Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr American Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Robert Abbott Sengstacke/Archive Photos/Getty Images Updated January 15, 2016. At 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 1968, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was hit by a sniper's bullet. King had been standing on the balcony in front of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, when, without warning, he was shot. The .30-caliber rifle bullet entered King's right cheek, traveled through his neck, and finally stopped at his shoulder blade. King was immediately taken to a nearby hospital but was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. Violence and controversy followed. In outrage of the murder, many blacks took to the streets across the United States in a massive wave of riots. The FBI investigated the crime, but many believed them partially or fully responsible for the assassination. An escaped convict by the name of James Earl Ray was arrested, but many people, including some of Martin Luther King Jr.'s own family, believe he was innocent.

continue reading below our video 4 Tips for Improving Test Performance What happened that evening? Martin Luther King Jr: A Dedicated Leader When Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged as the leader of the a Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, he began a long tenure as the spokesperson for nonviolent protest in the Civil Rights Movement . As a Baptist minister, he was a moral leader to the community. Plus, he was charismatic and had a powerful way of speaking. He was also a man of vision and determination. He never stopped dreaming of what could be. Yet he was a man, not a God. He was most often overworked and overtired. And he had a fondness for the private company of women. And though he was the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize winner , he did not have complete control over the Civil Rights Movement. By 1968, violence had edged its way into the movement. Black Panther Party members carried loaded weapons; riots had erupted across the country; and numerous civil rights organizations had taken up the mantra "Black Power!" Yet Martin Luther King held strong to his beliefs, even as he saw the Civil Rights Movement being torn in two.

Violence is what brought King back to Memphis in April 1968. Striking Sanitation Workers in Memphis On February 12, thirteen hundred African-American sanitation workers in Memphis went on strike. Though there had been a long history of grievances, the strike was begun as a response to a January 31 incident in which 22 black sanitation workers were sent home without pay during bad weather while all the white workers remained on the job. When the City of Memphis refused to negotiate with the 1,300 striking workers, King and other civil rights leaders were asked to visit Memphis in support. On Monday, March 18, King managed to fit in a quick stop in Memphis, where he spoke to over 15,000 who had gathered at Mason Temple. Ten days later, King arrived in Memphis to lead a march in support of the striking workers. Unfortunately, as King led the crowd, a few of the protesters got rowdy and smashed the windows of a storefront. The violence spread and soon countless others had taken up sticks and were breaking windows and looting stores. Police moved in to disperse the crowd. Some of the marchers threw stones at the police. The police responded with tear gas and nightsticks.

At least one of the marchers was shot and killed. King was extremely distressed at the violence that had erupted in his own march and became determined not to let violence prevail. He scheduled another march in Memphis for April 8. On April 3, King arrived in Memphis a little later than planned because there had been a bomb threat for his flight before takeoff. That evening, King delivered his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech to a relatively small crowd that had braved the bad weather to hear King speak. King's thoughts were obviously on his mortality, for he discussed the plane threat as well as the time he had been stabbed. He concluded the speech with Well, I don't know what will happen now; we've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life - longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you.

But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the Promised Land. And so I'm happy tonight; I'm not worried about anything; I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. After the speech, King went back to the Lorraine Motel to rest. Prev Martin Luther King Jr Assassination - Black History - HISTORY.com Martin Luther King Jr Assassination Martin Luther King Jr Assassination Author Martin Luther King Jr Assassination URL A+E Networks Introduction In early April 1968, shock waves reverberated around the world with the news that U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. A Baptist minister and founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), King had led the civil rights movement since the mid-1950s, using a combination of powerful words and non-violent tactics such as sit-ins, boycotts and protest marches (including the massive March on Washington in 1963) to fight segregation and achieve significant civil and voting rights advances for African Americans.

