The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Nobel Peace Prize civil rights leader, was shot fatally here Thursday night while leaning over a second-floor railing outside his hotel room.

The Atlanta Constitution (ENLARGE)

April 5, 1968 front page

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The 39-year-old Negro leader's death was reported by Frank Holloman, director of Memphis police and fire departments, after Dr. King has been taken to St. Joseph's Hospital.

"I and all the citizens of Memphis," Holloman said, "regret the murder of Dr. King and all resources at our and the state's command will be used to apprehend the person or persons responsible.

Police issued a bulletin for a young, dark-haired white man who dashed out of a flophouse across the street from King's hotel, dropped a semi-automatic Browning rifle on the sidewalk, and fled in a car.

Holloman said, "We have to definite lead we can report at this time regarding the assailant."

King's body was taken to the Shelby County morgue, and police said it would be up to Dr. Derry Francisco, county medical examiner, to order further disposition.

Four thousand national guard troops were ordered into Memphis by Gov. Buford Ellington after Dr. King's death. A curfew was imposed on the city of 550,000 inhabitants, about 40 percent of them Negro.

Dr. King has been bleeding profusely from what appeared to be a huge wound in the right jaw or neck area as he lay face up on the concrete walkway before he was taken away in a fire department ambulance.

His eyes appeared first half-closed and then open but staring. One of his closest aides, James Bevel, grief-stricken, said after Dr. King was removed, "I think he's gone."

BACK A DAY

Dr. King had come back to Memphis Wednesday morning to organize support once again for 1,300 sanitation workers who have been on strike since Lincoln's birthday. Just a week ago he led a march on behalf of the strikers that ended in violence with a 16 year old Negro killed, 62 persons injured and 200 arrested.

Police poured into the area around the Lorraine Motel where Dr. King was shot. They carried shotguns and rifles and sealed off the block, refusing to allow entry to newsmen and others.

Dr. King had been in his second-floor room - number 306—throughout the day until just about 6 p.m.

Then he emerged, wearing a black suite and white shirt. He paused, leaned over the green iron railing and stated chatting with an associate, Jesse Jackson, who was standing just below him.

MET MUSICIAN

Jackson introduced him to Ben Branch, a musician who was to play at a rally Dr. King was to address two hours later. As Jackson and Branch told of Dr. King's last moments later, the aide asked Dr. King:

"Do you know Ben?"

"Yes, that's my man!" Dr. King glowed.

They said, Dr. King then asked if Branch would play a spiritual.

"Precious Lord, Take My Hand," at the night meeting.

"I really want you to play that tonight," King said.

Branch said the shot came from "the hill on the other side of the street." He added:

"When I looked up, the police and the sheriff's deputies were running all around. The bullet exploded in his face."

"We didn't need to call the police," Jackson declared. "They were here all over the place."

A member of the King group, the Rev. Samuel Kyles, of Memphis, said Dr. King "had stood there about three minutes."

The Rev. Ralph W. Abernathy of Atlanta, perhaps Dr. King's closet friend, was just about to come out of the room.

A sudden loud noise burst out. Dr. King toppled to the concrete passageway floor and blood began gushing from a wound.

Someone rushed up with a towel to staunch the flow of blood. A blanket was placed over him.

Abernathy hurried up with a second larger towel. And then the aides waited, while police rushed up within minutes and in what seemed to be a long 10 or 15 minutes an ambulance arrived.

"He had just bent over," Jackson recalled later. "If he had been standing up, he wouldn't have been hit in the face.

"When I turned around," Jackson went on, bitterly, "I saw police coming from everywhere. They said, "where did it come from.' And I said, 'behind you.' The police were coming from where the shot came."

The Rev. Andrew Young, executive vice president of Southern Christian Leadership Conference, of which Dr. King has been president, said the shot might have been fired from a passing car.

"It sounded like a firecracker," Young said.

"He didn't say a word; he didn't move," Young mourned. He said the shot had hit Dr. King in the neck and lower right part of his face.

In a nearby building, a newsman who had been watching a television program said "it was a tremendous blast that sounded like a bomb."

There were perhaps 15 persons in the motel courtyard area when Dr. King was shot, all believed to be Negroes and associates of Dr. King.

Past the courtyard is a small empty swimming pool. Then comes Mulberry Street, a short block only three blocks from Beale Street on the edge of downtown Memphis.

