King Remembrance Week 2016 – Martin Luther King Jr …
The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site and Ebenezer
Baptist Church will commemorate the annual observance of King
Remembrance Week which honors the life and legacy of the Reverend Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. April 4-8, 2016. To commence the Park’s week
long series of public activities, a special Wreath-Laying Ceremony will
take place at Historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, Heritage Sanctuary in
Atlanta, Georgia on Monday April 4, 2016 at 5:30pm. This year marks the
48th anniversary of the death of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968 at the Lorraine
Motel in Memphis, Tennessee and was brought home to be buried in the
Sweet Auburn community. On April 9, 1968, his funeral took place at
Historic Ebenezer Baptist Church and Morehouse College. To reflect upon
that solemn occasion in history, the National Park Service along with
members of Ebenezer Baptist Church will place a replica of the 1968
wreath on the historic location of Ebenezer Baptist Church, Heritage
Sanctuary as it appeared on April 9, 1968. There will be a brief program
with remarks by National Park Service officials and other dignitaries
before laying the wreath upon the church’s façade.
KING CENTER COMMEMORATES MLK ASSASSINATION …
Dr. King is assassinated – Apr 04, 1968 – HISTORY.com
April 4th Commemoration | National Civil Rights Museum
The annual April 4th Commemoration at the National Civil Rights Museum is a … life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the anniversary of his death at the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968. … music selections, a ceremonial wreath laying and a
On March 28 1968 King was leading a march
in downtown Memphis when a masonic planned riot broke out and two Negro Masonic
assassins chased King and Abernathy with the intent to assassinate both King
and Abernathy on March 28.
King and Abernathy were able to find
refuge at a white business until the white print shop owner was able to safely escort
King and Abernathy out of town.
the Lorain Motel received a call from a member of Kings inner circle in Atlanta
requesting that a specific room on the second floor be reserve for King.
(King had always stayed in a secure room on the 1st floor.) On April 4,
Loree Bailey overheard a member of Kings entourage asking him to come out of
his room and speak to a small group that had assemble in the parking lot.
Loree Bailey knew that King was in bed suffering from a severe headache but
this member of Kings inner circle insisted that King come out and talk to the
people. King reluctantly came out of his room to speak to the small crowd when
he was shoot. Loree knew the identity of the Judas who had Dr. King set-up
to be assassinated. There
were Negro masonic assassins in Memphis the day of
the assassination one from Forrest City Arkansas. Were these the same assassins who attempted to kill King a week earlier? According to testimony from eye witnesses from the King
family vs. US government trial, the gun smoke came from the bushes across from
the motel and not from the bathroom window at the boarding house where Ray had stayed.
Dr. ML King and Loree Bailey were killed by Negro Masonic Assassins doing the dirty work of their white masonic slave masters.
Photographer Ernest Withers doubled as FBI informant
Bailey was killed, hung in the stairwell of her motel only hours after
the King assassination. The official cover-up statement said that Loree
Bailey had a stroke on April 4th and died a few days later.
was the Judas who set-up King? Was King assassination a Masonic hit?
Was a beer distributorship part of the payoff?Steve Cokley said it best
in his video.
Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (4 April 1968)
anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination should
inspire us all to reimagine this political revolutionary’s final act as a
statesman and civil rights leader.
Selma-to-Montgomery march, King became a pillar of fire, rejecting the
course of political moderation and social reform that had made him
palatable to white leaders and a hero to African Americans.
found him linking the struggle for racial justice to a wider crusade to
end war and poverty. Tellingly, his comprehensive approach, which
focused on changing America’s foreign and domestic policies as well as
hearts and minds, found him under attack by critics who claimed that he
was in over his head on the subject of Vietnam and foolish to break with
former ally President Lyndon B. Johnson.
power leader Stokely Carmichael. On April 15, 1967, in New York City, King and Carmichael
headlined the largest anti-war rally in American history to that date,
placing two of the era’s leading black political activists at the
forefront of a still-unpopular anti-war movement.
to the day before his death in a speech at Riverside Church in New York
City. His speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence,” announced
his formal break with both the Johnson Administration (he would never
visit the White House again) and political moderation.
his civil rights portfolio into the world of foreign policy and
international politics. Many publicly denounced him for having
irrevocably damaged the black freedom struggle by linking it to the
Vietnam War. King’s public approval ratings dropped precipitously among
whites and blacks for his uncompromising stance.
black sanitation workers, concluded with biblical references to having
seen the “promised land,” and is noteworthy for its rhetorical and political combativeness.
King’s political evolution remains unacknowledged by most of the
American public, leading to the irony of critics of the
#BlackLivesMatter movement asserting that contemporary protesters would
do well to follow in the footsteps of King and other heroes of the civil
rights era. Missing from such criticism is the reality of the later
King, the prophet who, after being recognized in his own lifetime, was
thoroughly disregarded by past allies, politicians and the public for
speaking truth to power in a manner that made the entire nation
uncomfortable.
decisions not to indict police officers in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten
Island, N.Y., represent, in both symbolic and substantive ways, a
continuation of the radical King’s political work.
the militarism of which he spoke has invaded our domestic sphere
through mass incarceration; how materialism promotes the largest income
and wealth gap between the rich and poor in American history; and how
institutional racism contours our current social, political and economic
systems.
that black lives mattered. His two most famous political sermons (at the
March on Washington in 1963 and in Montgomery, Ala., in 1965) were
broadcast by every major television network.
linked political revolution to radical policy changes that went beyond
the vote, that advocated economic redistribution and an end to war,
along with a “revolution in values”
designed to transform the very foundations of American democracy. It is
this King whom #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations most accurately reflect
and honor, even as he’s the one our nation continues to ignore.
Peniel E. Joseph, a contributing editor at The Root, is founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy
Assassination Conspiracy Trial
Reprint from the King Center:
After four weeks of testimony and over 70 witnesses in a civil trial in
Memphis, Tennessee, twelve jurors reached a unanimous verdict on
December 8, 1999 after about an hour of deliberations that Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. In a
press statement held the following day in Atlanta, Mrs. Coretta Scott
King welcomed the verdict, saying , “There is abundant evidence of a
major high level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband, Martin
Luther King, Jr. And the civil court’s unanimous verdict has validated
our belief. I wholeheartedly applaud the verdict of the jury and I feel
that justice has been well served in their deliberations. This verdict
is not only a great victory for my family, but also a great victory for
America. It is a great victory for truth itself. It is important to know
that this was a SWIFT verdict, delivered after about an hour of jury
deliberation. The jury was clearly convinced by the extensive evidence
that was presented during the trial that, in addition to Mr. Jowers, the
conspiracy of the Mafia, local, state and federal government agencies,
were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband. The jury also
affirmed overwhelming evidence that identified someone else, not James
Earl Ray, as the shooter, and that Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame.
