[2 articles]
Who Killed Martin Luther King?
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig11/valentine8.1.1.html
by Douglas Valentine
April 7, 2010
Douglas Valentine worked as a researcher for the King family and
testified at the trial about suspicions that Dr. King might have been
under U.S. government surveillance at the time of the assassination.
--
On Dec. 8, a jury in Memphis, Tenn., deliberated for only three hours
before deciding that the long-held official version of Martin Luther
King Jr.'s assassination was wrong.
The jury's verdict implicated a retired Memphis businessman and
government agencies in a conspiracy to kill the civil rights giant.
Though the trial testimony had received little press attention
outside of the Memphis area, the startling outcome drew an immediate
rebuttal from defenders of the official finding: that James Earl Ray
acted alone or possibly as part of a low-level conspiracy of a few
white racists.
Leading newspapers across the country disparaged the December verdict
as the product of a flawed conspiracy theory given a one-sided
presentation. The Washington Post even lumped the conspiracy
proponents in with those who insist Adolf Hitler was unfairly accused
of genocide.
"The deceit of history, whether it occurs in the context of Holocaust
denial or in an effort to rewrite the story of Dr. King's death, is a
dangerous impulse for which those committed to reasoned debate and
truth cannot sit still," a Post editorial read. "The more quickly and
completely this jury's discredited verdict is forgotten the better."
[WP, Dec. 12, 1999]
For its part, the King family cited the verdict as a way of dealing
with its personal grief. "We hope to put this behind us and move on
with our lives," said Dexter King, speaking on behalf of the family.
"This is a time for reconciliation, healing and closure."
But should closure or forgetfulness follow a verdict that finds
the federal government complicit in a conspiracy to assassinate one
of this nation's most historic figures? Are there indeed legitimate
reasons to doubt the official story? And how should Americans
evaluate this unorthodox trial, its evidence and the verdict?
Without doubt, the trial in Memphis lacked the neat wrap-up of a
Perry Mason drama. The testimony was sometimes imprecise, dredging up
disputed memories more than three decades old.
Some testimony was hearsay; long depositions by deceased or absent
figures were read into the record; and some witnesses had changed
their stories over time amid accusations of profiteering.
There was a messiness that often accompanies complex cases of great
notoriety. The plaintiff's case also did not encounter a rigorous
challenge from Lewis K. Garrison, the attorney for defendant Loyd Jowers.
Garrison shares the doubts about the official version, and his
client, Jowers, has implicated himself in the conspiracy, although
insisting his role was tangential. Some critics compared the trial to
a professional wrestling match with the defense putting up only token
resistance.
Yet, despite the shortcomings, the trial was the first time that
evidence from the King assassination was presented to a jury in a
court of law. The verdict demonstrated that 12 citizens six blacks
and six whites did not find the notion of a wide-ranging conspiracy
to kill King as ludicrous as many commentators did.
The trial suggested, too, that the government erred by neglecting the
larger issue of public interest in the mystery of who killed Martin
Luther King Jr. Instead the government simply affirmed and reaffirmed
James Earl Ray's guilty plea for three decades. Insisting that the
evidence pointed clearly toward Ray as the assassin, the government
never agreed to vacate Ray's guilty plea and allow for a full-scale
trial, a possibility that ended when Ray died from liver disease in 1998.
At that point, the King family judged that a wrongful death suit
against Jowers was the last chance for King's murder to be considered
by a jury. From the start, the family encountered harsh criticism
from many editorial writers who judged the conspiracy allegations nutty.
The King family's suspicions, however, derived from one fact that was
beyond dispute: that powerful elements of the federal government
indeed were out to get Martin Luther King Jr. in the years before his murder.
In particular, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover despised King as a
dangerous radical who threatened the national security and needed to
be neutralized by almost any means necessary.
After King's "I have a dream speech" in 1963, FBI assistant director
William Sullivan called King "the most dangerous and effective Negro
leader in the country." Hoover reacted to King's Nobel Peace Prize in
1964 with the comment that King was "the most notorious liar in the country."
