Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1960s, when there was a large upheaval in the United States against the governments' atrocities within the country, and its expansionist policies outside of its boarders, four major political assassinations returned the government back to the hands of the "Hidden State". Since the presidency of McKinley, when in pretense of helping four islands to become independent of Spain US entered the war, and after kicking Spanish out, Philippines, Cuba, Guam, and Puerto Rico were attached as subjects of the US government, a policy that continued by the next president Theodore Roosevelt to this day turned US foreign policy into a colonizing power. Four people who were against such policies and had a large followings, were John Kennedy assassinated on November 22, 1963, Malcolm X on February 25, 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, and Robert Kennedy assassinated on June 5, 1968. All of these assassinations happened during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson and FBI Director J Edgar Hoover. There are numerous books on the subject of a conspiracy between Johnson, a friend of Texas oil barons and connected to the mobs, and Hoover, another friend of Texas oil barons and the mobs, a triangle of the president, the CIA, and the FBI. A book by Dr. William Pepper titled "The Plot to Kill King" not only discloses who was behind the assassination of  King, it also briefly touches upon the connection to JFK assassination. A two part investigative film on Youtube also arrives to the same conclusion. The first part of the film is linked below, and the second part starts on Youtube right after. Below the link, beginning of Dr. Pepper's fascinating book is also copied here. 

The book and the film provide just a glimpse of the power of the hidden government, the government of the rich, and why more than 80% of the governments of the world fear and subjugate themselves to the US government. It is necessary to remind here that the US government was established by systematic genocide of the natives, was the last government to abolish slavery (although it still continues the practice in a different form that Michelle Alexander calls it "The New Jim Crow"), has the largest military in the world and has more of its citizens per capita behind bars than any other country. When the constitution of this country was written by Jefferson (originally authored by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, all land and slave owners), it was for the white male landowners to be elected and to vote, and that is who "we the people" are. Women were not allowed to vote in the US until the 20th century and with the struggle of the Suffrage Movement. These were the women who were beaten, jailed, and killed to finally succeed to vote with 19th amendment in 1920. African Americans were allowed to vote in some northern states in late 19th century, and with the abolishment of poll tax in 1965 they were finally allowed to vote like white people. However, by putting them behind bars and disallowing people with judicial convictions to vote, most of them cannot vote, and if they can, there are many obstacles to prevent them, which is represented in the book and movie "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy". Reading the true history of the United States by Howard Zinn and William Blum, to name a few, shows the damage the US government has inflicted on the world, a glimpse of which follows:

Excerpts from the book "The Plot to Kill King":

PREFACE

It has been nearly half a century since Martin Luther King Jr. was taken from us. From the outset—forty-seven years ago, as set out in detail in the epilogue—one writer after another has attempted to disinform the citizens and create false history.

Like most people, I accepted the official story about how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. I believe this was the result of my naiveté or perhaps the desire to put the loss of a friend behind me. In any case, when Dr. Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician and antiwar activist, and I traveled to Memphis for the memorial march on April 8, 1968, four days after the assassination, as far as I was concerned it was in the hands of the police.

In the following years, I heard about inconsistencies in the state’s case and rumors of a conspiracy in which James Earl Ray was framed for Dr. King’s murder. Then in 1977 to 1978, following a conversation with the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and at his suggestion, I prepared for and conducted a five-hour interview with James Earl Ray. Since that time, the mystery of Dr. King’s assassination has dominated much of my life. In no small measure, I suppose, this is because of the responsibility I feel for having initially prompted him to oppose the Vietnam War. That stand was a major factor contributing to his death.

The intervening years have only strengthened my belief that Dr. King’s assassination constituted the greatest loss suffered by the Republic in the twentieth century. To understand his death, it is essential to realize that although he is popularly depicted and perceived as a civil rights leader, he was much more than that. A nonviolent revolutionary, he personified the most powerful force for the long-overdue social, political, and economic reconstruction of the nation.

Those in charge of the United States intelligence, military, and law enforcement machinery understood Dr. King’s true significance. They perceived his active opposition to the war and his organizing of the poor as grave disruptions to the stability of a society already rife with unrest. FBI Director Hoover, in particular, took the position that Dr. King was under communist control.

The last year of Dr. King’s life was during one of the most turbulent times in the history of the nation. Much of the civil unrest took the form of nationwide urban riots and was clearly the result of racial tensions, frustrations, and anger at oppressive living conditions and the endemic hopelessness of inner-city life. However, one cannot consider these explosions without taking into account the pervasive presence of the war, its legitimization of violence, and its overall impact on the neighborhoods of the country.