I want to make it clear that my family has no interest in retribution.
Instead, our sole concern has been that the full truth of the
assassination has been revealed and adjudicated in a court of law… My
husband once said, “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends
toward justice.” To-day, almost 32 years after my husband and the father
of my four children was assassinated, I feel that the jury’s verdict
clearly affirms this principle. With this faith, we can begin the 21st
century and the new millennium with a new spirit of hope and healing.”
Adobe PDF – View as html
Across from the Lorraine Motel was Fire Station no. 2. Who ordered … to the question did Loyd Jowers participate in a conspiracy to do harm to Dr. Martin Luther King, your …
www.tucradio.org/Who_killed_MLK.pdf
In
the complaint filed by the King family, “King versus Jowers and Other
Unknown Co-Conspirators,” the only named defendant, Loyd Jowers, was
never their primary concern. As soon became evident in court, the real
defendants were the anonymous co-conspirators who stood in the shadows
behind Jowers, the former owner of a Memphis bar and grill. The Kings
and Pepper were in effect charging U.S. intelligence agencies —
particularly the FBI and Army intelligence — with organizing,
subcontracting, and covering up the assassination. Such a charge
guarantees almost insuperable obstacles to its being argued in a court
within the United States. Judicially it is an unwelcome beast.
I can
hardly believe the fact that, apart from the courtroom participants,
only Memphis TV reporter Wendell Stacy and I attended from beginning to
end this historic three-and-one-half week trial. Because of journalistic
neglect scarcely anyone else in this land of ours even knows what went
on in it. After critical testimony was given in the trial’s second week
before an almost empty gallery, Barbara Reis, U.S. correspondent for the
Lisbon daily Publico who was there several days, turned to me
and said, “Everything in the U.S. is the trial of the century. O.J.
Simpson’s trial was the trial of the century. Clinton’s trial was the
trial of the century. But this is the trial of the century, and who’s here?”
Many
qualifiers have been attached to the verdict in the King case. It came
not in criminal court but in civil court, where the standards of
evidence are much lower than in criminal court. (For example, the
plaintiffs used unsworn testimony made on audiotapes and videotapes.)
Furthermore, the King family as plaintiffs and Jowers as defendant
agreed ahead of time on much of the evidence.
But
these observations are not entirely to the point. Because of the
government’s “sovereign immunity,” it is not possible to put a U.S.
intelligence agency in the dock of a U.S. criminal court. Such a step
would require authorization by the federal government, which is not
likely to indict itself. Thanks to the conjunction of a civil court, an
independent judge with a sense of history, and a courageous family and
lawyer, a spiritual breakthrough to an unspeakable truth occurred in
Memphis. It allowed at least a few people (and hopefully many more
through them) to see the forces behind King’s martyrdom and to feel the
responsibility we all share for it through our government. In the end,
twelve jurors, six black and six white, said to everyone willing to
hear: guilty as charged.
We can also thank the unlikely figure of Loyd Jowers for providing a way into that truth.
Loyd
Jowers: When the frail, 73-year-old Jowers became ill after three days
in court, Judge Swearengen excused him. Jowers did not testify and said
through his attorney, Lewis Garrison, that he would plead the Fifth
Amendment if subpoenaed. His discretion was too late. In 1993 against
the advice of Garrison, Jowers had gone public. Prompted by William
Pepper’s progress as James Earl Ray’s attorney in uncovering Jowers’s
role in the assassination, Jowers told his story to Sam Donaldson on Prime Time Live.
He said he had been asked to help in the murder of King and was told
there would be a decoy (Ray) in the plot. He was also told that the
police “wouldn’t be there that night.”
In
that interview, the transcript of which was read to the jury in the
Memphis courtroom, Jowers said the man who asked him to help in the
murder was a Mafia-connected produce dealer named Frank Liberto.
Liberto, now deceased, had a courier deliver $100,000 for Jowers to hold
at his restaurant, Jim’s Grill, the back door of which opened onto the
dense bushes across from the Lorraine Motel. Jowers said he was visited
the day before the murder by a man named Raul, who brought a rifle in a
box.
As Mike Vinson reported in the March-April Probe,
other witnesses testified to their knowledge of Liberto’s involvement
in King’s slaying. Store-owner John McFerren said he arrived around 5:15
pm, April 4, 1968, for a produce pick-up at Frank Liberto’s warehouse
in Memphis. (King would be shot at 6:0l pm.) When he approached the
warehouse office, McFerren overheard Liberto on the phone inside saying,
“Shoot the son-of-a-bitch on the balcony.”
Café-owner
Lavada Addison, a friend of Liberto’s in the late 1970’s, testified
that Liberto had told her he “had Martin Luther King killed.” Addison’s
son, Nathan Whitlock, said when he learned of this conversation he asked
Liberto point-blank if he had killed King.
“[Liberto]
said, `I didn’t kill the nigger but I had it done.’ I said, `What about
that other son-of-a-bitch taking credit for it?’ He says, `Ahh, he
wasn’t nothing but a troublemaker from Missouri. He was a front man . . .
a setup man.'”
The
jury also heard a tape recording of a two-hour-long confession Jowers
made at a fall 1998 meeting with Martin Luther King’s son Dexter and
former UN Ambassador Andrew Young. On the tape Jowers says that meetings
to plan the assassination occurred at Jim’s Grill. He said the planners
included undercover Memphis Police Department officer Marrell
McCollough (who now works for the Central Intelligence Agency, and who
is referenced in the trial transcript as Merrell McCullough), MPD
Lieutentant Earl Clark (who died in 1987), a third police officer, and
two men Jowers did not know but thought were federal agents.
Young,
who witnessed the assassination, can be heard on the tape identifying
McCollough as the man kneeling beside King’s body on the balcony in a
famous photograph. According to witness Colby Vernon Smith, McCollough
had infiltrated a Memphis community organizing group, the Invaders,
which was working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In
his trial testimony Young said the MPD intelligence agent was “the guy
who ran up [the balcony stairs] with us to see Martin.”
Jowers
says on the tape that right after the shot was fired he received a
smoking rifle at the rear door of Jim’s Grill from Clark. He broke the
rifle down into two pieces and wrapped it in a tablecloth. Raul picked
it up the next day. Jowers said he didn’t actually see who fired the
shot that killed King, but thought it was Clark, the MPD’s best
marksman.
Young
testified that his impression from the 1998 meeting was that the aging,
ailing Jowers “wanted to get right with God before he died, wanted to
confess it and be free of it.” Jowers denied, however, that he knew the
plot’s purpose was to kill King — a claim that seemed implausible to
Dexter King and Young. Jowers has continued to fear jail, and he had
directed Garrison to defend him on the grounds that he didn’t know the
target of the plot was King. But his interview with Donaldson suggests
he was not naïve on this point.