The documented record is clear that the FBI and other federal
agencies aggressively investigated King as an enemy of the state. His
movements were monitored; his phones were tapped; his rooms were
bugged; derogatory information about his personal life was leaked to
discredit him; he was blackmailed about extramarital affairs; he was
sent a message suggesting that he commit suicide.
"There is only one way out for you," the message read. "You better
take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation."
These FBI operations escalated as black uprisings burned down parts
of American cities and as the nation's campuses erupted in protests
against the Vietnam War. To many young Americans, black and white,
King was a man of unparalleled stature and extraordinary courage. He
was the leader who could merge the civil rights and anti-war movements.
Increasingly, King saw the two issues as intertwined, as President
Lyndon Johnson siphoned off anti-poverty funds to prosecute the
costly war in Vietnam.
On April 15, 1967, less than a year before his murder, King concluded
a speech to an anti-war rally with a call on the Johnson
administration to "stop the bombing." King also began planning a Poor
People's March on Washington that would put a tent city on the Mall
and press the government for a broad redistribution of the nation's wealth.
Covert government operations worked to disrupt both the anti-war and
civil rights movements by infiltrating them with spies and agents
provocateurs. The FBI's COINTELPRO sought to neutralize what were
called "black nationalist hate groups," counting among its targets
King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
One FBI memo fretted about the possible emergence of a black
"Messiah" who could "unify and electrify" the various black militant
groups. The memo listed King as "a real contender" for this leadership role.
With this backdrop came the chaotic events in Memphis in early 1968
as King lent his support to a sanitation workers' strike marred by violence.
The government's surveillance of King in Memphis by both federal
agents and city police would rest at the heart of the case more
than three decades later.
On April 4, 1968, at 6 p.m., King emerged from his room on the second
floor of the Lorraine Motel. As he leaned over the balcony, King was
struck by a single bullet and died.
As word of his death spread, riots exploded in cities across the
country. Fiery smoke billowed from behind the Capitol dome.
Government officials struggled to restore order and police searched
for King's assassin.
One of those questioned was restaurant owner Loyd Jowers whose Jim's
Grill was below the rooming house where James Earl Ray had stayed and
from where authorities contend the fatal shot was fired.
Jowers told the police he knew nothing about the shooting, but had
heard a noise that "sounded like something that fell in the kitchen."
[The Commercial Appeal, Dec. 9, 1999]
The international manhunt ended at London's Heathrow Airport on June
8, 1968, when Scotland Yard detained Ray for carrying an illegal
firearm. Ray was extradited back to the United States to stand trial
as King's lone assassin.
The FBI insisted that it could find no solid evidence indicating that
Ray was part of any conspiracy. But the authorities contended they
had a strong case against Ray, including a recovered rifle with Ray's
fingerprints. The rifle fired bullets of the same caliber as the one
that killed King.
While Ray sat in jail, Jowers's name popped up again in the case. On
Feb. 10, 1969, Betty Spates, a waitress at Jim's Grill, implicated
Jowers in the assassination. She said Jowers found a gun behind the
café and may actually have shot King. Two days later, however, Spates
recanted. [The Commercial Appeal, Dec. 9, 1999]
On March 10, 1969, Ray accepted the advice of his attorney and
pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison.
Three days later, however, he wrote a letter to the judge asking that
his guilty plea be set aside. He claimed that he was innocent and
that his lawyer had misled him into making the plea.
Ray began telling a complex tale in which he was duped by an
operative he knew only as "Raul." Ray claimed that Raul arranged the
assassination and set Ray up to take the fall.
Government investigators rejected Raul's existence and insisted that
Ray was simply spinning a story to escape a long prison term. The
courts rejected Ray's request for a trial. As far as the legal system
of Memphis was concerned, the case was closed.
But there did appear to be weaknesses in the prosecution case that
might have shown up at trial.