In the year running up to July 1967, the number of riots and other serious disruptions against public order had reached ninety-three in nineteen states. In August, an additional thirty-three riots occurred in thirty-two cities in twenty-two states.

Dr. King was at the center of it all. His unswerving opposition to the war and his commitment to bring hundreds of thousands of poor people to a Washington, DC, encampment in the spring of 1968 to focus Congress’s attention on the plight of the nation’s poor turned the government’s anxiety into utter panic. In retrospect, I believe that there was no way Dr. King was going to be allowed to lead this army of alienated poor to Washington to take up residence in the shadow of the Washington Memorial.

When army intelligence officers interviewed rioters in Detroit after the July 23, 1967, riot that left nineteen dead, eight hundred injured, and $150 million of property damaged, they were amazed to learn that the leader most respected by those violent teenagers was not Stokely Carmichael, nor H. Rap Brown, but Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Six weeks after the Detroit riots, the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP), which I served as its executive director, scheduled a national convention over Labor Day weekend in Chicago. The gathering of five thousand delegates from all around the country and from every walk of life was expected to support a third-party presidential ticket of Dr. King and Dr. Spock. We now know the shock this prospect caused at the highest levels of government.

So caught up were we in the fight for social change that we didn’t appreciate the strength and determination of the opposition. It has become clear to me that by 1967 a siege mentality had descended on the nation’s establishment forces, including its federal law enforcement, intelligence, and military branches. At the best of times, “official” Washington and its appendages throughout the country are highly insular and protective. In 1967 to 1968, with the barbarians gathering just outside the gates of power, any move in defense of the system and its special economic interests would have been viewed as a patriotic duty. All significant organizations committed to ending the war of fostering social or economic change were infiltrated, subjected to surveillance, and/or subverted. NCNP was no exception.

This final book has been in development since 1978 and reflects a long-term effort to uncover the truth about Dr. King’s assassination. It does not cover the full scope of the investigation, since many leads were examined and discarded and much information, however interesting, ultimately turned out to be superfluous to the central story. In 1988, having come to finally believe that he was an unknowing scapegoat, I agreed to represent James Earl Ray. By 1990 I had become convinced that the only way to end his wrongful imprisonment would be to solve the case. The investigation, on which the book is based, has been focused on that goal. In every way possible I have sought to put evidence of James’s innocence before a court. Frustrated at every turn over this long-term effort, I now turn to the court of last resort—the American people.

This story has taken nearly four decades to unfold. The delay is largely the result of the creation and perpetration of a cover-up by government authorities at the local, state, and national levels, and the collaboration of the mainstream media, which is factually detailed in the epilogue.

I have become convinced that had some of the honest, competent Memphis homicide detectives I have come to know over the years not met obstruction from within their own ranks, they could have ferreted out enough evidence to warrant indicting several Memphians on charges ranging from accessory before (or after) the fact, to conspiracy, to murder, to murder in the first degree. Among those indicted would have been some of their fellow officers. Even without official obfuscation, however, it’s unlikely that these detectives could have traced the conspiracy further afield to the various well-insulated sources and individuals who were criminally involved.

As will become increasingly clear, it was inevitable that such a local police investigation wouldn’t be allowed and that each and every politically sponsored official investigation since 1968 would misinform the public and cover up the truth.

Years of investigation, and a habeas corpus petition denial, led to the unscripted television mock trial in 1993 that resulted in a not guilty verdict. In addition, a civil trial in 1999 held responsible officials of the federal, state, and local governments. My subsequent investigation, over a further fifteen-year period, has unearthed powerful new evidence. The stories of several key witnesses, silent for decades, are revealed for the first time. Although we will never know each and every detail behind this most heinous crime, we now have enough hard facts to overwhelmingly support James Earl Ray’s innocence. The body of new evidence, if formally considered, would compel any independent grand jury to bring to account those guilty parties whom we have identified.

Ultimately, there are many victims in this case; Dr. King, James Earl Ray, their families, and the citizens of the United States. All have been victimized by the abject failure of their democratic institutions. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and its cover-up extends far and wide into all levels of government and public services. Through the extensive control of information and the failure of checks and balances, government has inevitably come to serve the needs of powerful special interests. As a result, the essence of democracy—government of, by, and for the people—has been terminally eroded, and replaced, in my view, by a dominant oligarchic ruling system.

Thus, what begins as a detective story ends as a tragedy of unimagined proportions: an American tragedy; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is dead; James Earl Ray died in prison; many of the guilty remain free, some even revered and honored; and our faith in what we thought we knew as the United States is shaken to the core.

