The Lorraine Motel, in the hours after Dr. King’s assassination, April 4, 1968.
Henry Groskinsky/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
On April 4, 1968, LIFE photographer Henry Groskinsky and writer Mike Silva learned that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The two men raced 200 miles to the scene of the assassination, and found that they had unfettered access to the motel’s grounds; to nearby abandoned buildings from which the fatal rifle shot likely came; to Dr. King’s motel room; and to the bleak, blood-stained balcony where the civil rights leader had fallen, mortally wounded, hours earlier.
Will D. Campbell, a minister and activist alone on the Lorraine Motel balcony, gazed out into the night. “This picture was probably made as soon as we got there,” Groskinsky told LIFE.com. “When I saw him standing there, alone, I thought it looked as if he was just asking himself, My God, what has happened here?”
Henry Groskinsky/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
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