His assassination led to an outpouring of anger among black Americans, as well as a period of national mourning that helped speed the way for an equal housing bill that would be the last significant legislative achievement of the civil rights era. Google King Assassination: Background In the last years of his life, King faced mounting criticism from young African-American activists who favored a more confrontational approach to seeking change. These young radicals stuck closer to the ideals of the black nationalist leader Malcolm X (himself assassinated in 1965), who had condemned King’s advocacy of non-violence as “criminal” in the face of the continuing repression suffered by African Americans. As a result of this opposition, King sought to widen his appeal beyond his own race, speaking out publicly against the Vietnam War and working to form a coalition of poor Americans–black and white alike–to address such issues as poverty and unemployment. Did You Know? Among the witnesses at the scene of King's assassination was one of his closest aides, Jesse Jackson. Ordained as a minister soon after King's death, Jackson went on to form Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) and the National Rainbow Coalition and to run twice for U.S.

president, in 1984 and 1988. In the spring of 1968, while preparing for a planned march to Washington to lobby Congress on behalf of the poor, King and other SCLC members were called to Memphis, Tennessee to support a sanitation workers’ strike. On the night of April 3, King gave a speech at the Mason Temple Church in Memphis. In it he seemed to foreshadow his own untimely passing, or at least to strike a particularly reflective note, ending with these now-historic words: “I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Just after 6 p.m. the following day, King was standing on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel, where he and associates were staying, when a sniper’s bullet struck him in the neck.

He was rushed to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead about an hour later, at the age of 39. Shock and distress over the news of King’s death sparked rioting in more than 100 cities around the country, including burning and looting. Amid a wave of national mourning, President Lyndon B. Johnson urged Americans to “reject the blind violence” that had killed King, whom he called the “apostle of nonviolence.” He also called on Congress to speedily pass the civil rights legislation then entering the House of Representatives for debate, calling it a fitting legacy to King and his life’s work. On April 11, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, also known as the Fair Housing Act. King Assassination: Seeking Justice On June 8, authorities apprehended the suspect in King’s murder, a small-time criminal named James Earl Ray, at London’s Heathrow Airport. Witnesses had seen him running from a boarding house near the Lorraine Motel carrying a bundle; prosecutors said he fired the fatal bullet from a bathroom in that building. Authorities found Ray’s fingerprints on the rifle used to kill King, a scope and a pair of binoculars.

On March 10, 1969, Ray pleaded guilty to King’s murder and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. No testimony was heard in his trial. Shortly afterwards, however, Ray recanted his confession, claiming he was the victim of a conspiracy. Ray later found sympathy in an unlikely place: Members of King’s family, including his son Dexter, who publicly met with Ray in 1977 and began arguing for a reopening of his case. Though the U.S. government conducted several investigations into the trial–each time confirming Ray’s guilt as the sole assassin–controversy still surrounds the assassination. At the time of Ray’s death in 1998, King’s widow Coretta Scott King (who in the weeks after her husband’s death had courageously continued the campaign to aid the striking Memphis sanitation workers and carried on his mission of social change through non-violent means) publicly lamented that “America will never have the benefit of Mr. Ray’s trial, which would have produced new revelations about the assassination…as well as establish the facts concerning Mr.

Ray’s innocence.” Impact of the King Assassination Though blacks and whites alike mourned King’s passing, the killing in some ways served to widen the rift between black and white Americans, as many blacks saw King’s assassination as a rejection of their vigorous pursuit of equality through the nonviolent resistance he had championed. His murder, like the killing of Malcolm X in 1965, radicalized many moderate African-American activists, fueling the growth of the Black Power movement and the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s. King has remained the most widely known African-American leader of his era, and the most public face of the civil rights movement, along with its most eloquent voice. A campaign to establish a national holiday in his honor began almost immediately after his death, and its proponents overcame significant opposition–critics pointed to FBI surveillance files suggesting King’s adultery and his influence by Communists–before President Ronald Reagan signed the King holiday bill into law in 1983. Construction is underway on a permanent memorial to King, to be located on the Mall in Washington, D.C.

, near the Lincoln Memorial–the site of King’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington in 1963. Tags The Murder of Martin Luther King Jr. - ABC News ABC News The Murder of Martin Luther King Jr. April 4, 2013 By KATE BUBACZ via WORLD NEWS Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed by James Earl Ray at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., 45 years ago, on April 4, 1968. His death shocked a country rocked by riots, civil discord, and a controversial war. It sparked nationwide protests, a two-month manhunt and an outpouring of grief for the slain civil rights leader who continues to stand for equal rights, peaceful protests and justice for all. Charles Kelly/AP Photo Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. makes his last public appearance at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tenn., on April 3, 1968. The following day, King was assassinated on his motel balcony.

