The Day MLK Died: Rare Pictures From the Lorraine Motel, Memphis, April 4, 1968 Civil Rights Movement On April 4, 1968, LIFE photographer Henry Groskinsky and writer Mike Silva, on assignment in Alabama, learned that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The two men jumped into their car, raced the 200 miles to the scene of the assassination, and there - to their astonishment - 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 fell, mortally wounded, mere hours earlier. "I was very, very surprised at how desolate it all was," Groskinsky, now 78 years old, told LIFE.com when asked about the mood in the neighborhood around the motel. But then, people probably thought that the person who shot Dr. King might still be out there somewhere. For reasons that have been lost in the intervening decades, Groskinsky's photographs from that eerily quiet night in Memphis - taken at the site, and on the very day, of one of the signal events of the 20th century - were never published in LIFE magazine, and the story behind how they were made was never told.