For me, this is a story rife with sadness, replete with massive accounts of personal and public deception and betrayal. Its revelations and experiences have produced in the writer a depression stemming from an unavoidable confrontation with the depths to which human beings, even those subject to professional codes of ethics, have fallen. In addition, there is an element of personal despair that has resulted from this long effort, which has made me even question the wisdom of undertaking this task.

Far from being elated that the truth is now with us face-to-face, I feel consumed by a sadness that will be a lifelong emotional presence. One significant factor is facing the reality that one has misjudged the integrity and even the basic decency of individuals, some of whom have been friends or respected comrades over many years.

It is a traumatic realization that the use of political assassinations has all too often been successful at removing uncontrollable leaders whose commitment to substantive change of their societies had threatened the ruling forces, and thereby become so intolerable that physical removal remained the only option. This allowed for more compliant replacements and, in Dr. King’s case, a void that could not be filled. Two other leaders on J. Edgar Hoover’s “Prayer List,” President John F. Kennedy and president-in-waiting Robert F. Kennedy, were similarly removed. What has emerged is a perceptible change in public policies and civil society often serving the interests of the sponsoring ruling elite.

In my view, Paul Craig Roberts, the former Assistant Treasury Secretary under Ronald Reagan; Professor Martin Gilens of Princeton University; and Professor Benjamin of Northwestern University—the latter two writing in the journal Perspectives on Politics—are correct in their assertion that representative democracy in America has (subsequent to the 1960s’ fulfillment of the Hoover/Tolsen “Prayer List”) yielded to an oligarchic system of government and that this government is orchestrated by wealthy private-interest groups and individuals, resulting in a US government with a superficial resemblance to a functioning representative democracy.

As discussed later on with regard to this particular case, a principal focus in the demise of democracy and an accountable government is the concentration of the media in a few hands (see the epilogue). A formerly diverse media with significant independence is today concentrated in four mega-corporations. The selective issuance of broadcasting licenses ensures that the government will not be challenged on significant issues, particularly regarding political assassinations and false-flag “terrorist” events. Such acts are the lifeblood of the American oligarchy and its rulers.

It has been a source of great personal sadness that I have known three of the principal victims and represented as chief counsel two of the alleged assassins about whose innocence I have come to have no doubt.

Having had the advantage of being able to keep an eye open for new information on the Dr. King case for nearly four decades, I have had the advantage of seeing evidence emerge from the ether. I believe we can now state with certainty that not only is this assassination conclusively explained, but in the process of completing the investigation, we now know more about this assassination than about any similar assassination in history.

Whether the truth will make its way into the history books and thus into the minds of successive generations of American citizens is another story and one of which I shall not be the author.

To this end, my work and this final book complete my investigation of this American tragedy. It dramatically ties up the loose ends and fills in most of the remaining blanks leading up to and including the events on April 4, 1968.

The most startling revelation is that although many players have since passed away at the time of this writing, Dr. King’s primary, though not final, assassin is alive and reasonably well along with the perpetuation of the institutional forces behind it all.

In the context of one of the greatest injustices of the twentieth century, it is this that festers: that while so many good and innocent men and women have gone, the corruption, the corrupt, and the shadowy ruling forces remain—seemingly stronger and more entrenched than ever.

My work, which began nine years after the assassination and has continued to the present, has resulted in two books—in 1995 and 2003—and now culminates with this final work. This book pulls all of the previous work together, leading up to a revelation of the most devastatingly depressive final act in the life of this much-loved man.

Due to the absence of any courage by the mainstream/corporate media, the disinformers have largely been successful in keeping the truth buried.

Even today, they persist.

Tavis Smiley authored and published a book in 2014 entitled Death of a King: The Real Story of Martin Luther King’s Jr.’s Final Year.

While ignoring the now-extensively known facts surrounding the assassination, the television personality and host, Smiley, brings the reader up to the actual event, which is noted in the most cursory manner.

There is no mention of James Earl Ray. Neither is my name or work mentioned in the text, the sources, bibliographies, or the index. Neither was I one of the people chosen to be interviewed. When asked about this omission by a colleague of my friend Jim Douglas (who has had a long-time interest in my work on this case) at a Birmingham, Alabama, book gathering, Smiley’s comment was that he had his limits. And so he did, resulting in yet another instance of dis-informing the world about the loss of this great man.

