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NYGiant
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Dr King assassinated
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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 the Lorraine Motel in 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 a march on 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.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-...a023eefe0cd3d2
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I always thought this was a conspiracy.
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Brian Grafton
Victoria
BC Canada
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Dr King assassinated
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You’ve created a full version of someone else’s view of King’s assassination. And you seem to admit you have a personal read on this death when you write: “I always thought this was a conspiracy.”
Of course, it may have been that James Earl Ray was part of some kind of conspiracy, though I never sensed that. Would you explain why your thoughts moved towards some kind of conspiracy from the moment of King’s death?
Cheers
Brian G
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"We have met the enemy, and he is us." Walt Kelly.
"The Best Things in Life Aren't Things" Bumper sticker.
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NYGiant
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Dr King assassinated
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Quote: You’ve created a full version of someone else’s view of King’s assassination. And you seem to admit you have a personal read on this death when you write: “I always thought this was a conspiracy.”
Of course, it may have been that James Earl Ray was part of some kind of conspiracy, though I never sensed that. Would you explain why your thoughts moved towards some kind of conspiracy from the moment of King’s death?
Cheers
Brian G
Brain, not only I have concerns that there was a conspiracy, but so did others. The largest government investigation, led by the House Select Committee on Assassinations for instance. President Bill Clinton in 1998 reinvestigated the case. Attorney General Janet Reno assigned civil rights special counsel Barry Kowalski, who previously prosecuted the Los Angeles police officers in the Rodney King beating, to review the newest conspiracy allegations. In 2000, even after reviewing the results of the 1999 civil trial in Memphis, Kowalski concluded that Ray was guilty and that there was no government conspiracy.
James Earl Ray's chosen profession was theft and armed robbery, and after his third felony conviction in 1959, he was sentenced to 20 years in the Missouri State Penitentiary. He wasn't even successful at his chosen profession. So, how does a small time hood, have the intelligence to get to Atlanta, and then to Canada and England before being arrested in July 1968? He was arrested before fleeing to Rhodesia.
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Brian Grafton
Victoria
BC Canada
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Posts: 4720
Joined: 2004
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Dr King assassinated
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Okay, I get you’re not alone in sensing a conspiracy. Looking back over the past 60 years, various US organizations, groups and individuals have proven to be excellent at creating conspiracy theories. But you don’t mention any specifics which led you to see a conspiracy as Ray faced trial and conviction.
I see a certain number of inconsistencies now that I wasn’t aware of 60 years ago, I’ll admit. And in general principle, I reject both capital punishment and plea bargaining, because police and courts and attorneys can be wrong either through zeal or for a number of less honourable beliefs, and a plea bargain isn’t offered out of a desire for truth but a desire to escape punishment on one hand and attain a successful prosecution on the other. But I still don’t find indications of conspiracy. Because you say you sensed a conspiracy from the beginning, I’m wondering what facts led you in that direction.
Brian G
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"We have met the enemy, and he is us." Walt Kelly.
"The Best Things in Life Aren't Things" Bumper sticker.
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NYGiant
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Dr King assassinated
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Quote: Okay, I get you’re not alone in sensing a conspiracy. Looking back over the past 60 years, various US organizations, groups and individuals have proven to be excellent at creating conspiracy theories. But you don’t mention any specifics which led you to see a conspiracy as Ray faced trial and conviction.
I see a certain number of inconsistencies now that I wasn’t aware of 60 years ago, I’ll admit. And in general principle, I reject both capital punishment and plea bargaining, because police and courts and attorneys can be wrong either through zeal or for a number of less honourable beliefs, and a plea bargain isn’t offered out of a desire for truth but a desire to escape punishment on one hand and attain a successful prosecution on the other. But I still don’t find indications of conspiracy. Because you say you sensed a conspiracy from the beginning, I’m wondering what facts led you in that direction.
Brian G
Thank you for your response.
Legally, a Conspiracy exists when 2 or more persons join together and form an agreement to violate the law, and then act on that agreement. So, how does a convicted felon find the knowledge to avoid a man-hunt, flee to Canada, then board a plane to Great Britain and then be apprehended prior to fleeing to Rhodesia?
The violence against Civil Rights activists in the 1960s were all conspiracies.....the murder of Emmitt Till, the murder of Medgar Evans, the murders of 3 white Freedom Riders. We also know that members of a conspiracy murdered a Buffalo NY MD who happened to perform abortions. The FBI believed that James Kopp , the murderer received assistance in fleeing the US, although Irish anti-abortion groups denied they assisted him. Kopp fled to Mexico under an assumed name and later to Ireland. He then fled Ireland one step ahead of police on a ferry to Brittany, France on 12 March 2001, with two Irish passports besides his original U.S. document On March 29, 2001, Kopp was arrested without an incident[4] by French law enforcement in the town of Dinan, Brittany, just after picking up a package containing $300 outside of a post office. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Charles_Kopp
The only conspiracy proven , was the murder of Abraham Lincoln ( political anyway). John Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman, and Robert Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman.
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