Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Ph.D., Boston University (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Nobel Laureate, Baptist minister, and African American civil rights activist. He is one of the most significant leaders in U.S. history and in the modern history of non-violence, and is considered a hero, peacemaker and martyr by many people around the world. A decade and a half after his 1968 assassination, Martin Luther King Day, a U.S. holiday, was established in his honor. He also was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Assassination

King was assassinated the next evening, April 4, 1968, at 6:01pm, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, while preparing to lead a local march in support of the heavily black Memphis sanitation workers' union which was on strike at the time. Friends inside the motel room heard the shot fired and ran to the balcony to find King shot in the jaw. He was pronounced dead several hours later. The assassination led to a nationwide wave of riots in more than 60 cities. Four days later, President Lyndon Johnson declared a national day of mourning for the lost civil rights leader. A crowd of 300,000 attended his funeral that same day.

Related Topics:
April 4 - 1968 - Lorraine Motel - Memphis - Tennessee - Riots - Lyndon Johnson

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Two months after King's death, escaped convict James Earl Ray had been captured at London's Heathrow Airport while trying to leave Great Britain on a false Canadian passport in the name of Ramon George Sneyd. Ray was quickly extradited to Tennessee and charged with King's murder, confessing to the assassination on March 10, 1969, (though he recanted this confession three days later) and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. Ray, a presumed white supremacist and segregationist, had allegedy killed King because of the latter's extensive civil rights work. On the advice of his attorney Percy Foreman, Ray had taken a guilty plea to avoid a trial conviction and thus the definite possibility of receiving the death penalty although it was highly unlikely that he would have been executed even if he had been sentenced to death, as the US Supreme Court's 1972 decision in the case of Furman v. Georgia invalidated all state death penalty laws then in force.

Related Topics:
James Earl Ray - Heathrow Airport - Great Britain - Canadian - Tennessee - Murder - March 10 - 1969 - White supremacist - Segregationist - Percy Foreman - Furman v. Georgia - Death penalty

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Ray had fired Foreman as his attorney (from then on derisively calling him "Percy Fourflusher") claiming that a man he met in Montreal, Canada with the alias "Raoul" was involved, as was his brother Johnny, but not himself, further asserting that although he didn't "personally shoot Dr. King," he may have been "partially responsible without knowing it," hinting at a conspiracy. He spent the remainder of his life attempting (unsuccessfully) to withdraw his guilty plea and secure the trial he never had.

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Some speculate Ray had been a patsy much in the way alleged John Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had supposedly been. Among the claims used to support this assertion are the fact that the Remington Gamemaster Model 760 .30-06 caliber rifle Ray (a burglar and thief but not a killer or other violent criminal) had allegedly used to shoot Dr. King had only two of Ray's fingerprints on it while the second-floor bathroom of Ray's rooming house, from where Ray (an average marksman who hadn't fired a rifle since his Army service in the late 1940s) was believed to have fired at King, contained none of Ray's fingerprints at all.

Related Topics:
Patsy - Lee Harvey Oswald - Remington Gamemaster - Army

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Many suspecting a conspiracy in the assassination point out the two separate ballistic tests conducted on the Remington Gamemaster had neither conclusively proved Ray had been the killer nor that it had even been the murder weapon. Moreover, witnesses surrounding King at the moment of his death say the shot came from another location, from behind thick shrubbery near the rooming house, not from the rooming house itself, shrubbery which had been suddenly and inexplicably cut away in the days following the assassination. Also, Ray's petty criminal history had been one of colossal and repeated ineptitude, he'd been quickly and easily apprehended each time he committed an offense, behavior in sharp contrast to that of his shortly before and after the shooting; he'd easily managed to secure several different pieces of legitimate identification, using the names and personal data of living men who all coincidentally looked like and were of about the same age and physical build as Ray, he spent large sums of cash and traveled overseas without being apprehended at any border crossing, even though he had been a wanted fugitive. According to Ray, all of this had been accomplished with the aid of the still unidentified "Raoul." Investigative reporter Louis Lomax had also discovered the Missouri Department of Corrections, shortly after Ray's April 1967 prison escape, had sent the incorrect set of fingerprints to the FBI and had failed to notice or correct this error. Lomax had been publishing a series of investigative stories on the King assassination for the North American Newspaper Alliance, stories challenging the official view of the case, and had been reportedly pressured by the FBI to halt his investigation.