Joseph Louw/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images Civil rights leader Andrew Young, left, and others on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel point in the direction where gunshots came from after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. His body lays at their feet. Robert Abbott Sengstacke/Getty Images As he walks through O'Hare Airport in Chicago, American civil rights leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson holds a copy of the Daily Defender newspaper, which features the headline 'King Murdered!' April 5, 1968. The headline refers to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on the evening of April 4, 1968. William Ryerson/The Boston Globe via Getty Images A man looks at the portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. in the window of Jordan Marsh, a department store in Downtown Crossing in Boston, on April 6, 1968. Getty Images A soldier stands guard on April 8, 1968 on a Washington, D.C., street amid the ruins of buildings that were destroyed during the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Getty Images American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

lies in repose in Memphis, Tenn., as his colleagues Andrew Young, Bernard Lee and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy pay their respects to him. Getty Images The funeral procession for civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 9, 1968 in Atlanta draws thousands of mourners who came to pay their last respects to King at a public service at Morehouse College. A private funeral was held separately at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Getty Images Former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy walks through the streets with American civil rights activist Bernard Lee, left, in the funeral procession of assassinated civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., Atlanta, April 9, 1968. Getty Images The Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. and his wife, Alberta King, the parents of assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., and King Jr.'s widow, Coretta Scott King, listen to ceremonies at Morehouse College during a memorial for King in Atlanta, April 9, 1968. Getty Images A large crowd of mourners follow the casket of Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Atlanta. Dr.

King is assassinated - Apr 04, 1968 - HISTORY.com Dr. King is assassinated Publisher A+E Networks Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. is fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at theLorraine Motelin Memphis, Tennessee. The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers’ strike and was on his way to dinner when a bullet struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. King was pronounced dead after his arrival at a Memphis hospital. He was 39 years old. In the months before his assassination, Martin Luther King became increasingly concerned with the problem of economic inequality in America. He organized a Poor People’s Campaign to focus on the issue, including an interracialpoor people’s marchon Washington, and in March 1968 traveled to Memphis in support of poorly treated African-American sanitation workers. On March 28, a workers’ protest march led by King ended in violence and the death of an African-American teenager. King left the city but vowed to return in early April to lead another demonstration.

On April 3, back in Memphis, King gave his last sermon, saying, “We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop…And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.” One day after speaking those words, Dr. King was shot and killed by a sniper. As word of the assassination spread, riots broke out in cities all across the United States and National Guard troops were deployed in Memphis and Washington, D.C. On April 9, King was laid to rest in his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. Tens of thousands of people lined the streets to pay tribute to King’s casket as it passed by in a wooden farm cart drawn by two mules. The evening of King’s murder, a Remington .30-06 hunting rifle was found on the sidewalk beside a rooming house one block from the Lorraine Motel.

During the next several weeks, the rifle, eyewitness reports, and fingerprints on the weapon all implicated a single suspect: escaped convict James Earl Ray. A two-bit criminal, Ray escaped a Missouri prison in April 1967 while serving a sentence for a holdup. In May 1968, a massive manhunt for Ray began. The FBI eventually determined that he had obtained a Canadian passport under a false identity, which at the time was relatively easy. On June 8, Scotland Yard investigators arrested Ray at a London airport. He was trying to fly to Belgium, with the eventual goal, he later admitted, of reaching Rhodesia. Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe, was at the time ruled by an oppressive and internationally condemned white minority government. Extradited to the United States, Ray stood before a Memphis judge in March 1969 and pleaded guilty to King’s murder in order to avoid the electric chair. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison. Three days later, he attempted to withdraw his guilty plea, claiming he was innocent of King’s assassination and had been set up as a patsy in a larger conspiracy.