For instance, Charles Stephens, a key witness placing Ray at the
scene of the crime, appeared to have been drunk at the time and had
offered contradictory accounts of the assailant's description,
according to a reporter who encountered him after the shooting. [For
details, see William F. Pepper's Orders to Kill.]
Outside the government, other skeptical investigators began to pick
at the loose ends of the case.
In 1971, investigative writer Harold Weisberg published the first
dissenting account of the official King case in his book, Frame Up.
Weisberg noted problems with the physical evidence, including the
FBI's failure to match the death slug to the alleged murder weapon.
Questions about the case mounted when the federal government
declassified records revealing the intensity of FBI hatred for King.
The combination of factual discrepancies and a possible government
motive led some of King's friends to suspect a conspiracy.
In 1977, civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy encouraged lawyer
William F. Pepper to meet with Ray and hear out the convict's tale.
Pepper said he took on the assignment in part because he had
encouraged King to join in publicly criticizing the Vietnam War and
felt a sense of responsibility for King's fate.
Responding to growing public doubts about the official accounts of
the three major assassinations that rocked the nation in the 1960s,
Congress also agreed to re-examine the murders of President John F.
Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and King.
In congressional testimony, however, Ray came off poorly. Rep. Louis
Stokes, D-Ohio, the chairman of the investigating committee, said
Ray's performance convinced him that Ray indeed was the assassin and
that there was no government role in the murder.
The panel did leave open the possibility that other individuals were
involved, but limited the scope of any conspiracy to maybe Ray's
brothers, Jerry and John, or two St. Louis racists who allegedly put
a bounty on King's life. But others on the panel, such as Rep. Walter
Fauntroy, D-D.C., continued to harbor doubts about the congressional findings.
After a decade of on-and-off work on the case, Pepper decided to
press ahead. He agreed to represent Ray and filed a habeas corpus
suit on his behalf.
Also, in 1993, a mock television trial presented the evidence against
Ray to a "jury," which returned the convict's "acquittal." Pepper
asserted that the government's case was so weak that Ray would win a
regular trial, too.
Jowers reentered the controversy as well, reversing his initial
statement to police in which he denied knowledge of the
assassination. On Dec. 16, 1993, in a nationally televised ABC-TV
interview, Jowers claimed that a Mafia-connected Memphis produce
dealer, Frank C. Liberto, had paid him $100,000 to arrange King's murder.
But Liberto was then dead and the man named by Jowers as the paid
hit-man denied any role in the murder. [The Commercial Appeal, Dec. 9, 1999]
In 1995, Pepper published an account of his investigation in Orders
to Kill. The book contended that the conspirators behind the
assassination included elements of the Mafia, the FBI and U.S. Army
intelligence.
Pepper located witnesses with new evidence. John McFerren, a black
grocery owner, was quoted as saying that an hour before the
assassination, he overheard Liberto order someone over the phone to
"shoot the son of a bitch when he comes on the balcony."
But Pepper's credibility suffered when he cited anonymous sources in
identifying William Eidson as a deceased member of a U.S. Army
assassination squad that was present in Memphis on the day King died.
ABC-TV researchers found Eidson to be alive and furious at Pepper's
insinuations about his alleged role in the King assassination.
Still, the King family especially King's children grew
increasingly interested in the controversy. On March 27, 1997, King's
younger son, Dexter, sat down with Ray in prison, listened to Ray's
story and announced his belief that Ray was telling the truth.
In a separate meeting with the King family, Jowers claimed that a
police officer shot King from behind Jim's Grill. The officer then
handed the smoking rifle to Jowers, the former restaurant owner said.
The authorities in Tennessee, however, continued to rebuff Ray's
appeals for a trial. Prosecutors concluded that Jowers's story lacked
credibility and may have been motivated by greed. Ray's pleas for his
day in court finally ended with his death from liver disease.
