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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who preached nonviolence and racial brotherhood, was fatally shot here last night by a distant gunman who raced away and escaped. Four thousand National Guard troops were ordered into Memphis by Gov. Buford Ellington after the 39-year-old Nobel Prize-winning civil rights leader died. Dr. King was standing on the balcony of a second-floor hotel room here when a single shot fired from across the street struck him in the neck. He died less than an hour later in St. Joseph's Hospital.

Read full obituary from The New York Times →