Loyd Jowers’s story opened the door to testimony that explored the systemic nature of the murder in seven other basic areas:
background to the assassination;
local conspiracy;
the crime scene;
the rifle;
Raul;
broader conspiracy;
James Lawson, King’s friend and an organizer with SCLC,
testified that King’s stands on Vietnam and the Poor People’s Campaign
had created enemies in Washington. He said King’s speech at New York’s Riverside Church
on April 4, 1967, which condemned the Vietnam War and identified the
U.S. government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world
today,” provoked intense hostility in the White House and FBI.
Hatred
and fear of King deepened, Lawson said, in response to his plan to hold
the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C. King wanted to shut down
the nation’s capital in the spring of 1968 through massive civil
disobedience until the government agreed to abolish poverty. King saw
the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike as the beginning of a nonviolent
revolution that would redistribute income.
“I have no doubt,” Lawson said, “that the government viewed all this seriously enough to plan his assassination.”
Coretta
Scott King testified that her husband had to return to Memphis in early
April 1968 because of a violent demonstration there for which he had
been blamed. Moments after King arrived in Memphis to join the
sanitation workers’ march there on March 28, 1968, the scene turned
violent — subverted by government provocateurs, Lawson said. Thus King
had to return to Memphis on April 3 and prepare for a truly nonviolent
march, Mrs. King said, to prove SCLC could still carry out a nonviolent
campaign in Washington.
On the night of April 3, 1968, Floyd E. Newsum, a black
firefighter and civil rights activist, heard King’s “I’ve Been to the
Mountain Top” speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis. On his return home,
Newsum returned a phone call from his lieutenant and was told he had
been temporarily transferred, effective April 4, from Fire Station 2,
located across the street from the Lorraine Motel, to Fire Station 31.
Newsum testified that he was not needed at the new station. However, he
was needed at his old station because his departure left it “out of
service unless somebody else was detailed to my company in my stead.”
After making many queries, Newsum was eventually told he had been
transferred by request of the police department.
The
only other black firefighter at Fire Station 2, Norvell E. Wallace,
testified that he, too, received orders from his superior officer on the
night of April 3 for a temporary transfer to a fire station far removed
from the Lorraine Motel. He was later told vaguely that he had been
threatened.
Wallace
guessed it was because “I was putting out fires,” he told the jury with
a smile. Asked if he ever received a satisfactory explanation for his
transfer Wallace answered, “No. Never did. Not to this day.”
In the March-April Probe,
Mike Vinson described the similar removal of Ed Redditt, a black
Memphis Police Department detective, from his Fire Station 2
surveillance post two hours before King’s murder.
To
understand the Redditt incident, it is important to note that it was
Redditt himself who initiated his watch on Dr. King from the firehouse
across the street. Redditt testified that when King’s party and the
police accompanying them (including Detective Redditt) arrived from the
airport at the Lorraine Motel on April 3, he “noticed something that was
unusual.” When Inspector Don Smith, who was in charge of security, told
Redditt he could leave, Redditt “noticed there was nobody else there.
In the past when we were assigned to Dr. King [when Redditt had been
part of a black security team for King], we stayed with him. I saw
nobody with him. So I went across the street and asked the Fire
Department could we come in and observe from the rear, which we did.”
Given Redditt’s concerns for King’s safety, his particular watch on the
Lorraine may not have fit into others’ plans.
Redditt
testified that late in the afternoon of April 4, MPD Intelligence
Officer Eli Arkin came to Fire Station 2 to take him to Central
Headquarters. There Police and Fire Director Frank Holloman (formerly an
FBI agent for 25 years, seven of them as supervisor of J. Edgar
Hoover’s office) ordered Redditt home, against his wishes and
accompanied by Arkin. The reason Holloman gave Redditt for his removal
from the King watch Redditt had initiated the day before was that his
life had been threatened.
In
an interview after the trial, Redditt told me the story of how his 1978
testimony on this question before the House Select Committee on
Assassinations was part of a heavily pressured cover-up. “It was a
farce,” he said, “a total farce.”
Redditt
had been subpoenaed by the HSCA to testify, as he came to realize, not
so much on his strange removal from Fire Station 2 as the fact that he
had spoken about it openly to writers and researchers. The HSCA focused
narrowly on the discrepancy between Redditt’s surveiling King (as he was
doing) and acting as security (an impression Redditt had given writers
interviewing him) in order to discredit the story of his removal.
Redditt was first grilled by the committee for eight straight hours in a
closed executive session. After a day of hostile questioning, Redditt
finally said late in the afternoon, “I came here as a friend of the
investigation, not as an enemy of the investigation. You don’t want to
deal with the truth.” He told the committee angrily that if the secret
purpose behind the King conspiracy was, like the JFK conspiracy, “to
protect the country, just tell the American people! They’ll be happy!
And quit fooling the folks and trying to pull the wool over their eyes.”
When
the closed hearing was over, Redditt received a warning call from a
friend in the White House who said, “Man, your life isn’t worth a wooden
nickel.”
Redditt
said his public testimony the next day “was a set-up”: “The bottom line
on that one was that Senator Baker decided that I wouldn’t go into this
open hearing without an attorney. When the lawyer and I arrived at the
hearing, we were ushered right back out across town to the executive
director in charge of the investigation. [We] looked through a book, to
look at the questions and answers.”
“So
in essence what they were saying was: `This is what you’re going to
answer to, and this is how you’re going to answer.’ It was all made up
— all designed, questions and answers, what to say and what not to say.
A total farce.”
Former
MPD Captain Jerry Williams followed Redditt to the witness stand.
Williams had been responsible for forming a special security unit of
black officers whenever King came to Memphis (the unit Redditt had
served on earlier). Williams took pride in providing the best possible
protection for Dr. King, which included, he said, advising him never to
stay at the Lorraine “because we couldn’t furnish proper security
there.” (“It was just an open view,” he explained to me later, “Anybody
could . . . There was no protection at all. To me that was a set-up from
the very beginning.”)
Hatred and
fear of King deepened, Lawson said, in response to his plan to hold the
Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C. King wanted to shut down the
nation’s capital in the spring of 1968 through massive civil
disobedience until the government agreed to abolish poverty. King saw
the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike as the beginning of a nonviolent
revolution that would redistribute income. “I have no doubt,” Lawson
said, “that the government viewed all this seriously enough to plan his
assassination.”
For
King’s April 3, 1968 arrival, however, Williams was for some reason not
asked to form the special black bodyguard. He was told years later by
his inspector (a man whom Jowers identified as a participant in the
planning meetings at Jim’s Grill) that the change occurred because
somebody in King’s entourage had asked specifically for no black
security officers. Williams told the jury he was bothered by the
omission “even to this day.”