On Oct. 2, 1998, the King family filed a wrongful death suit against
Jowers. The trial opened in November 1999, attracting scant attention
from the national press.
Jowers, 73, attended only part of the trial and did not testify. His
admissions of complicity were recounted by others who had spoken with him.
Former United Nations ambassador Andrew Young testified that he found
Jowers sincere during a four-hour conversation about the
assassination. "I got the impression this was a man who was very sick
[and who] wanted to go to confession to get his soul right," Young said.
According to Young, Jowers said he had served Memphis police officers
and federal agents when they met in Jowers's restaurant before the
assassination. Jowers also recounted his story of Mafia money going
to a man who delivered a rifle to Jowers's café.
After the assassination, the man, a Memphis police officer, handed
the rifle to Jowers through a back door, according to Jowers's
account. [Scripps Howard News Service, Nov. 18, 1999]
A former state judge, Joe Brown, took the stand to challenge the
government's confidence that Ray's rifle was the murder weapon.
During one of Ray's earlier court hearings, Brown had ordered new
ballistic tests on the gun and the bullet that killed King.
The results had been inconclusive, with the forensics experts unable
to rule whether the gun was the murder weapon or wasn't. In his
testimony, however, Brown asserted that the sight on the rifle was so
poor that it couldn't have killed King.
"This weapon literally could not hit the broadside of a barn," Brown
said. But he acknowledged that he had no formal training as a weapons expert.
The jury also heard testimony that federal authorities were
monitoring the area around the Lorraine Motel. Carthel Weeden, a
former captain with the Memphis Fire Department, said that on the
afternoon of April 4, 1968, two men appeared at the fire station
across from the motel and showed the credentials of U.S. Army officers.
The men then carried briefcases, which they said held photographic
equipment, up to the roof of the station. Weeden said the men
positioned themselves behind a parapet approximately 18 inches high,
a position that gave them a clear view of the Lorraine Motel and the
rooming house window from which Ray allegedly fired the shot that killed King.
They also would have had a view of the area behind Jim's Grill. But
what happened to any possible photographs remains a mystery. Weeden
added that he was never questioned by local or federal authorities.
Former Rep. Fauntroy also testified at the Kings-Jowers trial.
Fauntroy complained that the 1978 congressional inquiry was not as
thorough as the public might have thought. The committee dropped the
investigation when funding dried up and left some promising leads
unexplored, he told the jury.
"Had we had [another] six months, we may well have gotten to the
bottom of everything," Fauntroy testified on Nov. 29. "We didn't have
the time to investigate leads we had established but could not
follow. … We asked the Justice Department to follow up … and to see
if there was more than just a low-level conspiracy."
Other witnesses described a strange withdrawal of police protection
from around the motel about an hour before King's death. A group of
black homicide detectives, who had served as King's bodyguards on
previous visits to Memphis, were kept from performing those duties in
April 1968.
In his summation, trying to minimize his client's alleged role in the
conspiracy, Garrison asked the jury, "would the owner of a greasy
spoon restaurant, and a lone assassin, could they pull away officers
from the scene of an assassination? Could they put someone up on the
top of the fire station?"
The cumulative evidence apparently convinced the jury. After the
trial, juror Robert Tucker told a reporter that the 12 jurors agreed
that the assassination was too complex for one person to handle. He
noted the testimony about the police guards being removed and Army
agents observing King from the firehouse. "All of these things added
up," Tucker said. [AP, Dec. 9, 1999]
Even before the trial ended, the media controversy about the case had
begun. Many reporters viewed the conspiracy allegations as half-baked
and the defense as offering few challenges to the breathtaking assertions.
The jury, for instance, heard little about the gradual evolution of
Jowers's story, which began with a flat denial and grew over time
with the addition of sometimes-conflicting details.
In a commentary on the case, history writer John McMillian reaffirmed
his confidence in Ray's guilt and his certainty that the wrongful
death suit was "misguided." But McMillian noted that the King
family's suspicions about the government's actions were grounded in
the reality of the FBI's campaign to ruin King's reputation.
