Milestones: April 4, 2024

April 4, 2024 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

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CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER ASSASSINATED — CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. WAS FATALLY SHOT on April 4, 1968, around 6 p.m. as he stood on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. he was in that city to support a sanitation strike, and as part of a wider campaign to fight racial financial inequality. Just one day earlier, King, who was 39 when killed, had delivered his famous “I’ve been to the Mountaintop,” sermon, uncannily presaging his death. Clues to the killer pointed to an escaped convict named James Earl Ray who, though he proclaimed his innocence, already had a reputation as an avowed racist.

As news of King’s assassination spread, riots broke out in cities across the United States, but not here in New York City, thanks to Mayor John V. Lindsay’s quick response, his knowledge of the Harlem community and Black people’s respect for him. Lindsay extemporaneously expressed his deep regret for King’s murder and pledged to work with the community.

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KING GIVES HIS ‘BEYOND VIETNAM’ SPEECH — EXACTLY A YEAR BEFORE HE WAS ASSASSINATED, Dr. King on April 4, 1967, delivered his famous “Beyond Vietnam” speech at Riverside Church, with 3,000 people in attendance. Pointing out what he saw as a common link between the civil rights and peace movements, King called for the United States to cease all bombing of North and South Vietnam, declare a truce, set a troop withdrawal date and also give the National Liberation Front a role in negotiations. Moreover, King believed that money that could have aided domestic social programs for the poor, particularly Black people, were being diverted to support military intervention in Vietnam.

King declared, “The war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home…We were taking the Black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”

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LINCOLN’S DISTURBING PREMONITION — PRESIDENT ABRAHAM LINCOLN HAD A PREMONITION of his death in a dream 10 days before his assassination. the president’s friend, Ward Hill Lamon, recounted the dream on April 4, 1865, that “strangely annoyed” Lincoln. He witnessed “the subdued sobs of mourners” and a corpse lying on a catafalque in the White House East Room. In the dream, Lincoln asked a soldier standing guard “Who is dead in the White House?” to which the soldier replied, “The president. He was killed by an assassin.” At that point, Lincoln had awakened.

An actor-turned-assassin named John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln on April 14, 1865, as the President watched a play at Ford’s Theater. That day also happened to be Good Friday, the most somber day of the Christian calendar.

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TWIN TOWERS OPEN — THE “TWIN TOWERS” OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER OFFICIALLY OPENED in New York City on April 4, 1973. The buildings supplanted the Empire State Building as the world’s tallest — but only for a year until the Willis Tower (originally named the Sears Tower) opened in Chicago in 1974. Architect Minoru Yamasaki based his design on Arabic architecture that included the concept of “express” and “local” elevators, with certain floor levels serving as sky lobbies. That same concept, and the lack of sufficient emergency stairwells, proved both fatal and lifesaving during the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks that destroyed the Twin Towers. Yet it was the 78th floor’s “sky lobby” location and design that gave people in the South Tower a chance at escaping before the building collapsed.

The garage under the North Tower also was destroyed, killing six and injuring over 1,000. The building that replaced both towers, One World Trade Center, was completed in 2014.

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WHAT AN OPENING — A BASEBALL RECORD WAS ALREADY BEING TIED ON OPENING DAY OF THE 1974 Major League Baseball season, when Hank Aaron, who had just reached his 40th birthday two months earlier, hit the very first pitch he received over the wall, thus matching the legendary Babe Ruth’s record. Hank Aaron would then break Ruth’s record in the fourth inning of the Atlanta Braves’ home opener four days later, on April 8. When he retired two years later, Hank Aaron had amassed a career total of 755 home runs.

Hank Aaron was inducted into the Hall in 1982 and died on Jan. 22, 2021, at age 86. He would have turned 87 on February 5 that year.

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TRANSFORMED INDUSTRY — THE MICROSOFT COMPANY WAS FOUNDED on April 4, 1975, when childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen opened a computer software firm, moving the business world from typewriters to this new technology. The company was originally based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After relocating to Washington state, it expanded into a major multinational technology corporation. Going public in 1986, Microsoft made Gates the world’s youngest billionaire within the year. In 1985, Microsoft released its new operating system, Windows, featuring a graphical user interface, drop-down menus, scroll bars and other innovations.

The firm’s name was originally spelled as Micro-Soft, standing for microprocessors and software — to produce software for an early personal computer model called the Altair 8800.

See previous milestones, here.