It is as though my (by then) thirty-seven-year effort to bring clarity and truth to this historic event, set out in two prior books, published in 1995 and 2003; a 1989 BBC documentary; a 1993 Thames Television/HBO Trial; and a thirty-day civil trial in 1999 where I represented the King family, had never occurred.

Is it conceivable that Smiley was unfamiliar with this work and these presentations? I think not and therein lies the insult, not only to me but to the King family, the memory of Dr. King, and to the truth and justice as well.

Coincidentally, I only knew Dr. King during the last year of his life. As David Garrow acknowledges in his book Bearing the Cross, it was my Ramparts magazine article from January 1967, “The Children of Vietnam,” and the photographs it contained compiled during my time as a journalist in Vietnam in 1966 (see Appendix B) that caused Dr. King to weep in my presence when I opened the file. For him, from that time forward there was no turning away from a commitment to oppose the war.

Smiley fails to mention that at Dr. King’s suggestion, before introducing him to a mass crowd in front of the United Nations on April 15, 1976, it was agreed that I would put forward the idea of the King/Spock independent presidential ticket to oppose the Johnson-war presidency in 1968. Smiley’s selective historical account also fails to mention that with Dr. King’s approval, I became the executive director of the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP)—an entity that focused on developing this ticket. As a part of this effort we mounted a large independent convention with over five thousand delegates from all over the country representing every peace and freedom organization of the day, convening at the Palmer House in Chicago, over Labor Day weekend in 1967.

Smiley did not seem to be aware (in fairness, it was only many years later that we learned the facts) that the Black Caucus that disrupted and subverted the convention was organized by the Chicago Blackstone Rangers gang (among others) who were paid and sponsored by the Johnson administration and working with Mayor Richard Daley’s organization.

The Johnson administration was terrified about the possibility of a King/Spock ticket and mounted a heavy anti-Israeli campaign, forcing through resolutions that alienated our liberal Jewish supporters such as Martin Peretz, thus depriving the efforts of necessary funds.

The administration was successful and we did not have a clue—only learning years later what had happened. These were turbulent times. It is important to remember that some one hundred cities burned that year. This was the social/political and cultural context that dominated the atmosphere of the convention.

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I introduced Martin Luther King Jr. as the keynote speaker. As he was speaking, a note was passed over my shoulder: Get him out of here as soon as he is finished or we will take him hostage and embarrass him before the world.

We had no choice. Dr. King was a unifier; without him the convention fell apart. Bill Coffin (the chaplain of Yale and eventually pastor of Riverside Church—a long-time social activist) and I wept. As for his final minutes in Memphis, Memphis Police Department surveillance notes recorded Billy Kyles knocking on Dr. King’s hotel room door at 5:50 p.m. The door opened briefly and closed. Kyles walked to the balcony and stood with his hands on the railing about sixty feet away from the door of the room from which Dr. King exited. Kyles did not go down to get a car. Neither did he approach Dr. King, who was standing alone on the balcony. For years this uncharacteristic action by Kyles puzzled me. That is no longer the case.

Dr. King came out from the room around 6:00 p.m. Ralph Abernathy was still inside. Dr. King was shot about four minutes later.

Tavis Smiley is the latest in the long list of authors and publishers to recount the time of the assassination itself. He, among others, have produced books and articles that have served to provide credibility to the official, or establishment, account of this seminal American, historical event. For a complete summary analysis, see the epilogue.

It matters little that Smiley’s latest work not only ignores the event itself but that his work is critically characterized by significant omissions.

It is incredibly revealing that Smiley never reached out to interview me, but I suppose that the reason is obvious. He had his limits. They might have been breached.

At this writing, I understand that the Discovery Channel will be airing a documentary; I have not been interviewed recently for this production.

We will see if they also had their “limits.”

INTRODUCTION

For What Purpose?

Is it all in vain, this torturous quest?

As misery ever deepens for mankind,

I feel more like an unwelcome guest,

Earthly trapped—an inescapable bind.

But nothing else, this time around,

The Mission controls, the Mission rules

Allowing no escape from the Mission bound

Till the soul escapes these earthly pools.

So, all it is for this solitary soul,

The struggle, pain, success, and glory,

For such a one, no other role

From start to finish a continuing story.

The Historical Summary

My relationship with Dr. King during the last year of his life may have hastened his demise by my pressing him to openly and forcefully oppose the war in Vietnam. This good man wept in my presence when he viewed the photographs I had taken of maimed and slaughtered Vietnamese children. My collaborative work with him and others in the movement precipitated my appointment as executive director of the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) whose design proposed a King/Spock independent presidential ticket to oppose Lyndon Johnson and the war in 1968.

