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Target: Martin Luther King
A New Look at America's Most Unresolved Assassination
by Richard Goldstein
8 January 2003
Village Voice
Beyond the black community, Martin Luther King Day (which falls
this year on January 20) is a rote commemoration. There are
speeches to report and civic lessons to be taught, but that's
where the impact of this occasion ends. King is what you might
call an empty icon. His beliefs have been stripped of their
materiality, so that he stands for an abstract ideal of
brotherhood -- not the sort of thing to inspire the show-me young.
Yet, in an era when money talks and the military walks, King's
politics are more important than his persona. He was that rare
thing in America today, a radical reformer who believed the system
could be changed and saved.
Though he had his doubts, especially near the end, King held to
the conviction that justice would come through a new consciousness
rooted in empathy. If this dream reeks of '60s naïveté, it did
even then to militants who regarded King as a fool at best.
Unfortunately their thinking prevailed. No wonder contempt for
King has such currency now, since a generation has grown up
without a leader who embodies his visionary politics. It's hard to
imagine a moment when such thinking mobilized millions. But as we
verge on another imperial war at the cost of social progress,
there's no more vital time to remember the real King. And as we
return to a policy of officially sanctioned whacking, there's no
better reason to revisit the most unresolved assassination in
modern American history.
"We never talked about assassination," says William Pepper, who
worked with King during the last year of his life. Though black
activists were being murdered in growing numbers, King's
colleagues didn't connect the dots. "We never put together what
had happened in Vietnam, Cuba, and the Congo [where CIA-supported
assassination plots succeeded, except in Castro's case]. We
couldn't apply that to us. It's a lament of mine that we were not
more aware."
By 1978, Pepper was in a very different place. He'd become an
attorney representing the man convicted of killing King, James
Earl Ray. Ray always claimed he'd been framed, and the King family
came to believe him. With their approval, Pepper fought for a
retrial, but the state of Tennessee successfully blocked the
proceeding, and in 1998 Ray died, still protesting his innocence.
A year later, Pepper was back in court pursuing the only option
left: a civil suit. The jury concurred with his case, and their
verdict cited "government agencies" as "parties to this
conspiracy." [See The Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in
Memphis by Jim Douglass --ratitor] The Justice Department launched
an investigation in 2000 but found no basis for the jury's
judgment. The official explanation remains what it was at Ray's
conviction: that he acted alone.
Now Pepper has written a book about the case that dominated his
life for more than 20 years. An Act of State: The Execution of
Martin Luther King is being published next week, just in time for
the annual testimonials to the fallen leader. This year, the King
family will try to break through the ritual by publicizing the
book.
The facts, as Pepper presents them, are these. King was the victim
of a contract taken out by mobsters already doing business with
the government (e.g., laundering money for the CIA). Ray was their
patsy, framed by the Memphis police, who also tampered with the
crime scene and manipulated evidence. Military units under the
auspices of the Special Forces surrounded the motel where King was
staying, serving as a backup unit in case the hit man failed. The
FBI, which had planted stories deriding King for staying in white
hotels, drew him to the black-owned Lorraine, and his secluded
room was changed to one with a very visible balcony. Armed black
activists who had stationed themselves in a rooming house
overlooking the motel were told to leave just before the killing,
as were black officers and firefighters.
Though many of these facts are irrefutable (there really was a
military unit on the scene, the FBI did plant those derisive
stories, King's room was changed, his security detail was
dispersed, etc.), they can be interpreted in a less conspiratorial
way -- as Gerald Posner does in his book Killing the Dream, which
argues for the official view. There's enough ambiguity in this
story to sustain both sides. But of all the assassinations that
rocked the '60s, this one is the least explicable and therefore
the most troubling. Revisiting King's murder opens a door to your
darkest fears about the government's capacity to act against its
own people.
If you were active in the '60s (or plan to be today), it will
horrify you to hear Pepper's account of the military's plans for
dealing with domestic disturbances: the sharpshooters who traveled
through the country with "mug books" of alleged subversives; the
maniacal surveillance machine that churned out data on millions of
Americans; the links between right-wing racists, J. Edgar Hoover
(who was known to be obsessed with King), and top military
commanders. Pepper thinks the spark that set all these forces off
was King's decision to organize a massive poor people's march on
Washington. Like the veterans' army that descended on the capital
during the Depression, they would camp there and visit their
representatives every day.
Remembering what had happened to those vets -- they were fired on
by federal troops -- the government feared that King's march would
become a bloodbath. "The view of official intelligence," Pepper
says, was that King would lose control of an increasingly angry
mob to radicals in the wings, "and very likely that mob would
become a revolutionary force." The prospect of troops firing on
marchers, and riots spreading to other cities, was terrifying --
especially since the army was already bogged down in a war. A
decision was made to cut the movement down from its head.
Was America in such peril that assassinating King could be
rationalized? In retrospect, that seems like an apocalyptic
fantasy, but it's certainly the way internal security forces
thought in those days. How much has changed?
-------------------
Pepper thinks King's murder marked the end of effective public
dissent in America. But he has the air of someone who can't quite
awaken from a dream that was smashed in his youth. He's headed to
Venezuela to start a fact-finding commission at the behest of Hugo
Chvez. He'll return for the publication of his book, though he's
not hoping for a spot on Nightline. But what if the media listen
up? Won't that blow his locked-down theory of the U.S.? "It would
be interesting," he replies. "I might believe they've now
consolidated control to such an extent that this kind of thing no
longer upsets them." Or maybe there's still reason to hope for an
opening. Didn't King say, "Truth crushed to earth shall rise
again"?
I've lost my faith in the progressive view of history -- but I
still act as if it's true, and that's some kind of tribute to the
man who shaped my politics. So, happy birthday, Rev.
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