40 years after Dr. King’s death
Forty years ago this month, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis with a rifle shot that tore half his face off. The great preacher of nonviolence against racism that had so often turned violently ugly in America died instantly.
As with many other obscene crimes in the second part of the 20th century, a lone assassin was quickly identified. Our great disasters—the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Dr. King, the Oklahoma City bombing, Columbine, 9/11—have been perpetrated by a very small cadre of crazed individuals, it seems.
From knowing there was a change in the Dallas motorcade’s route to having a John Doe 2 conveniently disappear to orders from on high to have jets stand down as passenger planes were hitting New York’s tallest buildings, the incongruities in official stories only puzzle us “conspiracy nuts.” Everyone else hears a story that has more questions than answers and accepts only the answers.
There aren’t many Americans who remember that James Earl Ray was never actually tried for Dr. King’s murder, although he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. End of story? Not in the eyes of the King family, its close associates of, of course, those conspiracy nuts.
David Ray Griffin, a professor of religion who writes brilliantly about the problems in the official version of the 9/11 story, has been tarred with that label. In The New Pearl Harbor, Griffin discusses the easy use of the term “conspiracy theory” in his introduction,
“It seems almost a requirement of admission into public discourse to announce that one rejects conspiracy theories of all sorts. We accept a conspiracy theory whenever we believe that two or more people have conspired in secret to achieve some goal, such as to rob a bank, defraud customers or fix prices. We would be more honest, therefore, if we followed the precedent of Michael Moore, who has said, “Now I’m not into conspiracy theories, except the ones that are true.”
On April 4, four decades to the day of the murder, CNN aired Eyewitness to Murder, a documentary examining Dr. King’s death. To CNN’s credit, it raised the issue of James Earl Ray’s not firing the deadly rifle shot and included an interview with attorney William Pepper, who makes the case in Orders to Kill that Ray wasn’t the gunman.
The King family, including the late Coretta Scott King, and the civil rights icon Andrew Young, had endured FBI harassment and J. Edgar Hoover’s covert wiretaps by the time that James Earl Ray was supposed to have fired a single shot into Dr. King’s head. Hoover’s campaign of intimidation included surveillance of Dr. King’s infidelity and the threat to send the tapes to Mrs. King.
A year to the date that Dr. King was assassinated, he delivered one of his most rousing speeches at New York’s Riverside Church. Titled Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence, it took a courageous stand against the moral shame of the war. “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam,” he said.
During Hoover’s campaign of intimidation, where was James Earl Ray? When powerful supporters of the escalation in Vietnam were outraged that Dr. King had spoken out against it, where was James Earl Ray? It seems that James Earl Ray was only there when he needed to be at the cheap boarding house opposite the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968.
I watched CNN’s report with our 12-year-olds. Our son, who’s been known to march to a different brass band instead of just to a different drummer, asked me why Ray had left his rifle, bedspread and the underwear laundry tag that had his name on it in a bundle on the sidewalk. “Didn’t he know he was going to get caught if he left his stuff there?” asked my son. I had to answer that no one would be that dumb unless he or someone else wanted to make sure he was identified. It’s amazing how even a 12-year-old can become a conspiracy nut just by asking the right question.
To Dr. King’s family and Andrew Young, the idea that a lone gunman and not the powerful interests that had more to lose if Dr. King continued speaking out was the guilty party seemed incredible. While CNN had to respect the integrity of these honorable people by raising the issue that Ray didn’t actually fire the fatal shot, it didn’t have the guts to end the program with that question.
A hack government prosecutor laughingly dismissed the notion of a conspiracy by using the old saw that it’s impossible to keep a plot a secret if several people are involved. Hundreds of people knew about the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb during World War II but no one spoke out until the “destroyer of worlds “ as Dr. Robert Oppenheimer termed atomic power in a quote from the Bhagavad-Gita, obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Without the publication of the Pentagon Papers, how much would still be hidden about Vietnam? If whistleblower Dr. Frederic Whitehurst hadn’t spoken out about the failures of the FBI Lab, would it still continue manufacturing evidence to build faulty cases?
James Earl Ray maintained that an operative who went by the name Raoul had manipulated him into buying the right kind of rifle and checking in at the right boarding house. Given the intrigues of the MKULTRA experiments that the CIA conducted to study mind control and its COINTELPRO program of widespread spying on American citizens in the 1960s, the notion that Dr. King’s death was the result of dirty tricks isn’t farfetched.
Peace groups and anti-establishment organizations have always been harassed. In the 1990s, the FBI had a VAAPCON task force that investigated abortion clinic bombings. Roman Catholic groups such as the US Conference of Bishops and Dr. Jerry Falwell were among its surveillance targets. It wasn’t until Freedom of Information Act requests revealed the surveillance that the public knew about it.
Dr. King’s standing as a moral force against the Vietnam War would have had a devastating effect on the decision to send more of America’s black and white poor to die overseas. Immediately after his death, cities burned, riots erupted and black and white communities grew further apart in fear instead of coming together to end an unpopular war.
Racist cops had turned pressure hoses and dogs on black teens marching peacefully. White men could beat 14-year-old Emmett Till to death and Viola Liuzzo could be shot with other civil rights workers. Judges could make a mockery of justice by not punishing crimes against black people. Yet no one targeted the nation’s foremost advocate of racial equality until a freshly released convict named James Earl Ray decided to take him out and then leave incriminating evidence on a Memphis sidewalk to be found by police. Who’s a conspiracy theorist now?
The pattern of injustice inflicted on black people by white people protected by the law had existed for hundreds of years before James Earl Ray supposedly silenced Dr. King by himself. On CNN’s report, a black police officer spoke regretfully about being told not to protect Dr. King during his time in Memphis. A white police officer spoke of personnel from the 11th Military Intelligence Group who had been to the roof opposite Dr. King’s motel room before his visit. Add CNN to the list of those spreading conspiracy theories.
Cui bono is a Latin phrase that means “whose benefit.” When someone is found murdered, detectives ask themselves who would have benefited from the death. Spouses who have taken out large insurance policies on a deceased husband or wife would benefit by cashing in. A business associate whose theft would have been discovered by the deceased would benefit, too.
In the assassination of Dr. King, cui bono? A petty criminal named James Earl Ray or more powerful forces who would have found it convenient to have a moral voice silenced? CNN didn’t have the gumption to follow through on the questions raised in its own report, but that doesn’t mean those questions should be ignored in favor of another lone gunman theory.
In memory of Dr. and Mrs. King, we should have the courage to ask them.