Dr. Benjamin Spock and I became close friends living during the period of the development of NCNP. His book Baby and Child Care was, at one time, second only to the Bible in sales. A leader of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), he became a leading antiwar advocate and was active in the movement, writing a supporting introduction for my article, “The Children of Vietnam.” A powerful antiwar activist, he was convicted (overturned on appeal) and was prepared to run with Dr. King on a third-party presidential ticket, which, as NCNP’s executive director, it was my role to advance.

In early 1967, I opened my files on the Vietnam War to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize three years earlier. As a freelance journalist who witnessed firsthand the atrocities of the Vietnam War, I discussed the effects of the war on the civilian population and the ancient village road culture of the Vietnamese people with Dr. King, who was already inclined to formally announce his position on the war. He had previously voiced his growing concern about his country’s ever-greater role in what appeared to be an internal struggle for control of the nation by a nationalist movement seeking to overcome an oligarchic regime in the South, a regime previously beholden to Western economic interests.

It occurs to me that he would likely react in much the same way today. Opposing American involvement in, and support for, its unilateral opposition around the world to nationalist revolutionary movements and regimes hostile to US corporate interests, in a mythical “war on terror,” leaving in its wake chaos, failed states, and human misery and suffering in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Syria. These extraordinarily costly monolithic adventures have created the largest refugee population, with rights under international law (though they continue to be termed “migrants” by mainstream media) since the Second World War.

In the Museum of History in Hanoi, a plaque is displayed with the following words: All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which the early capitalist fathers changed John Locke’s call for the “pursuit of property.” It was with these words and pro-American spirit, which Ho-Chi Minh said he took from the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, that he proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on September 2, 1945.

It was not then clear to Dr. King that Ho-Chi Minh’s reverence for Jefferson, Lincoln, and American democracy, as he idealized it, made him the legitimate father of a unified Vietnam, but on April 4, 1967, in his speech at Riverside Church in Manhattan, Dr. King declared his formal opposition to the increasing American barbarities in Vietnam. By July 1967, against the disastrous backdrop of the Vietnam War, America began to burn not only through successful enemy attacks in Vietnam but from racial tensions and riots sparked by mounting anger over living conditions at home.

At the Spring Mobilization antiwar demonstrations in New York, on April 15 before 250,000 cheering and chanting citizens and after I had advanced his name as an alternative presidential candidate to Lyndon Johnson, Dr. King called on the government to “stop the bombing.”

He was already emerging as the key figurehead in a powerful coalition of the growing peace and civil rights movements, which were to form the basis of the “new politics.” The National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) was established to catalyze people nationwide. From this platform, Dr. King planned to move into mainstream politics as a potential candidate on a presidential ticket with Dr. Benjamin Spock in order to highlight the antipoverty and antiwar agenda. He called for conscientious objection, political activity, and a revolution in values to shift American society from materialism to humanism. As a result, he came under increasing attack.

Therefore, in very early 1967 I confronted King after he reached out to me, having read the Ramparts article (see Appendix B), which catalogued the devastating effects of napalm and white phosphorus bombing that had been unleashed on the young and old of Vietnam. His prodigious conscience compelled him not only to formally announce his opposition to the war but to actively work and organize against it in every corner of America he visited.

There was great concern in the halls of power in America that this most honored of black Americans had decided to use the full force of his integrity, moral authority, and international prestige to challenge the might and moral bankruptcy of the leadership of the American state, which he freely characterized as the “greatest purveyor of violence on earth.”

His formal announcement of opposition and condemnation of his government generated serious apprehension in the boardrooms of the select list of large American corporations that were receiving enormous profits from the conflict in Vietnam. These, of course, included the range of armament, aircraft, and chemical manufacturers as well as favored construction companies (like Texas and Lyndon Johnson’s own Brown and Root, the forerunner to Halliburton), which had multibillion-dollar contracts, and the oil companies, again including those owned by Texans Johnson and Edgar Hoover’s friends, H. L. Hunt and Clint Murchison. It is hard to imagine oilmen and their industrial corporate comrades becoming more upset about this threat to public policy, which had benefited them since John F. Kennedy’s death and the end of his commitment to end the 27.5 percent oil depletion allowance, and the removal of American advisors for Vietnam beginning in December 1963. This list, of course, should not omit the powerful multinational banks who are the bankers of these corporations that arrange financing so that they themselves greatly profit from the loan syndications and leasing contracts, as well as the large law firms who advise and provide legal services on aspects of every deal, contract, lease, and sale.