"While King was alive, he and his family suffered needlessly from
slimy government subterfuge," McMillian wrote. Though believing Ray
was "justly punished for being King's assassin," McMillian wrote,
"the FBI has never been held accountable for a much more lengthy,
expensive and organized campaign to destroy King." [The Commercial
Appeal, Nov. 26, 1999]
Other critics focused on Pepper. Court TV analyst Harriet Ryan noted
that the King family's motivations appeared sincere, but "the same
cannot be said for Pepper [who] stands to gain from sales of his book."
Gerald Posner, author of the conspiracy-debunking book, Killing the
Dream, argued that the trial "bordered on the absurd" due to a
"lethargic" defense and a passive judge who allowed "most everything
to come into the record."
Posner also cited money as the motive behind the case. He accused
Pepper of misleading the King family for personal gain and suggested
that the King family went along as part of a scheme to sell the movie
rights to film producer Oliver Stone.
Pepper responded that a film project that the King family had
discussed with Warner Bros. had fallen through before the civil case
was brought. He noted, too, that the family sought and received only
a token jury award of $100. [WP, Dec. 18, 1999]
But the back-and-forth quickly muddied whatever new understanding the
public might have gained from the trial.
Part of the confusion could be traced to the effectiveness of Posner
and other critics in making their case in a wide array of newspapers
and on television talk shows. Some of the blame, however, must fall
on Pepper and his flawed investigation that did include some
erroneous assertions.
The larger tragedy may be that the serious questions about King's
assassination have receded even deeper into the historical mist.
As Court TV analyst Ryan noted, "Whatever theories Garrison and
Pepper get into the record ... it is not likely they will change the
general belief that Ray was responsible."
Though Ryan may be right, another perspective came in 1996 when two
admirers of Dr. King the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr. and actor Mike
Farrell wrote a fund-raising letter seeking support for a fuller
investigation of the assassination.
They argued that the full story of Martin Luther King Jr.'s
assassination was too important to the country to leave any stone
unturned. They stated:
"There are buried truths in our history which continue to insist
themselves back into the light, perhaps because they hold within them
the nearly dead embers of what we were once intended to be as a nation."
--------
The Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis
http://www.lewrockwell.com/spl2/mlk-conspiracy-exposed.html
http://ctka.net/pr500-king.html
by Jim Douglass
April 5, 2010
According to a Memphis jury's verdict on December 8,1999, in the
wrongful death lawsuit of the King family versus Loyd Jowers "and
other unknown co-conspirators," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was
assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own
government. Almost 32 years after King's murder at the Lorraine Motel
in Memphis on April 4, 1968, a court extended the circle of
responsibility for the assassination beyond the late scapegoat James
Earl Ray to the United States government.
I can hardly believe the fact that, apart from the courtroom
participants, only Memphis TV reporter Wendell Stacy and I attended
from beginning to end this historic three-and-one-half week trial.
Because of journalistic neglect scarcely anyone else in this land of
ours even knows what went on in it. After critical testimony was
given in the trial's second week before an almost empty gallery,
Barbara Reis, U.S. correspondent for the Lisbon daily Publico who was
there several days, turned to me and said, "Everything in the U.S. is
the trial of the century. O.J. Simpson's trial was the trial of the
century. Clinton's trial was the trial of the century. But this is
the trial of the century, and who's here?"
What I experienced in that courtroom ranged from inspiration at the
courage of the Kings, their lawyer-investigator William F. Pepper,
and the witnesses, to amazement at the government's carefully
interwoven plot to kill Dr. King. The seriousness with which U.S.
intelligence agencies planned the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.
speaks eloquently of the threat Kingian nonviolence represented to
the powers that be in the spring of 1968.
