Balcony of the Lorraine Motel

Lorraine Motel, room 306 · Memphis, Tennessee, United States · 1968-04-04

Martin Luther King Jr. was shot on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel on 4 April 1968, outside room 306, the room he habitually took in Memphis. He had come to support the city's striking sanitation workers. The motel facade, the room and the balcony are preserved as the centrepiece of the National Civil Rights Museum, with a wreath fixed at the spot.

The record

Coordinates are given at landmark level. A landmark-level coordinate points at the structure; a city-level one points at the settlement, not at a parcel.

Finding photographs

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• Wikimedia Commons — freely licensed images, with the licence stated on every file. This is the only source we republish from.
• The reference article — its own illustrations, and its citations to archives.
• Image search filtered to reusable licences — useful for tracing which institution holds a picture.
• National and municipal archives of United States, and the picture desks of newspapers published there at the time.

Check the licence before you reuse anything. A photograph being online, or being old, does not make it free; in most countries a 1960s press photograph is still in copyright.

Footage

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