He claimed that in 1967, a mysterious man named “Raoul” had approached him and recruited him into a gunrunning enterprise. On April 4, 1968, he said, he realized that he was to be the fall guy for the King assassination and fled to Canada. Ray’s motion was denied, as were his dozens of other requests for a trial during the next 29 years. During the 1990s, the widow and children of Martin Luther King Jr. spoke publicly in support of Ray and his claims, calling him innocent and speculating about an assassination conspiracy involving the U.S. government and military. U.S. authorities were, in conspiracists’ minds, implicated circumstantially. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover obsessed over King, who he thought was under communist influence. For the last six years of his life, King underwent constant wiretapping and harassment by the FBI. Before his death, Dr. King was also monitored by U.S. military intelligence, which may have been asked to watch King after he publicly denounced the Vietnam War in 1967.

Furthermore, by calling for radical economic reforms in 1968, including guaranteed annual incomes for all, King was making few new friends in the Cold War-era U.S. government. Over the years, the assassination has been reexamined by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the Shelby County, Tennessee, district attorney’s office, and three times by the U.S. Justice Department. The investigations all ended with the same conclusion: James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King. The House committee acknowledged that a low-level conspiracy might have existed, involving one or more accomplices to Ray, but uncovered no evidence to definitively prove this theory. In addition to the mountain of evidence against him–such as his fingerprints on the murder weapon and his admitted presence at the rooming house on April 4–Ray had a definite motive in assassinating King: hatred. According to his family and friends, he was an outspoken racist who informed them of his intent to kill Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He died in 1998. Related Videos Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (4 April 1968) Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

(4 April 1968) At 6:05 P.M. on Thursday, 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King was shot dead while standing on a balcony outside his second-ﬂoor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. News of King’s assassination prompted major outbreaks of racial violence, resulting in more than 40 deaths nationwide and extensive property damage in over 100 American cities. James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old escaped fugitive, later confessed to the crime and was sentenced to a 99-year prison term. During King’s funeral a tape recording was played in which King spoke of how he wanted to be remembered after his death: ‘‘I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others’’(King, ‘‘Drum Major Instinct,’’ 85). King had arrived in Tennessee on Wednesday, 3 April to prepare for a march the following Monday on behalf of striking Memphis sanitation workers .

As he prepared to leave the Lorraine Motel for a dinner at the home of Memphis minister Samuel ‘‘Billy’’ Kyles, King stepped out onto the balcony of room 306 to speak with Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) colleagues standing in the parking area below. An assassin ﬁred a single shot that caused severe wounds to the lower right side of his face. SCLC aides rushed to him, and Ralph Abernathy cradled King’s head. Others on the balcony pointed across the street toward the rear of a boarding house on South Main Street where the shot seemed to have originated. An ambulance rushed King to St. Joseph’s Hospital, where doctors pronounced him dead at 7:05 P.M. President Lyndon B. Johnson called for a national day of mourning to be observed on 7 April. In the following days, public libraries, museums, schools, and businesses were closed, and the Academy Awards ceremony and numerous sporting events were postponed. On 8 April King’s widow, Coretta Scott King , and other family members joined thousands of participants in a march in Memphis honoring King and supporting the sanitation workers. King’s funeral service was held the following day in Atlanta at Ebenezer Baptist Church .

It was attended by many of the nation’s political and civil rights leaders, including Jacqueline Kennedy, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and Ralph Bunche . Morehouse College President Benjamin Mays delivered the eulogy, predicting that King ‘‘would probably say that, if death had to come, I am sure there was no greater cause to die for than ﬁghting to get a just wage for garbage collectors’’ (Mays, 9 April 1968). Over 100,000 mourners followed two mules pulling King’s cofﬁn through the streets of Atlanta. After another ceremony on the Morehouse campus, King’s body was initially interred at South-View Cemetery. Eventually, it was moved to a crypt next to the Ebenezer Church at the King Center , an institution founded by King’s widow. Shortly after the assassination, a policeman discovered a bundle containing a 30.06 Remington riﬂe next door to the boarding house. The largest investigation in Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) history led its agents to an apartment in Atlanta.