Leon
Cohen, a retired New York City police officer, testified that in 1968
he had become friendly with the Lorraine Motel’s owner and manager,
Walter Bailey (now deceased). On the morning after King’s murder, Cohen
spoke with a visibly upset Bailey outside his office at the Lorraine.
Bailey told Cohen about a strange request that had forced him to change
King’s room to the location where he was shot.
Bailey
explained that the night before King’s arrival he had received a call
“from a member of Dr. King’s group in Atlanta.” The caller (whom Bailey
said he knew but referred to only by the pronoun “he”) wanted the motel
owner to change King’s room. Bailey said he was adamantly opposed to
moving King, as instructed, from an inner court room behind the motel
office (which had better security) to an outside balcony room exposed to
public view.
“If they had listened to me,” Bailey said, “this wouldn’t have happened.”
Philip Melanson, author of the Martin Luther King Assassination (1991),
described his investigation into the April 4 pullback of four tactical
police units that had been patrolling the immediate vicinity of the
Lorraine Motel. Melanson asked MPD Inspector Sam Evans (now deceased),
commander of the units, why they were pulled back the morning of April
4, in effect making an assassin’s escape much easier. Evans said he gave
the order at the request of a local pastor connected with King’s party,
Rev. Samuel Kyles. (Melanson wrote in his book that Kyles emphatically
denied making any such request.) Melanson said the idea that MPD
security would be determined at such a time by a local pastor’s request
made no sense whatsoever.
Olivia
Catling lived a block away from the Lorraine on Mulberry Street.
Catling had planned to walk down the street the evening of April 4 in
the hope of catching a glimpse of King at the motel. She testified that
when she heard the shot a little after six o’clock, she said, “Oh, my
God, Dr. King is at that hotel!” She ran with her two children to the
corner of Mulberry and Huling streets, just north of the Lorraine. She
saw a man in a checkered shirt come running out of the alley beside a
building across from the Lorraine. The man jumped into a green 1965
Chevrolet just as a police car drove up behind him. He gunned the
Chevrolet around the corner and up Mulberry past Catling’s house moving
her to exclaim, “It’s going to take us six months to pay for the rubber
he’s burning up!!” The police, she said, ignored the man and blocked off
a street, leaving his car free to go the opposite way.
I
visited Catling in her home, and she told me the man she had seen
running was not James Earl Ray. “I will go into my grave saying that was
not Ray, because the gentleman I saw was heavier than Ray.”
“The
police,” she told me, “asked not one neighbor [around the Lorraine],
`What did you see?’ Thirty-one years went by. Nobody came and asked one
question. I often thought about that. I even had nightmares over that,
because they never said anything. How did they let him get away?”
Catling
also testified that from her vantage point on the corner of Mulberry
and Huling she could see a fireman standing alone across from the motel
when the police drove up. She heard him say to the police, “The shot
came from that clump of bushes,” indicating the heavily overgrown brushy
area facing the Lorraine and adjacent to Fire Station 2.
Earl Caldwell was a New York Times reporter in his room
at the Lorraine Motel the evening of April 4. In videotaped testimony,
Caldwell said he heard what he thought was a bomb blast at 6:00 p.m.
When he ran to the door and looked out, he saw a man crouched in the
heavy part of the bushes across the street. The man was looking over at
the Lorraine’s balcony. Caldwell wrote an article about the figure in
the bushes but was never questioned about what he had seen by any
authorities.
In
a 1993 affidavit from former SCLC official James Orange that was read
into the record, Orange said that on April 4, “James Bevel and I were
driven around by Marrell McCollough, a person who at that time we knew
to be a member of the Invaders, a local community organizing group, and
who we subsequently learned was an undercover agent for the Memphis
Police Department and who now works for the Central Intelligence Agency .
. . [After the shot, when Orange saw Dr. King’s leg dangling over the
balcony], I looked back and saw the smoke. It couldn’t have been more
than five to ten seconds. The smoke came out of the brush area on the
opposite side of the street from the Lorraine Motel. I saw it rise up
from the bushes over there. From that day to this time I have never had
any doubt that the fatal shot, the bullet which ended Dr. King’s life,
was fired by a sniper concealed in the brush area behind the derelict
buildings.
“I
also remember then turning my attention back to the balcony and seeing
Marrell McCollough up on the balcony kneeling over Dr. King, looking as
though he was checking Dr. King for life signs.
“I
also noticed, quite early the next morning around 8 or 9 o’clock, that
all of the bushes and brush on the hill were cut down and cleaned up. It
was as though the entire area of the bushes from behind the rooming
house had been cleared . . .
“I will always remember the puff of white smoke and the cut brush and having never been given a satisfactory explanation.
“When I tried to tell the police at the scene as best I saw they told me to be quiet and to get out of the way.
“I was never interviewed or asked what I saw by any law enforcement authority in all of the time since 1968.”
Also
read into the record were depositions made by Solomon Jones to the FBI
and to the Memphis police. Jones was King’s chauffeur in Memphis. The
FBI document, dated April 13, 1968, says that after King was shot, when
Jones looked across Mulberry Street into the brushy area, “he got a
quick glimpse of a person with his back toward Mulberry Street. . . .
This person was moving rather fast, and he recalls that he believed he
was wearing some sort of light-colored jacket with some sort of a hood
or parka.” In his 11:30 p.m., April 4, 1968 police interview, Jones
provides the same basic information concerning a person leaving the
brushy area hurriedly.
Maynard
Stiles, who in 1968 was a senior official in the Memphis Sanitation
Department, confirmed in his testimony that the bushes near the rooming
house were cut down. At about 7:00 a.m. on April 5, Stiles told the
jury, he received a call from MPD Inspector Sam Evans “requesting
assistance in clearing brush and debris from a vacant lot in the
vicinity of the assassination.” Stiles called another superintendent of
sanitation, who assembled a crew. “They went to that site, and under the
direction of the police department, whoever was in charge there,
proceeded with the clean-up in a slow, methodical, meticulous manner.”
Stiles identified the site as an area overgrown with brush and bushes
across from the Lorraine Motel.
Within
hours of King’s assassination, the crime scene that witnesses were
identifying to the Memphis police as a cover for the shooter had been
sanitized by orders of the police.
Probe readers will again recall from Mike Vinson’s
article three key witnesses in the Memphis trial who offered evidence
counter to James Earl Ray’s rifle being the murder weapon:
Judge Joe Brown;
Judge Arthur Hanes Jr.;
William Hamblin.
