April 4 in History

James Earl Ray fired a single .30-06 bullet from the bathroom window of Bessie Brewer's rooming house at 422.5 South Main Street in Memphis at 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 1968. The bullet struck Martin Luther King Jr. in the right cheek as he stood on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel, breaking his jaw and several vertebrae, severing his jugular vein, and lodging in his shoulder. The force ripped off his necktie and threw him backward. He never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead at St. Joseph's Hospital at 7:05 p.m. He was 39 years old. King had come to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers and had delivered his prophetic "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech just the night before, telling the audience at Mason Temple that he had "seen the Promised Land" but might not get there with them. His last words, spoken to musician Ben Branch on the balcony, were about that evening's planned event: "Ben, make sure you play 'Take My Hand, Precious Lord' in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty." The assassination triggered riots in over 100 American cities. Washington, D.C., burned for three days. Army troops and National Guard units deployed to Chicago, Baltimore, Kansas City, and dozens of other cities. Forty-three people were killed and over 20,000 arrested in the week following the murder. President Lyndon Johnson, who had announced five days earlier that he would not seek reelection, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, including the Fair Housing Act, on April 11. Ray fled Memphis in a white Mustang, traveled to Canada on a forged passport, then to London, Lisbon, and back to London, where he was arrested at Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968. He pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty and received a 99-year sentence. He recanted his guilty plea three days later and spent the rest of his life claiming he was a patsy manipulated by a mysterious figure he called "Raul." He died in prison in 1998. King's autopsy revealed that his heart was in the condition of a 60-year-old man, which his biographer Taylor Branch attributed to the cumulative stress of thirteen years leading the civil rights movement.

Bill Gates was 19 years old and Paul Allen was 22 when they officially founded Microsoft on April 4, 1975, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They chose Albuquerque because that was where MITS, the manufacturer of the Altair 8800 microcomputer, was headquartered, and their first product was a BASIC programming language interpreter for the Altair. The company's name, a portmanteau of "microcomputer" and "software," was Allen's idea. Gates wanted to call it "Micro-Soft," with a hyphen, which appeared in early correspondence before being dropped. The Altair 8800 had appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics in January 1975, and Gates and Allen recognized immediately that this machine, and the personal computers that would follow, needed software. They contacted MITS founder Ed Roberts and claimed to have a working BASIC interpreter for the Altair, which was a lie. They wrote the software over the next eight weeks, with Allen famously finishing the bootstrap loader on the flight to Albuquerque. The demonstration worked on the first try, and MITS agreed to distribute their software. Gates's strategic genius revealed itself early. Rather than selling the BASIC interpreter outright, he licensed it, establishing the business model that would make Microsoft the most profitable software company in history. His "Open Letter to Hobbyists," published in 1976, argued that software piracy would destroy the incentive to write programs, a position that was wildly unpopular with the hobbyist community but prescient about the software industry's future economics. Microsoft moved to Bellevue, Washington, in 1979 and landed the contract that would define the company's trajectory. When IBM needed an operating system for its upcoming personal computer in 1980, Microsoft purchased QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from Seattle Computer Products for $50,000, adapted it, and licensed it to IBM as MS-DOS. Crucially, Gates retained the right to license MS-DOS to other manufacturers, which meant every IBM-compatible PC sold by any company needed Microsoft's software. By 1986, Microsoft's IPO made Gates a billionaire at age 31, the youngest self-made billionaire in American history at the time.

Martin Luther King Jr. was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, at 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 1968. He was thirty-nine years old. He had come to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers, most of them Black, who were demanding equal pay and safer working conditions after two colleagues were crushed to death by a malfunctioning garbage truck. The night before his assassination, he delivered the "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech at the Mason Temple, which ended with the words: "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." He had been in a difficult period. The Poor People's Campaign, his attempt to build a multiracial coalition against poverty, was struggling to gain momentum. His public opposition to the Vietnam War had cost him allies in the Johnson administration and within the civil rights establishment itself. The FBI's COINTELPRO operation had been surveilling him for years, and J. Edgar Hoover had authorized a letter anonymously suggesting King take his own life. James Earl Ray fired a single shot from a bathroom window in a rooming house across Mulberry Street from the motel. The bullet struck King in the jaw, severed his spinal cord, and he died at St. Joseph's Hospital at 7:05 p.m. His death triggered riots in more than one hundred American cities. President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968 six days later. Ray pleaded guilty and was sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison. He recanted his confession almost immediately and spent the rest of his life claiming he had been framed.

A suspicious blaze tore through the Cambridgeshire village of Cottenham on April 4, 1850, reducing much of its thatched-roof housing to ash in a matter of hours. The fire spread rapidly through the village's closely packed cottages, most of which were constructed with timber frames and straw thatch, materials that were essentially tinder in dry conditions. Hundreds of residents were left homeless, and the scale of destruction prompted immediate demands for arson investigations and tighter building regulations in rural England. The Great Fire of Cottenham occurred during a period of significant rural unrest. Agricultural laborers across England were protesting low wages, poor conditions, and the enclosure of common lands that had deprived many families of traditional grazing and foraging rights. Arson, particularly the burning of hayricks and farm buildings, was a common form of protest during the "Swing Riots" era, and suspicious fires continued to plague the English countryside well into the 1850s. Whether the Cottenham fire was a deliberate act of arson was never definitively established, but the suspicious circumstances fueled public debate about the conditions that drove rural workers to desperate measures. The disaster exposed the vulnerability of English villages to catastrophic fire. Most rural communities lacked organized fire brigades, and the predominance of thatch roofing meant that a single fire could consume an entire street within minutes. In the aftermath, insurance companies began pressuring property owners to replace thatch with slate or tile, and local authorities began establishing volunteer fire brigades equipped with hand-operated pumps. The rebuilding of Cottenham took years, and many displaced families never returned.

