Portal:Tennessee/Selected anniversaries/April

April 2, 2006 - A tornado outbreak took 24 lives and devastated parts of West Tennessee, including Newbern and Bradford. It was followed five days later by another devastating tornado outbreak that left 12 people dead in Middle Tennessee.
April 3-4, 1974 - 45 people died in Tennessee during the largest one-day tornado outbreak on record, which caused a total of 319 deaths in the United States and Canada.
April 4, 1968 - Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, now the National Civil Rights Museum.
April 6/7, 1862 - The Battle of Shiloh was one of the first major battles in the Western Theater of the American Civil War, it lasted two days.
April 12, 1864 - The Civil War Battle of Fort Pillow, also known as the Fort Pillow Massacre, was fought at Fort Pillow on bluffs above the Mississippi River near Henning, Tennessee.
April 17, 1905 - The current Tennessee flag was adopted by the Tennessee State Legislature as the state flag.
April 17, 1973 - Federal Express began operations in Memphis, the first cargo airline to use only jet aircraft for its services.
April 27, 1865 - The paddlewheel steamboat Sultana was destroyed by an explosion and sank in the Mississippi River near Memphis; the greatest maritime disaster in United States history killed an estimated 1,700 of the 2,400 passengers.