When one assesses the awesome array of privately established, non-governmental, institutional power, it is eminently reasonable to consider those in government decision-making positions as being compelled to listen to, protect, and serve the unified interests of this corporate establishment. When business speaks with one voice, as it did in respect to the war or the purported extreme threat of war, at the time when Dr. King set himself up in opposition, the relevant government agencies and their officials became mere foot soldiers for the mighty economic interests. Out in front during war are the armed forces and the intelligence and law enforcement communities. Not far behind are the executive, the legislative, and the judicial legitimizers, who sanction the necessary action. Following in line are the media conglomerates, who as the publicists of government policy, though posing as independent voices of the people, vigorously support and defend the official policy in those serious national security instances of significant concern to the corporate establishment.

Virtually unanimously, and with one voice, the mass media condemned Dr. King’s opposition to the war. In the shadows, of course, were the forces they served.

When one understands this context and those times more than four decades ago, it is understandable that when Dr. King began to crusade against the war, he would cast a long shadow over the ruling economic forces of America. It is little wonder they shuddered at the possibility that his efforts might result in turning off the tap of the free-flowing profits. Should the American people demand an end to the war and should the war end, the losses were not something they could accept.

Perhaps it was for this reason alone that Dr. King had to be stopped.

If this was not reason enough, Dr. King gave these awesomely powerful forces another inducement to eliminate him. He had been wrestling with the problem of economic injustice for some time. It was, he said, in summary, one thing to gain the civil right to eat at a formerly segregated lunchroom counter, but quite another to be able to pay the bill. This was the next goal and, in the world’s dominant capitalist society, an essential component of freedom and equality, and one that was the essence of the movement for social equality and the core of the movement for social justice. The war had made things worse. Not only were a disproportionate number of blacks being sent ten thousand miles from home to serve as cannon fodder, but the cost of the war increasingly required that essential social services and programs in their communities be curtailed. The poor knew better than anyone that President Johnson’s commitment to “guns and butter” could not be fulfilled. In effect there was an undeclared cessation of the “war on poverty.”

For Dr. King, opposition to the war against the people of a poor, non-white, ancient culture was in harmony with, and a natural extension of, the civil rights struggle against oppression and the denial of basic freedoms and essential services at home.

By mid-1967, he began to formulate a strategy to address the widening gap between the rich and the poor. The failure of the success of this effort, at this writing in 2014 and 2015, has resulted in the greatest disparity of wealth in the Republic since 1929.

This project gradually took the form not of simply a march but of the extensive Poor People’s Campaign and mobilization to culminate in an encampment in the shadow of the Washington Memorial. The projection was for the establishment of a tent city with five hundred thousand of the nation’s poorest and most alienated citizens. They would remain as long as it took to get action from the Congress.

If the wealthy, powerful interests across the nation would find intolerable Dr. King’s escalating activity against the war, his planned mobilization of half a million poor people with the intention of laying siege to Congress could only engender outrage and fear.

They knew that it was not going to be possible for Congress to satisfy the demands of the multitude of poor, alienated Americans led by Dr. King, and they believed that the growing frustration could well lead to violence. In such a situation with the unavailability of sufficient troops to control the mass of people, the Capitol could be overrun. Similar events in France come to mind, with demonstrations and turbulence in cities throughout the country, but unlike De Gaulle, Lyndon Johnson did not have an Andre Malraux to counsel him—nothing less than a revolution might result. This possibility could not be allowed to materialize, and neither could Dr. King’s crusade against the war and social economic deprivation be permitted to continue.

When the NCNP Convention was held on Labor Day weekend, many of us believed that nothing less than the nation’s rebirth was on the agenda. But a small, aggressive group had urged each arriving black delegate to join an obviously planned Black Caucus that at one point threatened to take Dr. King hostage. This threat was passed over my shoulder (as a note) as he spoke. Dr. King made a spirited speech, calling for unity and action, after which I had to arrange for him to leave quickly under guard for his own safety. Black Caucus delegates voted en bloc. There were walkouts, hostilities, and splits. Though we didn’t admit it at the time, the NCNP died as a political force that weekend. Reverend Bill Coffin (who would officiate at my marriage six years later at Yale) and I wept at that realization. We had not understood the power of the forces against us and their ability to divide the emerging coalition and to infiltrate and manipulate movement organizations.

Dr. King, however, along with the shadow NCNP movement, stepped up his antiwar efforts and threw himself into developing the Poor People’s Campaign, which was scheduled to bring hundreds of thousands of the nation’s poor blacks, Hispanics, whites, and intellectuals to Washington in the spring of 1968. He would, of course, not live to see it.