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, twelve minutes after takeoff. The plane was carrying over 300 passengers, most of them Vietnamese orphans being evacuated as part of Operation Babylift. The rear cargo doors had blown out at approximately 23,000 feet, severing hydraulic lines and control cables. The pilot, Captain Dennis Traynor, managed to turn back toward the airport but could not maintain altitude. One hundred and seventy-eight people died, including 78 children. Operation Babylift was conceived in the final desperate weeks of the Vietnam War. North Vietnamese forces were advancing rapidly toward Saigon, and the South Vietnamese government was collapsing. President Gerald Ford authorized the evacuation of orphans on April 2, responding to pressure from adoption agencies, media coverage of the children, and a desire to generate positive coverage as the war ended in American defeat. The first flight was the C-5A that crashed. The aircraft's failure was traced to a design flaw. The rear cargo doors on the C-5A were secured by latches that had a history of problems. Lockheed, the manufacturer, had issued technical orders about the latching mechanism, but the specific failure mode that occurred on April 4 had not been anticipated. When the doors blew, the explosive decompression destroyed the lower cargo compartment where many of the children and adult escorts were seated. Some passengers were sucked out of the aircraft. Despite the disaster, Operation Babylift continued. Over the next month, approximately 3,300 children were evacuated on military and civilian aircraft. Many were adopted by American and European families. The operation remained controversial. Critics argued that some of the children were not actually orphans and had been separated from living parents. Vietnamese cultural norms around extended family care meant that children in orphanages often had relatives who could have raised them. Several lawsuits were filed, and a class-action case reached the U.S. courts. The crash was the deadliest aviation disaster of the entire Vietnam War and the single largest loss of life in C-5 history.

South Korea's Constitutional Court unanimously upheld the impeachment of President Yoon Suk Yeol on April 4, 2025, ending a political crisis that began with his extraordinary declaration of martial law in December 2024. All six sitting justices voted to remove him from office, finding that his invocation of emergency powers had violated the constitution and represented an unacceptable threat to democratic governance. Yoon became only the second South Korean president removed through impeachment, after Park Geun-hye in 2017. Yoon had declared martial law on the evening of December 3, 2024, citing vague national security threats and accusing opposition lawmakers of sympathizing with North Korea. Military units deployed to the streets of Seoul, and soldiers briefly entered the National Assembly building. The martial law declaration stunned the nation and drew immediate comparisons to the military dictatorships that had governed South Korea until the late 1980s. The National Assembly voted to lift martial law within hours, and Yoon rescinded the order, but the damage to his presidency was irreversible. The impeachment motion passed the National Assembly on December 14 with broad bipartisan support. Prime Minister Han Duck-soo assumed the duties of acting president while the Constitutional Court deliberated. Yoon's legal team argued that the martial law declaration, while perhaps ill-advised, fell within the president's constitutional authority and did not warrant removal. Prosecutors countered that Yoon had attempted to suspend democratic governance and prevent the legislature from exercising its constitutional role. The unanimous ruling rejected every defense Yoon's team offered. The court found that the martial law declaration had no legitimate basis, that deploying troops to the National Assembly constituted an attack on legislative independence, and that Yoon's actions demonstrated he could not be trusted with presidential authority. Street demonstrations celebrating the verdict drew hundreds of thousands of people in Seoul. The crisis reinforced the resilience of South Korea's democratic institutions, which had now successfully removed two presidents through constitutional means within a single decade.

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. The speech, which Daniel Webster had edited down from an even longer draft, was a detailed argument for limited executive power and a subtle rebuke of Andrew Jackson's presidency. Three weeks later, Harrison developed a cold that progressed to pneumonia and pleurisy. He died on April 4, 1841, exactly one month after taking office, becoming the first president to die in the job. Harrison was 68 at his inauguration, the oldest president until Ronald Reagan. He had been elected largely on the strength of his military reputation, particularly his 1811 victory at the Battle of Tippecanoe against Tecumseh's confederacy and his performance commanding American forces in the War of 1812. The Whig Party chose him precisely because he was a war hero with few strong political positions, a blank canvas on which party leaders like Henry Clay could project their agenda. The immediate medical question was straightforward: pneumonia killed him. The political question was anything but. The Constitution stated that upon the president's death, the vice president would assume "the powers and duties of said office," but it did not clearly specify whether the vice president became president or merely acting president. John Tyler, Harrison's vice president, settled the matter by asserting that he was the president in full, not a caretaker. He took the oath of office, moved into the White House, and refused to open mail addressed to "Acting President Tyler." Tyler's precedent, established through sheer force of assertion, governed every subsequent presidential succession until the Twenty-Fifth Amendment codified it in 1967. Had Tyler accepted the "acting president" interpretation, the nature of executive power in America might have developed very differently, with Congress rather than the vice president controlling the transition. Harrison's death also destroyed the Whig Party's agenda, as Tyler promptly vetoed most of the legislation Clay's congressional majority passed, earning the nickname "His Accidency."