Fingerprints uncovered in the apartment matched those of James Earl Ray, a fugitive who had escaped from a Missouri prison in April 1967. FBI agents and police in Memphis produced further evidence that Ray had registered on 4 April at the South Main Street roominghouse and that he had taken a second-ﬂoor room near a common bathroom with a view of the Lorraine Motel. The identiﬁcation of Ray as a suspect led to an international manhunt. On 19 July 1968, Ray was extradited to the United States from Britain to stand trial. In a plea bargain, Tennessee prosecutors agreed in March 1969 to forgo seeking the death penalty when Ray pled guilty to murder charges. The circumstances leading to the plea later became a source of controversy, when Ray recanted his confession soon after being sentenced to a 99-year term in prison. During the years following King’s assassination, doubts about the adequacy of the case against Ray were fueled by revelations of the extensive surveillance of King by the FBI and other government agencies.

Beginning in 1976, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, chaired by Representative Louis Stokes, re-examined the evidence concerning King’s assassination, as well as that of President John F. Kennedy . The committee’s ﬁnal report suggested that Ray may have had co-conspirators. The report nonetheless concluded that there was no convincing evidence of government complicity in King’s assassination. After recanting his guilty plea, Ray continued to maintain his innocence, claiming to have been framed by a gun-smuggler he knew as ‘‘Raoul.’’ In 1993 Ray’s lawyer, William F. Pepper, sought to build popular support to reopen Ray’s case by staging a televised mock trial of Ray in which the ‘‘jury’’ found him not guilty. In 1997 members of King’s family publicly supported Ray’s appeal for a new trial, and King’s son Dexter Scott King supported Ray’s claims innocence during a televised prison encounter. Despite this support Tennessee authorities refused to reopen the case, and Ray died in prison on 23 April 1998. Even after Ray’s death, conspiracy allegations continued to surface.

In 1999, on behalf of King’s widow and children, Pepper won a token civil verdict of wrongful death against Lloyd Jowers, owner of Jim’s Grill, a restaurant across the street from the Lorraine Motel. Although the trial produced considerable testimony that contradicted the original case against Ray, the Justice Department announced in 2000 that its own internal investigation, launched in 1998 at the King family’s request, had failed to ﬁnd sufﬁcient evidence to warrant a further investigation. Sources Homer Bigarts, ‘‘Leaders at Rites,’’ New York Times, 10 April 1968. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road, 2007. King, ‘‘Drum Major Instinct,’’ in Knock at Midnight, eds. Carson and Holloran, 1998. Mays, Eulogy, 9 April 1968, MLKJP-GAMK. Pepper, Orders to Kill, 1995. Posner, Killing the Dream, 1998. Who Killed Martin Luther King Jr.? Updated January 15, 2016. Who Killed Martin Luther King Jr.?

Despite many conspiracy theories questioning who was responsible for the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., most of the evidence points to a single shooter, James Earl Ray. On the morning of April 4, Ray used information from the televised news as well as from a newspaper to discover where King was staying in Memphis. Around 3:30 p.m., Ray, using the name John Willard, rented room 5B in Bessie Brewer's run-down rooming house that was located across the street from the Lorraine Motel. Ray then visited the York Arms Company a few blocks away and purchased a pair of binoculars for $41.55 in cash. Returning to the rooming house, Ray readied himself in the communal bathroom, peering out the window, waiting for King to emerge from his hotel room. At 6:01 p.m., Ray shot King, mortally wounding him. continue reading below our video 4 Tips for Improving Test Performance Immediately after the shot, Ray quickly placed his rifle, binoculars, radio, and newspaper into a box and covered it with an old, green blanket. Then Ray hurriedly carried the bundle out of the bathroom, down the hall, and down to the first floor.

Once outside, Ray dumped his package outside the Canipe Amusement Company and walked swiftly to his car. He then drove away in his white Ford Mustang, just before police arrived. While Ray was driving toward Mississippi, police were starting to put the pieces together. Nearly immediately, the mysterious green bundle was discovered as were several witnesses who had seen someone who they believed to be the new renter of 5B rushing out of the rooming house with the bundle. By comparing fingerprints found on items in the bundle, including those on the rife and binoculars, with those of known fugitives, the FBI discovered they were looking for James Earl Ray. After a two-month long, international manhunt, Ray was finally captured on June 8 at London's Heathrow Airport. Ray pleaded guilty and was given a 99-year sentence in prison. Ray died in prison in 1998. * Ralph Abernathy as quoted in Gerald Posner, Killing the Dream (New York: Random House, 1998) 31. Bibliography Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference . New York: William Morrow, 1986.