Judge Joe Brown, who had presided over two years of hearings
on the rifle, testified that “67% of the bullets from my tests did not
match the Ray rifle.” He added that the unfired bullets found wrapped
with it in a blanket were metallurgically different from the bullet
taken from King’s body, and therefore were from a different lot of
ammunition. And because the rifle’s scope had not been sited, Brown
said, “this weapon literally could not have hit the broad side of a
barn.” Holding up the 30.06 Remington 760 Gamemaster rifle, Judge Brown
told the jury, “It is my opinion that this is not the murder weapon.”
Circuit Court Judge Arthur Hanes Jr. of Birmingham, Alabama,
had been Ray’s attorney in 1968. (On the eve of his trial, Ray replaced
Hanes and his father, Arthur Hanes Sr., by Percy Foreman, a decision Ray
told the Haneses one week later was the biggest mistake of his life.)
Hanes testified that in the summer of 1968 he interviewed Guy Canipe,
owner of the Canipe Amusement Company. Canipe was a witness to the
dropping in his doorway of a bundle that held a trove of James Earl Ray
memorabilia, including the rifle, unfired bullets, and a radio with
Ray’s prison identification number on it. This dropped bundle, heaven
(or otherwise) sent for the State’s case against Ray, can be accepted as
credible evidence through a willing suspension of disbelief. As Judge
Hanes summarized the State’s lone-assassin theory (with reference to an
exhibit depicting the scene), “James Earl Ray had fired the shot from
the bathroom on that second floor, come down that hallway into his room
and carefully packed that box, tied it up, then had proceeded across the
walkway the length of the building to the back where that stair from
that door came up, had come down the stairs out the door, placed the
Browning box containing the rifle and the radio there in the Canipe
entryway.” Then Ray presumably got in his car seconds before the
police’s arrival, driving from downtown Memphis to Atlanta unchallenged
in his white Mustang.
Concerning
his interview with the witness who was the cornerstone of this theory,
Judge Hanes told the jury that Guy Canipe (now deceased) provided
“terrific evidence”: “He said that the package was dropped in his
doorway by a man headed south down Main Street on foot, and that this
happened at about ten minutes before the shot was fired [emphasis added].”
Hanes
thought Canipe’s witnessing the bundle-dropping ten minutes before the
shot was very credible for another reason. It so happened (as confirmed
by Philip Melanson’s research) that at 6:00 p.m. one of the MPD tactical
units that had been withdrawn earlier by Inspector Evans, TACT 10, had
returned briefly to the area with its 16 officers for a rest break at
Fire Station 2. Thus, as Hanes testified, with the firehouse brimming
with police, some already watching King across the street, “when they
saw Dr. King go down, the fire house erupted like a beehive . . . In
addition to the time involved [in Ray’s presumed odyssey from the
bathroom to the car], it was circumstantially almost impossible to
believe that somebody had been able to throw that [rifle] down and
leaave right in the face of that erupting fire station.”
When
I spoke with Judge Hanes after the trial about the startling evidence
he had received from Canipe, he commented, “That’s what I’ve been saying
for 30 years.”
William Hamblin testified not about the rifle thrown down in
the Canipe doorway but rather the smoking rifle Loyd Jowers said he
received at his back door from Earl Clark right after the shooting.
Hamblin recounted a story he was told many times by his friend James
McCraw, who had died.
James
McCraw is already well-known to researchers as the taxi driver who
arrived at the rooming house to pick up Charlie Stephens shortly before
6:00 p.m. on April 4. In a deposition read earlier to the jury, McCraw
said he found Stephens in his room lying on his bed too drunk to get up,
so McCraw turned out the light and left without him — minutes before
Stephens, according to the State, identified Ray in profile passing down
the hall from the bathroom. McCraw also said the bathroom door next to
Stephen’s room was standing wide open, and there was no one in the
bathroom — where again, according to the State, Ray was then balancing
on the tub, about to squeeze the trigger.
William
Hamblin told the jury that he and fellow cab-driver McCraw were close
friends for about 25 years. Hamblin said he probably heard McCraw tell
the same rifle story 50 times, but only when McCraw had been drinking
and had his defenses down.
In
that story, McCraw said that Loyd Jowers had given him the rifle right
after the shooting. According to Hamblin, “Jowers told him to get the
[rifle] and get it out of here now. [McCraw] said that he grabbed his
beer and snatched it out. He had the rifle rolled up in an oil cloth,
and he leapt out the door and did away with it.” McCraw told Hamblin he
threw the rifle off a bridge into the Mississippi River.
Hamblin
said McCraw never revealed publicly what he knew of the rifle because,
like Jowers, he was afraid of being indicted: “He really wanted to come
out with it, but he was involved in it. And he couldn’t really tell the
truth.”
William
Pepper accepted Hamblin’s testimony about McCraw’s disposal of the
rifle over Jowers’s claim to Dexter King that he gave the rifle to Raul.
Pepper said in his closing argument that the actual murder weapon had
been lying “at the bottom of the Mississippi River for over thirty-one
years.”
Maynard
Stiles, who in 1968 was a senior official in the Memphis Sanitation
Department, confirmed in his testimony that the bushes near the rooming
house were cut down. At about 7:00 a.m. on April 5, Stiles told the
jury, he received a call from MPD Inspector Sam Evans “requesting
assistance in clearing brush and debris from a vacant lot in the
vicinity of the assassination. . . . They went to that site, and under
the direction of the police department, whoever was in charge there,
proceeded with the clean-up in a slow, methodical, meticulous manner.” .
. . Within hours of King’s assassination, the crime scene that
witnesses were identifying to the Memphis police as a cover for the
shooter had been sanitized by orders of the police.
One of the most significant developments in the Memphis trial
was the emergence of the mysterious Raul through the testimony of a
series of witnesses.
In
a 1995 deposition by James Earl Ray that was read to the jury, Ray told
of meeting Raul in Montreal in the summer of 1967, three months after
Ray had escaped from a Missouri prison. According to Ray, Raul guided
Ray’s movements, gave him money for the Mustang car and the rifle, and
used both to set him up in Memphis.
Andrew
Young and Dexter King described their meeting with Jowers and Pepper at
which Pepper had shown Jowers a spread of photographs, and Jowers
picked out one as the person named Raul who brought him the rifle to
hold at Jim’s Grill. Pepper displayed the same spread of photos in
court, and Young and King pointed out the photo Jowers had identified as
Raul. (Private investigator John Billings said in separate testimony
that this picture was a passport photograph from 1961, when Raul had
immigrated from Portugal to the U.S.)
The
additional witnesses who identified the photo as Raul’s included:
British merchant seaman Sidney Carthew, who in a videotaped deposition
from England said he had met Raul (who offered to sell him guns) and a
man he thinks was Ray (who wanted to be smuggled onto his ship) in
Montreal in the summer of 1967; Glenda and Roy Grabow, who recognized
Raul as a gunrunner they knew in Houston in the `60s and `70s and who
told Glenda in a rage that he had killed Martin Luther King; Royce
Wilburn, Glenda’s brother, who also knew Raul in Houston; and British
television producer Jack Saltman, who had obtained the passport photo
and showed it to Ray in prison, who identified it as the photo of the
person who had guided him.