Related Topics:
Louis Lomax - Missouri - FBI - North American Newspaper Alliance

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According to a former Pemiscot County, Missouri deputy sheriff, Jim Green, who claimed to have been part of an Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)-led conspiracy to kill Dr. King, Ray had been targeted as the patsy for the King assassination shortly before his April 1967 prison escape and had been tracked by the Bureau during his year as a fugitive. After several trips to and from Canada and Mexico during this time, Ray had gone to Memphis after agreeing to participate (allegedly controlled by his mysterious benefactor "Raoul" who reportedly had weeks before while in Birmingham, Alabama ordered Ray to purchase the Remington Gamemaster rifle) in what he was told was a major bank robbery while King was in town--since city police resources would be dedicated toward maintaining security for King and his entourage, the intended bank heist would be much simpler than usual. Green (who, like Ray, had asserted that FBI assistant director Cartha DeLoach headed the assassination plot) had claimed Ray had been ordered to stay in the rooming house and as a diversion for the purported bank heist, to then hold up a small diner near the rooming house at approximately 6:00 p.m. on April 4th. Dr. King was shot a minute later by a sniper hidden in the shrubbery near the rooming house. Meanwhile, according to Green, two men, one of them allegedly a Memphis police detective, were waiting to ambush and kill Ray while Ray was on his way to the planned diner holdup and then plant the Remington rifle in the trunk of Ray's pale yellow (not white) 1966 Ford Mustang, effectively framing a dead man. However, moments before the assassination, Ray had apparently suspected a setup and instead quickly left town in his Mustang, heading for Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta police found Ray's abandoned Mustang six days after King had been shot.

Related Topics:
Pemiscot County, Missouri - Federal Bureau of Investigation - Patsy - Canada - Mexico - Birmingham, Alabama - Cartha DeLoach - 1966 - Ford Mustang - Atlanta, Georgia

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Ray and six other convicts escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee on June 10, 1977 shortly after Ray testified that he did not shoot King to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, but were recaptured on June 13 and returned to prison.http://knoxville.fbi.gov/hist.htm More years were then added to his sentence for attempting to escape from the penitentiary.

Related Topics:
Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary - Petros, Tennessee - June 10 - 1977 - June 13

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In 1997 Martin Luther King's son Dexter King met with Ray, and publicly supported Ray's efforts to obtain a trial.

Related Topics:
1997 - Dexter King

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In 1999, Coretta Scott King, King's widow (also a civil rights leader), along with the rest of King's family won a wrongful death civil trial against Loyd Jowers and "other unknown co-conspirators". Jowers claimed to have received $100,000 to arrange King's assassination. The jury of six whites and six blacks found Jowers guilty and that "governmental agencies were parties" to the assassination plot.http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/WFPonMLK.pdf http://www.thekingcenter.org/tkc/trial.html

Related Topics:
1999 - Coretta Scott King - Wrongful death - Civil trial - Loyd Jowers

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Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was with King at the time of his death, noted "The fact is there were saboteurs to disrupt the march. within our own organization, we found a very key person who was on the government payroll. So infiltration within, saboteurs from without and the press attacks. ... I will never believe that James Earl Ray had the motive, the money and the mobility to have done it himself. Our government was very involved in setting the stage for and I think the escape route for James Earl Ray." http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/15/1710221&mode=thread&tid=25

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King biographer David Garrow disagrees with William F. Pepper's claims that the government killed King. He is supported by King assassination author Gerald Posner. http://www.historynewsnetwork.org/articles/10325.html

Related Topics:
David Garrow - William F. Pepper - Gerald Posner

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