Posner, Gerald. Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.. New York: Random House, 1998. Martin Luther King Assassination Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis by Jim Douglass 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 broadside 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 .” Raul 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.” A broader conspiracy 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. Cover-up 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. Norville 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. 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. Did you ever interview Judge Arthur Haynes ? 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 activated 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 transcript is available online at [The transcript is no longer available at the King Center. Hypertext, PDF, and text-only representations are available at ratical.org/ratville/JFK/MLKACT/ – Editor ] 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 activated 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. How the Government Killed Martin Luther King, Jr.

Gibson writes: "It really isn't that radical a thing to expect this government to kill someone who threatened their authority and had the power to organize millions to protest it." Martin Luther King at Washington DC's Lincoln Memorial in 1968. (photo: Francis Miller/Getty Images) How the Government Killed Martin Luther King, Jr. By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News 03 April 13 efore scoffing at this headline, you should know that in 1999, in Memphis, Tennessee, more than three decades after MLK's death, a jury found local, state, and federal government agencies guilty of conspiring to assassinate the Nobel Peace Prize winner and civil rights leader. The same media you would expect to cover such a monumental decision was absent at the trial, because those news organizations were part of that conspiracy. William F. Pepper, who was James Earl Ray's first attorney, called over 70 witnesses to the stand to testify on every aspect of the assassination. The panel, which consisted of an even mix of both black and white jurors, took only an hour of deliberation to find Loyd Jowers and other defendants guilty.

If you're skeptical of any factual claims made here, click here for a full transcript , broken into individual sections. Read the testimonies yourself if you don't want to take my word for it. It really isn't that radical a thing to expect this government to kill someone who threatened their authority and had the power to organize millions to protest it. When MLK was killed on April 4, 1968, he was speaking to sanitation workers in Memphis , who were organizing to fight poverty wages and ruthless working conditions. He was an outspoken critic of the government's war in Vietnam, and his power to organize threatened the moneyed corporate interests who were profiting from the war. At the time of his death, he was gearing up for the Poor People's Campaign , an effort to get people to camp out on the National Mall to demand anti-poverty legislation – essentially the first inception of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The government perceived him as a threat, and had him killed. James Earl Ray was the designated fall guy, and a complicit media, taking its cues from a government in fear of MLK, helped sell the "official" story of the assassination. Here's how they did it.

The Setup The defendant in the 1999 civil trial, Loyd Jowers, had been a Memphis PD officer in the 1940s . He owned a restaurant called Jim's Grill, a staging ground to orchestrate MLK's assassination underneath the rooming house where the corporate media alleges James Earl Ray shot Dr. King. During the trial, William Pepper, the plaintiff's attorney, played a tape of an incriminating 1998 conversation between Jowers, UN Ambassador Andrew Young, and Dexter King, MLK's son. Young testified that Jowers told them he "wanted to get right with God before he died, wanted to confess it and be free of it." On the tape, Jowers mentions that those present at the meetings included MPD officer Marrell McCollough, Earl Clark, an MPD lieutenant and known as the department's best marksman, another MPD officer, and two men who were unknown to Jowers but whom he assumed to be representatives of federal agencies. While Dr. King was in Memphis, he was under open or eye-to-eye federal surveillance by the 111th Military Intelligence Group based at Fort McPherson in Atlanta, Georgia.

Memphis PD intelligence officer Eli Arkin even admitted to having the group in his own office. During his last visit to Memphis in late March of 1968, MLK was under covert surveillance, meaning his room at the Rivermont was bugged and wired. Even if he went out to the balcony to speak, his words were recorded via relay. William Pepper alleges in his closing argument during King v. Jowers that such covert surveillance was usually done by the Army Security Agency, implying the involvement of at least two federal agencies. Jowers also gave an interview to Sam Donaldson on "Prime Time Live" in 1993. The transcript of the interview was read during the trial, and it was revealed that Jowers openly talked about being asked by produce warehouse owner Frank Liberto to help with MLK's murder. Liberto had mafia connections, and sent a courier with $100,000 to Jowers, who owned a local restaurant, with instructions to hold the money at his restaurant. John McFerren owned a store in Memphis and was making a pickup at Liberto's warehouse at 5:15 p.m. on April 4th, roughly 45 minutes before the assassination.

