How the Government Killed Martin Luther King, Jr.
Shot down by the Memphis PD’s top sharpshooter – with backup
by US Army snipers on a nearby rooftop
By
Carl Gibson – Reader
Supported News
Before 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.
http://youtu.be/0lg1EBXYjvE
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 carl@rsnorg.org, 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.
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Kevin Barrett
Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist, is one of
America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror.
Dr. Barrett has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications.
Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin, where he ran for Congress in 2008. He currently works as a nonprofit organizer, author, and talk radio host.
Dr. Barrett has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications.
Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin, where he ran for Congress in 2008. He currently works as a nonprofit organizer, author, and talk radio host.
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