Saltman
and Pepper, working on independent investigations, located Raul in
1995. He was living quietly with his family in the northeastern U.S. It
was there in 1997 that journalist Barbara Reis of the Lisbon Publico,
working on a story about Raul, spoke with a member of his family. Reis
testified that she had spoken in Portuguese to a woman in Raul’s family
who, after first denying any connection to Ray’s Raul, said “they” had
visited them. “Who?” Reis asked. “The government,” said the woman. She
said government agents had visited them three times over a three-year
period. The government, she said, was watching over them and monitoring
their phone calls. The woman took comfort and satisfaction in the fact
that her family (so she believed) was being protected by the government.
In
his closing argument Pepper said of Raul: “Now, as I understand it, the
defense had invited Raul to appear here. He is outside this
jurisdiction, so a subpoena would be futile. But he was asked to appear
here. In earlier proceedings there were attempts to depose him, and he
resisted them. So he has not attempted to come forward at all and tell
his side of the story or to defend himself.”
Carthel Weeden, captain of Fire Station 2 in 1968, testified
that he was on duty the morning of April 4 when two U.S. Army officers
approached him. The officers said they wanted a lookout for the Lorraine
Motel. Weeden said they carried briefcases and indicated they had
cameras. Weeden showed the officers to the roof of the fire station. He
left them at the edge of its northeast corner behind a parapet wall.
From there the Army officers had a bird’s-eye view of Dr. King’s balcony
doorway and could also look down on the brushy area adjacent to the
fire station.
The
testimony of writer Douglas Valentine filled in the background of the
men Carthel Weeden had taken up to the roof of Fire Station 2. While
Valentine was researching his book The Phoenix Program (1990), on
the CIA’s notorious counterintelligence program against Vietnamese
villagers, he talked with veterans in military intelligence who had been
re-deployed from the Vietnam War to the sixties antiwar movement. They
told him that in 1968 the Army’s 111th Military Intelligence Group kept
Martin Luther King under 24-hour-a-day surveillance. Its agents were in
Memphis April 4. As Valentine wrote in The Phoenix Program, they “reportedly watched and took photos while King’s assassin moved into position, took aim, fired, and walked away.”
Testimony
which juror David Morphy later described as “awesome” was that of
former CIA operative Jack Terrell, a whistle-blower in the Iran-Contra
scandal. Terrell, who was dying of liver cancer in Florida, testified by
videotape that his close friend J.D. Hill had confessed to him that he
had been a member of an Army sniper team in Memphis assigned to shoot
“an unknown target” on April 4. After training for a triangular
shooting, the snipers were on their way into Memphis to take up
positions in a watertower and two buildings when their mission was
suddenly cancelled. Hill said he realized, when he learned of King’s
assassination the next day, that the team must have been part of a
contingency plan to kill King if another shooter failed.
Terrell
said J.D. Hill was shot to death. His wife was charged with shooting
Hill (in response to his drinking), but she was not indicted. From the
details of Hill’s death, Terrell thought the story about Hill’s wife
shooting him was a cover, and that his friend had been assassinated. In
an interview, Terrell said the CIA’s heavy censorship of his book Disposable Patriot (1992) included changing the paragraph on J.D. Hill’s death, so that it read as if Terrell thought Hill’s wife was responsible.
Walter Fauntroy, Dr. King’s colleague and a 20-year member of
Congress, chaired the subcommittee of the 1976-78 House Select Committee
on Assassinations that investigated King’s assassination. Fauntroy
testified in Memphis that in the course of the HSCA investigation “it
was apparent that we were dealing with very sophisticated forces.” He
discovered electronic bugs on his phone and TV set. When Richard
Sprague, HSCA’s first chief investigator, said he would make available
all CIA, FBI, and military intelligence records, he became a focus of
controversy. Sprague was forced to resign. His successor made no demands
on U.S. intelligence agencies. Such pressures contributed to the
subcommittee’s ending its investigation, as Fauntroy said, “without
having thoroughly investigated all of the evidence that was apparent.”
Its formal conclusion was that Ray assassinated King, that he probably
had help, and that the government was not involved.
When
I interviewed Fauntroy in a van on his way back to the Memphis Airport,
I asked about the implications of his statements in an April 4, 1997 Atlanta Constitution
article. The article said Fauntroy now believed “Ray did not fire the
shot that killed King and was part of a larger conspiracy that possibly
involved federal law enforcement agencies, ” and added: “Fauntroy said
he kept silent about his suspicions because of fear for himself and his
family.”
Fauntroy
told me that when he left Congress in 1991 he had the opportunity to
read through his files on the King assassination, including raw
materials that he’d never seen before. Among them was information from
J. Edgar Hoover’s logs. There he learned that in the three weeks before
King’s murder the FBI chief held a series of meetings with “persons
involved with the CIA and military intelligence in the Phoenix operation
in Southeast Asia.” Why? Fauntroy also discovered there had been Green
Berets and military intelligence agents in Memphis when King was killed.
“What were they doing there?” he asked.
When
Fauntroy had talked about his decision to write a book about what he’d
“uncovered since the assassination committee closed down,” he was
promptly investigated and charged by the Justice Department with having
violated his financial reports as a member of Congress. His lawyer told
him that he could not understand why the Justice Department would bring
up a charge on the technicality of one misdated check. Fauntroy said he
interpreted the Justice Department’s action to mean: “Look, we’ll get
you on something if you continue this way. . . . I just thought: I’ll
tell them I won’t go and finish the book, because it’s surely not worth
it.”
At
the conclusion of his trial testimony, Fauntroy also spoke about his
fear of an FBI attempt to kill James Earl Ray when he escaped from
Tennessee’s Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in June 1977. Congressman
Fauntroy had heard reports about an FBI SWAT team having been sent into
the area around the prison to shoot Ray and prevent his testifying at
the HSCA hearings. Fauntroy asked HSCA chair Louis Stokes to alert
Tennesssee Governor Ray Blanton to the danger to the HSCA’s star witness
and Blanton’s most famous prisoner. When Stokes did, Blanton called off
the FBI SWAT team, Ray was caught safely by local authorities, and in
Fauntroy’s words, “we all breathed a sigh of relief.”