McFerren testified that he overheard Liberto tell someone over the phone, "Shoot the son of a bitch on the balcony." Other witnesses who testified included café owner Lavada Addison, who was friends with Liberto in the 1970s. She recalled him confiding to her that he "had Martin Luther King killed." Addison's son, Nathan Whitlock, also testified. He asked Liberto if he killed MLK, and he responded, "I didn't kill the nigger but I had it done." When Whitlock pressed him about James Earl Ray, Liberto replied, "He wasn't nothing but a troublemaker from Missouri. He was a front man ... a setup man." The back door of Loyd Jowers' establishment led to a thick crop of bushes across the street from the Lorraine Motel balcony where Dr. King was shot. On the taped confession to Andrew Young and Dexter King, Jowers says after he heard the shot, Lt. Earl Clark, who is now deceased, laid a smoking rifle at the rear of his restaurant. Jowers then disassembled the rifle, wrapped it in a tablecloth and prepared it for disposal.

The corporate media says it was James Earl Ray who shot MLK, and he did it from the 2nd floor bathroom window of the rooming house across the street from the Lorraine Motel. The official account alleges the murder weapon was dropped in a bundle and abandoned at Dan Canipe's storefront just before he made his getaway. But even those authorities and media admit that the bullet that tore through MLK's throat didn't have the same metallurgical composition as the bullets in the rifle left behind by James Earl Ray. And Judge Joe Brown, a weapons expert called to testify by Pepper in the 1999 trial, said the rifle allegedly used by James Earl Ray had a scope that was never sighted in, meaning that the weapon in question would have fired far to the left and far below the target. The actual murder weapon was disposed of by taxi driver James McCraw, a friend of Jowers. William Hamblin testified in King v. Jowers that McCraw told him this story over a 15-year period whenever he got drunk. McCraw repeatedly told Hamblin that he threw the rifle over the Memphis-Arkansas bridge, meaning that the rifle is at the bottom of the Mississippi river to this day.

And according to Hamblin's testimony, Canipe said he saw the bundle dropped in front of his store before the actual shooting occurred. The Conspiracy To make Dr. King vulnerable, plans had to be made to remove him from his security detail and anyone sympathetic who could be a witness or interfere with the killing. Two black firefighters, Floyd Newsum and Norvell Wallace, who were working at Fire Station #2 across the street from the Lorraine Motel, were each transferred to different fire stations. Newsum was a civil rights activist and witnessed MLK's last speech to the striking Memphis sanitation workers, "I Have Seen the Mountaintop," before getting the call about his transfer. Newsum testified that he wasn't needed at his new assignment, and that his transfer meant that Fire Station #2 would be out of commission unless someone else was sent there in his stead. Newsum talked about having to make a series of inquiries before finally learning that his reassignment had been ordered by the Memphis Police Department. Wallace testified that to that very day, while the official explanation was a vague death threat, he hadn't once received a satisfactory answer as to why he was suddenly reassigned.

Ed Redditt , a black MPD detective who was assigned to MLK's security detail, was also removed from the scene an hour before the shooting and sent home, and the only reason given was a vague death threat. Jerry Williams , another black MPD detective, was usually tasked with assembling a security team of black police officers for Dr. King. But he testified that on the night of the assassination, he wasn't assigned to form that team. There was a Black Panther-inspired group called The Invaders , who were staying at the Lorraine Motel to help MLK organize a planned march with the striking garbage workers. The Invaders were ordered to leave the motel after getting into an argument with members of MLK's entourage. The origins of the argument are unclear, though several sources affirm that The Invaders had been infiltrated by Marrell McCollough of the MPD, who later went on to work for the CIA. And finally, the Tact 10 police escort of several MPD cars that accompanied Dr. King's security detail were pulled back the day before the shooting by Inspector Evans. With all possible obstacles out of the way, MLK was all alone just before the assassination. The Cover-Up Around 7 a.m.