In the complaint filed by the King family, "King versus Jowers and
Other Unknown Co-Conspirators," the only named defendant, Loyd
Jowers, was never their primary concern. As soon became evident in
court, the real defendants were the anonymous co-conspirators who
stood in the shadows behind Jowers, the former owner of a Memphis bar
and grill. The Kings and Pepper were in effect charging U.S.
intelligence agencies particularly the FBI and Army intelligence
with organizing, subcontracting, and covering up the assassination.
Such a charge guarantees almost insuperable obstacles to its being
argued in a court within the United States. Judicially it is an
unwelcome beast.
Many qualifiers have been attached to the verdict in the King case.
It came not in criminal court but in civil court, where the standards
of evidence are much lower than in criminal court. (For example, the
plaintiffs used unsworn testimony made on audiotapes and videotapes.)
Furthermore, the King family as plaintiffs and Jowers as defendant
agreed ahead of time on much of the evidence.
But these observations are not entirely to the point. Because of the
government's "sovereign immunity," it is not possible to put a U.S.
intelligence agency in the dock of a U.S. criminal court. Such a step
would require authorization by the federal government, which is not
likely to indict itself. Thanks to the conjunction of a civil court,
an independent judge with a sense of history, and a courageous family
and lawyer, a spiritual breakthrough to an unspeakable truth occurred
in Memphis. It allowed at least a few people (and hopefully many more
through them) to see the forces behind King's martyrdom and to feel
the responsibility we all share for it through our government. In the
end, twelve jurors, six black and six white, said to everyone willing
to hear: guilty as charged.
We can also thank the unlikely figure of Loyd Jowers for providing a
way into that truth.
Loyd Jowers: When the frail, 73-year-old Jowers became ill after
three days in court, Judge Swearengen excused him. Jowers did not
testify and said through his attorney, Lewis Garrison, that he would
plead the Fifth Amendment if subpoenaed. His discretion was too late.
In 1993 against the advice of Garrison, Jowers had gone public.
Prompted by William Pepper's progress as James Earl Ray's attorney in
uncovering Jowers's role in the assassination, Jowers told his story
to Sam Donaldson on Prime Time Live. He said he had been asked to
help in the murder of King and was told there would be a decoy (Ray)
in the plot. He was also told that the police "wouldn't be there that night."
In that interview, the transcript of which was read to the jury in
the Memphis courtroom, Jowers said the man who asked him to help in
the murder was a Mafia-connected produce dealer named Frank Liberto.
Liberto, now deceased, had a courier deliver $l00,000 for Jowers to
hold at his restaurant, Jim's Grill, the back door of which opened
onto the dense bushes across from the Lorraine Motel. Jowers said he
was visited the day before the murder by a man named Raul, who
brought a rifle in a box.
As Mike Vinson reported in the March-April Probe, other witnesses
testified to their knowledge of Liberto's involvement in King's
slaying. Store-owner John McFerren said he arrived around 5:l5 pm,
April 4, 1968, for a produce pick-up at Frank Liberto's warehouse in
Memphis. (King would be shot at 6:0l pm.) When he approached the
warehouse office, McFerren overheard Liberto on the phone inside
saying, "Shoot the son-of-a-bitch on the balcony."
Café-owner Lavada Addison, a friend of Liberto's in the late 1970's,
testified that Liberto had told her he "had Martin Luther King
killed." Addison's son, Nathan Whitlock, said when he learned of this
conversation he asked Liberto point-blank if he had killed King.
"[Liberto] said, 'I didn't kill the nigger but I had it done.' I
said, 'What about that other son-of-a-bitch taking credit for it?' He
says, 'Ahh, he wasn't nothing but a troublemaker from Missouri. He
was a front man…a setup man.'"
The jury also heard a tape recording of a two-hour-long confession
Jowers made at a fall 1998 meeting with Martin Luther King's son
Dexter and former UN Ambassador Andrew Young. On the tape Jowers says
that meetings to plan the assassination occurred at Jim's Grill. He
said the planners included undercover Memphis Police Department
officer Marrell McCollough (who now works for the Central
Intelligence Agency, and who is referenced in the trial transcript as
Merrell McCullough), MPD Lieutentant Earl Clark (who died in 1987), a
third police officer, and two men Jowers did not know but thought
were federal agents.