The
Memphis jury also learned how a 1993-98 Tennessee State investigation
into the King assassination was, if not a cover-up, then an inquiry
noteworthy for its lack of witnesses. Lewis Garrison had subpoenaed the
head of the investigation, Mark Glankler, in an effort to discover
evidence helpful to Jowers’s defense. William Pepper then cross-examined
Glankler on the witnesses he had interviewed in his investigation:
Q. (BY MR. PEPPER) Mr. Glankler, did you interview Mr. Maynard Stiles, whose testifying —
A. I know the name, Counselor, but I don’t think I took a statement from Maynard Stiles or interviewed him. I don’t think I did.
Q. Did you ever interview Mr. Floyd Newsum?
A. Can you help me with what he does?
Q. Yes. He was a black fireman who was assigned to Station Number 2.
A. I don’t recall the name, Counsel.
Q. All right. Ever interview Mr. Norvell Wallace?
A. I don’t recall that name offhand either.
Q. Ever interview Captain Jerry Williams?
A. Fireman also?
Q. Jerry Williams was a policeman. He was a homicide detective.
A. No, sir, I don’t — I really don’t recall that name.
Q. Fair enough. Did you ever interview Mr. Charles Hurley, a private citizen?
A. Does he have a wife named Peggy?
Q. Yes.
A. I think we did talk with a Peggy Hurley or attempted to.
Q. Did you interview a Mr. Leon Cohen?
A. I just don’t recall without —
Q. Did you ever interview Mr. James McCraw?
A. I believe we did. He talks with a device?
Q. Yes, the voice box..
A. Yes, okay. I believe we did talk to him, yes, sir.
Q. How about Mrs. Olivia Catling, who has testified —
A. I’m sorry, the last name again.
Q. Catling, C A T L I N G.
A. No, sir, that name doesn’t —
Q. Did you ever interview Ambassador Andrew Young?
A. No, sir.
Q. You didn’t?
A. No, sir, not that I recall.
Q. Did you ever interview Judge Arthur Hanes?
A. No, sir.
So
it goes — downhill. The above is Glankler’s high-water mark: He got
two out of the first ten (if one counts Charles and Peggy Hurley as a
yes). Pepper questioned Glankler about 25 key witnesses. The jury was
familiar with all of them from prior testimony in the trial. Glankler
could recall his office interviewing a total of three. At the
twenty-fifth-named witness, Earl Caldwell, Pepper finally let Glankler
go:
Q. Did you ever interview a former New York Times journalist, a New York Daily News correspondent named Earl Caldwell?
A. Earl Caldwell? Not that I recall.
Q. You never interviewed him in the course of your investigation?
A. I just don’t recall that name.
MR. PEPPER: I have no further comments about this investigation — no further questions for this investigator.
Pepper
went a step beyond saying government agencies were responsible for the
assassination. To whom in turn were those murderous agencies
responsible? Not so much to government officials per se, Pepper
asserted, as to the economic powerholders they represented who stood in
the even deeper shadows behind the FBI, Army Intelligence, and their
affiliates in covert action. By 1968, Pepper told the jury, “And today
it is much worse in my view” — “the decision-making processes in the
United States were the representatives, the footsoldiers of the very
economic interests that were going to suffer as a result of these times
of changes [being actived by King].”
To say that
U.S. government agencies killed Martin Luther King on the verge of the
Poor People’s Campaign is a way into the deeper truth that the economic
powers that be (which dictate the policies of those agencies) killed
him. In the Memphis prelude to the Washington campaign, King posed a
threat to those powers of a non-violent revolutionary force. Just how
determined they were to stop him before he reached Washington was
revealed in the trial by the size and complexity of the plot to kill
him.
The vision behind the trial
In his sprawling, brilliant work that underlies the trial, Orders to Kill
(1995), William Pepper introduced readers to most of the 70 witnesses
who took the stand in Memphis or were cited by deposition, tape, and
other witnesses. To keep this article from reading like either an
encyclopedia or a Dostoevsky novel, I have highlighted only a few.
(Thanks to the King Center, the full trial trascript is available online at http://www.thekingcenter.com/tkc/trial.html.)
What Pepper’s work has accomplished in print and in court can be
measured by the intensity of the media attacks on him, shades of Jim
Garrison. But even Garrison did not gain the support of the Kennedy
family (in his case) or achieve a guilty verdict. The Memphis trial has
opened wide a door to our assassination politics. Anyone who walks
through it is faced by an either/or: to declare naked either the empire
or oneself.
The
King family has chosen the former. The vision behind the trial is at
least as much theirs as it is William Pepper’s, for ultimately it is the
vision of Martin Luther King Jr. Coretta King explained to the jury her
family’s purpose in pursuing the lawsuit against Jowers: “This is not
about money. We’re concerned about the truth, having the truth come out
in a court of law so that it can be documented for all. I’ve always felt
that somehow the truth would be known, and I hoped that I would live to
see it. It is important I think for the sake of healing so many people
— my family, other people, the nation.”
Dexter King, the plaintiffs’ final witness, said the trial was about why his
father had been killed: “From a holistic side, in terms of the people,
in terms of the masses, yes, it has to be dealt with because it is not
about who killed Martin Luther King Jr., my father. It is not
necessarily about all of those details. It is about: Why was he
killed? Because if you answer the why, you will understand the same
things are still happening. Until we address that, we’re all in trouble.
Because if it could happen to him, if it can happen to this family, it
can happen to anybody.
“It
is so amazing for me that as soon as this issue of potential
involvement of the federal government came up, all of a sudden the media
just went totally negative against the family. I couldn’t understand
that. I kept asking my mother, `What is going on?’
“She
reminded me. She said, `Dexter, your dad and I have lived through this
once already. You have to understand that when you take a stand against
the establishment, first, you will be attacked. There is an attempt to
discredit. Second, [an attempt] to try and character-assassinate. And
third, ultimately physical termination or assassination.’
“Now
the truth of the matter is if my father had stopped and not spoken out,
if he had just somehow compromised, he would probably still be here
with us today. But the minute you start talking about redistribution of
wealth and stopping a major conflict, which also has economic
ramifications . . . “
In
his closing argument, William Pepper identified economic power as the
root reason for King’s assassination: “When Martin King opposed the war,
when he rallied people to oppose the war, he was threatening the bottom
lines of some of the largest defense contractors in this country. This
was about money. He was threatening the weapons industry, the hardware,
the armaments industries, that would all lose as a result of the end of
the war.
“The
second aspect of his work that also dealt with money that caused a
great deal of consternation in the circles of power in this land had to
do with his commitment to take a massive group of people to Washington. .
. . Now he began to talk about a redistribution of wealth, in this the
wealthiest country in the world.”
Pepper
went a step beyond saying government agencies were responsible for the
assassination. To whom in turn were those murderous agencies
responsible? Not so much to government officials per se, Pepper
asserted, as to the economic powerholders they represented who stood in
the even deeper shadows behind the FBI, Army Intelligence, and their
affiliates in covert action. By 1968, Pepper told the jury, “And today
it is much worse in my view” — “the decision-making processes in the
United States were the representatives, the footsoldiers of the very
economic interests that were going to suffer as a result of these times
of changes [being actived by King].”
