling alliances, it is a startling vow — America binding its safety to Europe's, in peacetime, by choice. The band, by odd coincidence, played "It Ain't Necessarily So."
Source: www.archives.gov
“Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty we are free at last.”Martin Luther King Jr., 1963