TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Saturday, April 4, the 94th day of 2015. There are 271 days left in the year.

In 1865, President Abraham Lincoln visited the vanquished Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, where he was greeted by a crowd that included former slaves.

In 1818, Congress decided the flag of the United States would consist of 13 red and white stripes and 20 stars, with a new star to be added for every new state of the Union.

In 1841, President William Henry Harrison succumbed to pneumonia one month after his inaugural, becoming the first U.S. chief executive to die in office.

In 1958, Johnny Stompanato, an enforcer for crime boss Mickey Cohen and the boyfriend of actress Lana Turner, was stabbed to death by Turner’s teenage daughter, Cheryl Crane, who said Stompanato had attacked her mother.

In 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., 39, was shot and killed while standing on a balcony of the

Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

In 1975, more than 130 people, most of them children, were killed when a U.S. Air Force transport plane evacuating Vietnamese orphans crashlanded shortly after takeoff from Saigon. Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

In 1985, Gary Dotson, who’d served six years of a prison sentence for rape, was freed on bail from the Joliet Correctional Center in Illinois after his accuser testified that the attack had never occurred. (Charges against Dotson were dropped in 1989; he was pardoned by Illinois Gov. George Ryan in 2002.)

In 1995, Francisco Martin Duran, who had raked the White House with semiautomatic rifle fire in Oct. 1994, was convicted in Washington of trying to assassinate President Bill Clinton.