Across Mulberry Street is a six-foot high wall, topped by bushes and grasses, and then perhaps 20 yards behind are two-story brick and frame houses.

At Butler Street on the corner is a newish-looking white brick fire station.

One report said that the shot came from the area of one of the buildings across the street.

This report was that a man had run out of the building and leaped into a car, perhaps dropping the weapon on the street.

Later there was a report that police had chased a late-model blue car through Memphis and north to Millington, and that a civilian in a car with a citizens band radio had pursued the car and opened fire on it.

Mayor Henry Loeb immediately ordered a dusk to dawn curfew in Memphis in an effort to stem any possible violence on the streets.

TAKEN TO SURGERY

Dr. King had been taken to the hospital's operating theater for emergency surgery, apparently still living when he was brought in on a stretcher with a bloody towel over his head.

Paul Hess, assistant administrator of St. Joseph's hospital, said afterward.

"At 7 p.m. Dr. Martin Luther King expired in the emergency room as a result of a gunshot wound in the neck. Other details will have to come from the coroner's office."

The police cordon was widened to cover an area of about five blocks around the motel, sealing off the area. Firemen reported several fires broke out in the vicinity.

Dr. King's wife, Coretta, mother of his two children, had been in Atlanta. Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. of Atlanta rushed to the King home and drove Mrs. King to the airport.

AT AIRPORT

She was waiting for a flight to Memphis when she received the word that her husband had died.

Just last night Dr. King had told associates he was not concerned over reports of possible harm while he was in Memphis.

Young recalled:

"He said he had reached the [UNREADABLE] of fulfillment with his non-violent movement and these reports did not bother him."

At the FBI office here, Robert Jensen, special agent in charge, said:

"We have entered the investigation at the specific request of the attorney general. I am restricted to this statement at the moment."

Dr. King died in the same emergency room to which James H. Meredith, first Negro enrolled at the University of Mississippi, had been taken after he was shot in ambush in June 1965 at Hernando, Miss., a few miles south of Memphis. Meredith had not been seriously hurt.

NOT IN COURT

Earlier Thursday there had been a lengthy discussion in federal court before Judge Bailey Brown with Dr. King absent on whether Dr. King should be allowed to proceed with another massive civil rights march in Memphis Monday.

Dr. King's lawyers suggested that an injunction against the march be lifted, but that a compromise place court restrictions on participants in the march.

Judge Brown, who issued the injunction Wednesday at the urging of Memphis officials, was to render a decision on the proposal by Friday.

Dr. King had indicated he was considering disobeying the injunction against his leading any marches for at least 10 days. But his lawyers proposed the compromise that would have stipulated a parade route to police in advance, kept marshals on hand to supervise it, and limited marchers to four abreast, without signs or sticks.

ARKANSAS ALERT

Later, Arkansas State Police across the Mississippi River from Memphis, received an alert to watch out for a white car driven by a white man, dark-haired and dressed in a dark suit.

At the hospital, Chauncey Eskridge, King's legal adviser, had been waiting outside the emergency room. Sobbing, he said King's death "ought to have a shocking effect on the whole world."

"A man full of life, full of love and he was shot," Eskridge said. "He had always lived with that expectation - but nobody ever expected it to happen."

Actually King had suffered beatings and blows in his career, and once—on Sept. 20, 1958—he was stabbed in a Harlem department store in New York by a Negro woman, later adjudged insane. That time he underwent a four-hour operation to remove a steel letter opener that had been plunged into his upper left chest, and for a time was on the critical list.

AIDES GATHER

After King's death, his chief associates, Abernathy, Jackson, Bevel and Hosea Williams—were convened in their slain leader's room by Young. They had to step across the drying pool of King's blood outside as they went in.

Someone had thrown a crumpled pack of cigarettes into the blood.

After 15 minutes they emerged.

Jackson looked at the blood. He embraced Abernathy. "Stand tall!" Somebody exhorted the others.

"Murder! Murder!" Bevel groaned. "Doc said that's not the way."

"Doc " was a nickname for King.

The murdered leader's aides then said they would go on to the hall where Thursday night's rally was to have been held, to calm those persons who might have gathered there.

Some police officers sought to dissuade them from going, but eventually the group did start out with a police escort.