All of these efforts came to naught as a result of government infiltration and subversion, and ultimately with Dr. King’s assassination. The country moved further to the right over the next ten years, and as a result, I withdrew from active participation in national political activity. The assassination of Bobby Kennedy, barely two months after Dr. King was cut down, reinforced the dismay and cynicism of many, myself included.

What was beyond our understanding at the time, and is discussed in detail later in this work, was the close association of powerful individuals and corporate interests, with their foot soldiers in government and, in particular, the military and the intelligence establishments. Over one hundred cities were burned or seriously disrupted in 1967 to 1968. The nation was on edge. A revolution was barely averted in France. Opposition to the war and growing economic disparity at home led to growing dissent, which in turn fed the peace and freedom movement.

The army’s reserves were virtually depleted and there was serious concern as to whether forces were available to put down a concerted rebellion on domestic shores. Dr. King was regarded, as the shooter has revealed to me (discussed later), as a “shit starter” who must be removed. The unease of the military and intelligence forces and their liaison with each other during that last year reflects this fear. Chronological notes (see Appendix A) of significant meetings and events are included during this time, primarily of the military, but also referencing FBI and CIA participation. The degree of surveillance of Martin King and Robert Kennedy reveals the threat they posed.

Not for a moment, however, during that turbulent time did I hesitate to believe that someone other than James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan (in regards to the RFK assassination) had been responsible for the back-to-back assassinations. What a difference the evidence from over nearly four decades has made.

The actual upending of my initial Dr. King assassination perceptions began with my conversation with Ralph Abernathy in 1977. This eventually led to my many months’ long preparation for the interrogation of James Earl Ray at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary that took place in August 1978—and changed everything.

Calmly and quietly, James left us with a multitude of issues and unanswered questions. The five-hour interrogation session was observed by body language specialist, Dr. Howard Berens. After the interrogation, Reverend Abernathy, Reverend Lawson, Dr. Berens, and I agreed that regardless of what role James may have played, he was not the shooter.

Thus began a personal investigation that only now, in the autumn of 2015, has been completed.

The first book, while not a prerequisite to reading this one, set out the details of that initial investigative work from 1978 through 1995 and my relationship with James. (I agreed to represent him in 1988, ten years after beginning to investigate the case, when I finally became convinced that he was an unknowing scapegoat.)

During those initial seventeen years, I spent much time on the streets in the bowels of Memphis, Tennessee. The pressures on me and my family increased from all sides, including an instance in which my four-year-old son picked up the phone to hear a threat on his father’s life. It culminated with an offer from an undesirable source to buy our family home. Raising a young family under these circumstances was untenable. We moved to England in 1981, where I became a visiting scholar at Wolfson College, Cambridge University, and regularly commuted to the United States for the case.

Formal habeas corpus proceedings, which I took on James’s behalf through the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals and up to the Supreme Court, failed to get him a new trial or even an evidentiary hearing. Gradually, more and more issues arose concerning unasked and unanswered questions by the House of Representatives investigation. It also became abundantly clear that James’s final lawyer, Percy Foreman, who initially pledged to go to trial and then abruptly pressed James to plead guilty, ignored a considerable volume of exculpatory evidence as well as significant indications of official governmental involvement not only in a cover-up, but of the assassination itself. Foreman went to the extreme by agreeing to give James’s brother Jerry $500 in exchange for James’s guilty plea in court without causing any “unseemly conduct” in court (see Appendix C).

With the failure of getting the case in court, I took advantage of an offer, by Thames Television in the UK, in collaboration with HBO, to do an unscripted television mock trial of James. This trial resulted in an independent jury finding James not guilty, and this opened the floodgates through which new evidence poured.

For example, James’s shadowy handler and controller Raul was identified and spoken to by one courageous witness, Glenda Grabow, in a six-minute telephone conversation, documented by her telephone bill (see Appendix E). She knew Raul well in the late 1960s, while he was in and out of Houston, and she was in no doubt that it was the same person. I also spoke with him. When his daughter was shown the same US immigration photograph of him, which had been independently identified by Glenda, her brother, her husband Roy, Loyd Jowers, and James, the daughter unthinkingly said anyone could get that photograph of her father—confirming his identity.