on April 5, the morning after the shooting, MPD Inspector Sam Evans called Public Works Administrator Maynard Stiles and told him to have a crew destroy the crop of bushes adjacent to the rooming house above Loyd Jowers' restaurant. This is particularly odd coming from a policeman, since the bushes were in a crime scene area, and crime scene areas are normally roped off, not to be disturbed. The official narrative of a sniper in the bathroom at the rooming house was then reinforced, since a sniper firing from an empty clearing would be far more visible than one hidden behind a thick crop of bushes. Normally, when a major political figure is murdered, all possible witnesses are questioned and asked to make statements. But Memphis PD neglected to conduct even a basic house-to-house investigation. Olivia Catling, a resident of nearby Mulberry Street just a block away from the shooting, testified that she saw a man leave an alley next to the rooming house across from the Lorraine, climb into a Green 1965 Chevrolet, and speed away, burning rubber right in front of several police cars without any interference.

There was also no questioning of Captain Weiden, a Memphis firefighter at the fire station closest to the Lorraine, the same one from which Floyd Newsum had been transferred just a day before. Memphis PD and the FBI also suppressed the statements of Ray Hendricks and William Reed, who said they saw James Earl Ray's white mustang parked in front of Jowers' restaurant, before seeing it again driving away as they crossed another street. Ray's alibi was that he had driven away from the scene to fix a tire, and these two statements that affirmed his alibi were withheld from Ray's guilty plea jury. The jury present at Ray's guilty plea hearing also wasn't informed about the bullet that killed MLK having different striations and markings than the other bullets kept as evidence, nor that the bullet couldn't be positively matched as coming from the alleged murder weapon. Three days after entering the guilty plea, James Earl Ray unsuccessfully attempted to retract it and demand a trial.

Incredibly, James Earl Ray turned down two separate bribes, one of which was recorded by his brother Jerry Ray, where he was offered $220,000 by writer William Bradford Huey and the guarantee of a full pardon if he would just agree to have the story "Why I Killed Martin Luther King" written on his behalf. The Deception One of the 70 witnesses that William F. Pepper called to testify in King v. Jowers was Bill Schaap, a practicing attorney with particular experience in military law, with bar credentials in New York, Chicago, and DC. Schaap testified at great length about how the government, through the FBI and the CIA, puts people in key positions on editorial boards at influential papers like the New York Times and Washington Post. He describes that although these editorial board members and news directors at cable news outlets may be liberal in their politics, they always take the government's side in national security-related stories. Before you write that off as conspiracy theory, remember how people like Bill Keller at the New York Times, as well as the Washington Post editorial board , all cheerfully led the march to war in Iraq ten years ago. Another King v.

Jowers witness was Earl Caldwell, a New York Times reporter who was sent to Memphis by an editor named Claude Sitton. Caldwell testified that the orders from his editor were to "nail Dr. King." In the publication's effort to sell the story of James Earl Ray as the murderer, the Times cited an investigation into how Ray got the money for his Mustang, rifle, and the long road trip to Tennessee from California. The Times said that according to their own findings as well as the findings of federal agencies, Ray got the money by robbing a bank in his hometown of Alton, Illinois. In Pepper's closing argument, he says that when he or Jerry Ray talked to the chief of police in Alton, along with the bank president of the branch that was allegedly robbed, neither said they had been approached by the New York Times, or by the FBI. Essentially, the Times fabricated the entire story in order to sell a false narrative that there was no government intervention and that James Earl Ray was a lone wolf. So for the following 31 years after King's death, nobody dared to question the constant reiteration of James Earl Ray as the murderer of Martin Luther King.

Even 13 years after a jury found the government complicit in a conspiracy to murder the civil rights leader, the complicit media continues to propagate the false narrative they sold us three decades ago and vociferously shout down any alternative theories as to what happened as "conspiracy theory," framing those putting forth such theories as wackjobs undeserving of any credibility. It's strikingly similar to how the Washington Post defended their warmongering in a recent editorial commenting on the invasion of Iraq, and had one of their reporters defend the media's leading of the charge into Iraq. As we remember Dr. King and the important work he did, we should also reject the official account of his death as loudly as the government and media shout down anyone who tries to contradict their lies. As Edward R. Murrow said , "Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit." Carl Gibson, 25, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG. Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Question: Who assassinated Martin Luther King Junior?
Answer: James Earl Ray