Young, who witnessed the assassination, can be heard on the tape
identifying McCollough as the man kneeling beside King's body on the
balcony in a famous photograph. According to witness Colby Vernon
Smith, McCollough had infiltrated a Memphis community organizing
group, the Invaders, which was working with the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference. In his trial testimony Young said the MPD
intelligence agent was "the guy who ran up [the balcony stairs] with
us to see Martin."
Jowers says on the tape that right after the shot was fired he
received a smoking rifle at the rear door of Jim's Grill from Clark.
He broke the rifle down into two pieces and wrapped it in a
tablecloth. Raul picked it up the next day. Jowers said he didn't
actually see who fired the shot that killed King, but thought it was
Clark, the MPD's best marksman.
Young testified that his impression from the 1998 meeting was that
the aging, ailing Jowers "wanted to get right with God before he
died, wanted to confess it and be free of it." Jowers denied,
however, that he knew the plot's purpose was to kill King a claim
that seemed implausible to Dexter King and Young. Jowers has
continued to fear jail, and he had directed Garrison to defend him on
the grounds that he didn't know the target of the plot was King. But
his interview with Donaldson suggests he was not naïve on this point.
Loyd Jowers's story opened the door to testimony that explored the
systemic nature of the murder in seven other basic areas: l)
background to the assassination; 2) local conspiracy; 3) the crime
scene; 4) the rifle; 5) Raul; 6) broader conspiracy; 7) cover-up.
1) Background to the assassination: James Lawson, King's friend and
an organizer with SCLC, testified that King's stands on Vietnam and
the Poor People's Campaign had created enemies in Washington. He said
King's speech at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, which
condemned the Vietnam War and identified the U.S. government as "the
greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," provoked intense
hostility in the White House and FBI.
Hatred and fear of King deepened, Lawson said, in response to his
plan to hold the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C. King
wanted to shut down the nation's capital in the spring of 1968
through massive civil disobedience until the government agreed to
abolish poverty. King saw the Memphis sanitation workers' strike as
the beginning of a nonviolent revolution that would redistribute income.
"I have no doubt," Lawson said, "that the government viewed all this
seriously enough to plan his assassination."
Coretta Scott King testified that her husband had to return to
Memphis in early April 1968 because of a violent demonstration there
for which he had been blamed. Moments after King upon arriving in
Memphis joined the sanitation workers' march there on March 28, 1968,
the scene turned violent subverted by government provocateurs,
Lawson said. Thus King had to return to Memphis on April 3 and
prepare for a truly nonviolent march, Mrs. King said, to prove SCLC
could still carry out a nonviolent campaign in Washington.
2) Local conspiracy: On the night of April 3, 1968, Floyd E. Newsum,
a black firefighter and civil rights activist, heard King's "I've
Been to the Mountain Top" speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis. On
his return home, Newsum returned a phone call from his lieutenant and
was told he had been temporarily transferred, effective April 4, from
Fire Station 2, located across the street from the Lorraine Motel, to
Fire Station 3l. Newsum testified that he was not needed at the new
station. However, he was needed at his old station because his
departure left it "out of service unless somebody else was detailed
to my company in my stead." After making many queries, Newsum was
eventually told he had been transferred by request of the police department.
The only other black firefighter at Fire Station 2, Norvell E.
Wallace, testified that he, too, received orders from his superior
officer on the night of April 3 for a temporary transfer to a fire
station far removed from the Lorraine Motel. He was later told
vaguely that he had been threatened.
Wallace guessed it was because "I was putting out fires," he told the
jury with a smile. Asked if he ever received a satisfactory
explanation for his transfer Wallace answered, "No. Never did. Not to
this day."
--
The rest of this article can be found in
The Assassinations, edited by Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease.
.
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