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."
he
accounting of the financial cost of the nearly decade-long Iraq War
will go on for years, but a recent analysis has shed light on the
companies that made money off the war by providing support services as
the privatization of what were former U.S. military operations rose to
unprecedented levels.
