April 4: A Dream Interrupted, A Company Born in a Garage, The Critic Who Loved the Dark
The stories we inherit from April 4 ask us to think about what endures after a life ends, after a company is founded, after a critic puts down his pen. They are stories about vision — the moral vision of a man who saw an America that did not yet exist and gave his life demanding it, the technological vision of two young friends who saw a computer on every desk before most people had seen a computer at all, and the aesthetic vision of a writer who saw cinema not as escapism but as one of the great arts of human expression. Three very different men, three very different legacies — and the same underlying conviction that the world, looked at clearly and described honestly, can be made into something better.
Memphis, and What We Lost There
On April 4, 1968, at 6:01 in the evening, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had traveled to support striking sanitation workers. He was thirty-nine years old. The bullet struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord; he was pronounced dead at St. Joseph's Hospital an hour later. His assassin, James Earl Ray, was captured two months afterward at Heathrow Airport in London. The night of King's murder, cities across America — Washington, Chicago, Baltimore, Louisville, Kansas City — erupted in riots. President Lyndon Johnson appeared on national television, his face drawn, to call for calm. Robert F. Kennedy, campaigning in Indianapolis, delivered one of the most moving impromptu eulogies in American political history to a crowd that had not yet heard the news.
King had been, by April 1968, a more complicated and more radical figure than the national memory would later acknowledge. He had come to Memphis in the context of his Poor People's Campaign, a broad economic justice initiative that sought to address poverty across racial lines. He had spoken out forcefully against the Vietnam War — losing allies in the process — and had been openly surveilled and harassed by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI for years. The version of King most often commemorated is the King of the 1963 March on Washington; the King of 1968 was more embattled, more insistent, more willing to name the economic structures that sustained racial inequality. His death did not end that work — it made it, in one of history's cruelest ironies, easier to sanctify and harder to complete. The Lorraine Motel is now the National Civil Rights Museum, its balcony preserved exactly as it was on that April evening, a permanent reminder of what was interrupted there.
Two Friends and a World-Changing Idea
Seven years after Memphis, on April 4, 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen signed the papers incorporating a small software company they called Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Gates was nineteen. Allen was twenty-two. They had been friends since meeting at the Lakeside School in Seattle, where they had spent countless hours commandeering the school's computer terminal and teaching themselves to program. The immediate catalyst for Microsoft's founding was a January 1975 cover story in Popular Electronics featuring the Altair 8800, an early personal computer kit that hobbyists were buying by the thousands — without any useful software to run on it. Gates and Allen saw the opening and cold-called the Altair's manufacturer, MITS, claiming they had a programming language ready to demonstrate. They did not. They wrote it in the weeks before the demo. It worked.
That audacious improvisation became the founding spirit of Microsoft. Within five years, the company had moved to the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, licensed its operating system to IBM for the personal computer that would define the industry, and positioned itself at the center of a revolution that neither Gates nor Allen had manufactured so much as anticipated with extraordinary precision. By the 1990s, Microsoft's Windows operating system ran on the vast majority of the world's personal computers, and Gates had become the richest person on earth. The company's journey was not without controversy — antitrust battles, accusations of predatory business practices, and the gradual eclipse of its dominance by the internet age all complicated the story. But on April 4, 1975, none of that had happened yet. Two young men with a borrowed idea and borrowed time had simply decided to bet on a future that most people hadn't yet thought to imagine.
Two Thumbs, Raised for Good
On April 4, 2013, Roger Ebert died of cancer at his home in Chicago, two days after announcing that his illness had returned and that he was taking what he called "a leave of presence" from his work. He was seventy years old and had been reviewing films for the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967 — a span of forty-six years during which he had seen, by his own estimate, somewhere in the neighborhood of ten thousand movies. He had won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1975, the first film critic ever to do so. He had spent more than three decades on television alongside Gene Siskel, their thumb-based rating system becoming so embedded in the culture that "two thumbs up" entered the language as a synonym for unambiguous endorsement. He had battled thyroid cancer since 2002, losing his jaw to surgery and his ability to speak — and had continued writing with more prolific energy than before, producing some of the most searching, personal work of his career.
What set Ebert apart from the professional critics who surrounded him was not just his range or his accessibility — though he had both in abundance — but his insistence that the movies mattered. Not as a guilty pleasure or a commercial product, but as a genuine art form capable of producing what he called "an empathy machine": a means of living, briefly and completely, inside another person's experience. He wrote about films with the seriousness of a philosopher and the enthusiasm of someone who had never lost the capacity to be surprised by a great scene. His reviews of films he despised were often funnier than the films themselves; his reviews of films he loved could make a reader feel the urgency of going immediately to the theater. The collected archive of his work — hundreds of reviews, essays, and blog posts — remains one of the great bodies of criticism in American letters, a love letter to the art of watching carefully and feeling deeply.