To
say that U.S. government agencies killed Martin Luther King on the
verge of the Poor People’s Campaign is a way into the deeper truth that
the economic powers that be (which dictate the policies of those
agencies) killed him. In the Memphis prelude to the Washington campaign,
King posed a threat to those powers of a non-violent revolutionary
force. Just how determined they were to stop him before he reached
Washington was revealed in the trial by the size and complexity of the
plot to kill him.
Dexter
King testified to the truth of his father’s death with transforming
clarity: “If what you are saying goes against what certain people
believe you should be saying, you will be dealt with — maybe not the
way you are dealt with in China, which is overtly. But you will be dealt
with covertly. The result is the same.
“We
are talking about a political assassination in modern-day times, a
domestic political assassination. Of course, it is ironic, but I was
watching a special on the CIA. They say, `Yes, we’ve participated in
assassinations abroad but, no, we could never do anything like that
domestically.’ Well, I don’t know. . . . Whether you call it CIA or some
other innocuous acronym or agency, killing is killing.
“The
issue becomes: What do we do about this? Do we endorse a policy in this
country, in this life, that says if we don’t agree with someone, the
only means to deal with it is through elimination and termination? I
think my father taught us the opposite, that you can overcome without
violence.
“We’re
not in this to make heads roll. We’re in this to use the teachings that
my father taught us in terms of nonviolent reconciliation. It works. We
know that it works. So we’re not looking to put people in prison. What
we’re looking to do is get the truth out so that this nation can learn
and know officially. If the family of the victim, if we’re saying we’re
willing to forgive and embark upon a process that allows for
reconciliation, why can’t others?”
When
pressed by Pepper to name a specific amount of damages for the death of
his father, Dexter King said, “One hundred dollars.”
The Verdict
The
jury returned with a verdict after two and one-half hours. Judge James
E. Swearengen of Shelby County Circuit Court, a gentle African-American
man in his last few days before retirement, read the verdict aloud. The
courtroom was now crowded with spectators, almost all black.
“In
answer to the question, `Did Loyd Jowers participate in a conspiracy to
do harm to Dr. Martin Luther King?’ your answer is `Yes.'” The man on
my left leaned forward and whispered softly, “Thank you, Jesus.”
The
judge continued: “Do you also find that others, including governmental
agencies, were parties to this conspiracy as alleged by the defendant?’
Your answer to that one is also `Yes.'” An even more heartfelt whisper:
“Thank you, Jesus!”
Perhaps
the lesson of the King assassination is that our government understands
the power of nonviolence better than we do, or better than we want to.
In the spring of 1968, when Martin King was marching (and Robert Kennedy
was campaigning), King was determined that massive, nonviolent civil
disobedience would end the domination of democracy by corporate and
military power. The powers that be took Martin Luther King seriously.
They dealt with him in Memphis.
Thirty-two years
after Memphis, we know that the government that now honors Dr. King
with a national holiday also killed him. As will once again become
evident when the Justice Department releases the findings of its
“limited re-investigation” into King’s death, the government (as a
footsoldier of corporate power) is continuing its cover-up — just as it
continues to do in the closely related murders of John and Robert
Kennedy and Malcolm X.
David
Morphy, the only juror to grant an interview, said later: “We can look
back on it and say that we did change history. But that’s not why we did
it. It was because there was an overwhelming amount of evidence and
just too many odd coincidences.
“Everything
from the police department being pulled back, to the death threat on
Redditt, to the two black firefighters being pulled off, to the military
people going up on top of the fire station, even to them going back to
that point and cutting down the trees. Who in their right mind would go
and destroy a crime scene like that the morning after? It was just very,
very odd.”
I
drove the few blocks to the house on Mulberry Street, one block north
of the Lorraine Motel (now the National Civil Rights Museum). When I
rapped loudly on Olivia Catling’s security door, she was several minutes
in coming. She said she’d had the flu. I told her the jury’s verdict,
and she smiled. “So I can sleep now. For years I could still hear that
shot. After 31 years, my mind is at ease. So I can sleep now, knowing
that some kind of peace has been brought to the King family. And that’s
the best part about it.”
Perhaps
the lesson of the King assassination is that our government understands
the power of nonviolence better than we do, or better than we want to.
In the spring of 1968, when Martin King was marching (and Robert Kennedy
was campaigning), King was determined that massive, nonviolent civil
disobedience would end the domination of democracy by corporate and
military power. The powers that be took Martin Luther King seriously.
They dealt with him in Memphis.
Thirty-two
years after Memphis, we know that the government that now honors Dr.
King with a national holiday also killed him. As will once again become
evident when the Justice Department releases the findings of its
“limited re-investigation” into King’s death, the government (as a
footsoldier of corporate power) is continuing its cover-up — just as it
continues to do in the closely related murders of John and Robert
Kennedy and Malcolm X.
The
faithful in a nonviolent movement that hopes to change the distribution
of wealth and power in the U.S.A. — as Dr. King’s vision, if made
real, would have done in 1968 — should be willing to receive the same
kind of reward that King did in Memphis. As each of our religious
traditions has affirmed from the beginning, that recurring story of
martyrdom (“witness”) is one of ultimate transformation and cosmic good
news
Martin Luther King‘s murderer — newly released photos and …
… when gunned down while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. … restaurant owner was sued in civil court as part of a conspiracy to murder Martin Luther King.
www.digitaljournal.com/article/305238
- Background to the assassination
- Local conspiracy
- The crime scene
- The rifle
- Raul
- A broader conspiracy
- Cover-up
Filed under: African-American History, Assemblies of God, Bishop Charels E. Blake, Bishop Dale Bronner, Bishop Eddie Long, Bishop George D. McKinney, Bishop Neil Ellis, Bishop Roy L.H. Winbush, Bishop Samuel Green, CBN, Christian, Christian Word Ministries, Chuck Smith, Church of God In Christ, COGIC, Dallas Theological Seminary, Donald Hilliard Ministries, Dr. Martin L. King Assassination, Dr. Martin L. King Jr., Elder Derrick Hutchons, Freemason, Global Destiny, Jesse Jackson, John Ankerberg, John Hagee Ministries, John Hayford, Uncategorized | Tagged: april4-2016, Bishop Charles Blake, Bishop T.D. Jakes, Church of God In Christ, COGIC, Dallas Theological Seminary, Freemason, Jesse Jackson, Joe Van Koevering, Loree Bailey, Mason Temple, Moody Bible Institute, Rhema Bible Training Center | Leave a comment »
…but
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[PDF – 275KB]
“Sir” Thomas More
Sword of Truth 