What was also to emerge were the direct roles of Loyd Jowers, the owner of Jim’s Grill, from the back lot of which the fatal shot was fired, and Frank Liberto, a local Mafia lieutenant close to the New Orleans Southwestern organized crime family of Carlos Marcello. At the time, I knew nothing about the crucial Dixie Mafia connection to J. Edgar Hoover and his personal emissary Clyde Tolson, and the assassination effort led by the family of Russell Adkins. This involvement would later surface with the information provided under oath by the Adkins family’s youngest son, Ron Tyler Adkins.

Someone claiming to be John Downie called my military contact on January 1, 1996, when the first book had been out for only a few months. He asserted that I was basically correct on the facts and offered to fill in the details. He said he had only followed orders and that he had not been given too much independent decision-making authority. He also said he was officially dead and had been given a new identity.

The conversations continued for some eighteen months, occasionally in Bermuda, where I would have a shadow presence, well out of sight. The informant would never meet with me personally since I was Ray’s lawyer, but the intermediary (Steve Tompkins) carried the questions and answers back and forth as he had done with two former Special Forces members of the Alpha 184 back-up sniper unit who fled to Mexico in the early 1970s after discovering that a clean-up operation was underway. I gradually realized that the informant was a clever disinformation agent whose mission was ultimately to redirect our investigation.

A decade later I would spend hours with one of the daughters of the real John Downie and, as a result of our conversation, developed an unexpected respect for this most unlikely recipient. Information relayed to me about his previous exchanges with President Johnson on the Vietnam War required an expanded assessment of his role; more on that later.

My foray into the military involvement understandably engendered hostility and it became clear that my investigation must be discredited. In one instance, Forrest Sawyer and ABC, in a program entitled Turning Point, interviewed me with Billy Ray Eidson, who I had named as the leader of the Alpha 184 back-up sniper unit. I only named him because all of my investigations and investigators had told me he was dead. We dropped that ball. He was involved in a barroom murder, had killed a couple of people in Birmingham, and fled to Costa Rica, where he remarried and lived in obscurity. The army, knowing he was alive, brought him onto the television program. It was a short, sharp hit, but had nothing to do with the primary allegations that he led the back-up sniper team.

When I confronted Sawyer afterwards, telling him we could have had a meaningful discussion if he had told me Eidson was alive, in which I could have brought documentation to confront him, he shrugged his shoulders and turned away.

Eidson, and his National Guard General Henry Cobb, Commander of the Twentieth Special Forces Group (who also participated in the ABC interview), denied any involvement in the assassination. Eidson, who in 1968 was a fireman in Birmingham, subsequently said he was off duty on the day of the assassination—April 4, 1968—building a house for a friend a good distance away from Birmingham. Sometime later in a BBC interview, General Cobb separately stated that he knew Eidson could not have been involved in the assassination because he had seen him that day around the firehouse in Birmingham a number of times.

They had obviously not coordinated their Eidson alibi story.

Similar problems arose during our efforts to obtain copies of the photographs taken by the Psy-Ops team from the roof of the fire stations. These photographs showed (according to the few who saw them) the shooter lowering his rifle, and he was not James. My colleague, Steve Tompkins, was tailed and photographed by FBI agents as he went to a meeting with one of the Psy-Ops officers. He made the mistake of traveling under his own name. His office—in the Georgia State Capitol, no less—was broken into one night before he was to meet with me and turn over a sensitive file. When I arrived that morning, the file was missing.

When I made a similar error of registering in my own name in a Birmingham, Alabama, Holiday Inn, my room was entered in my absence and my daybook and telephone list—left behind in haste—were taken.

Those were tumultuous times. It was one thing for the Mafia to carry out a contract killing of Dr. King, but quite another to learn that a super-secret military intelligence group, housed in the Pentagon, under the ultimate command of the assistant chief of staff for intelligence, with close working liaison with the FBI, played a significant role. These revelations only worsened when we learned that the 902nd MIG was involved in a clandestine joint venture operation with Carlos Marcello’s Mafia family, whereby stolen weapons from US military bases, camps, and arsenals were delivered to Marcello’s property, loaded onto barges, and shipped to the Gulf at Houston, where they were off-loaded, repackaged, and sold to right-wing forces in Latin and South America. The profits were split 50–50 between the 902nd and the mob, with the 902nd using the profits to fund further black operations. This particular operation, the assassination of Dr. King, was not only confirmed by two members of the Alpha 184 sniper team, who were themselves drivers at various times, but also independently corroborated by Glenda Grabow, who was a friend of the Houston operatives and present at some of the unloading activity led by Raul. Thus, she personally observed the Houston side of the enterprise.

A further link, beyond any credible notion of coincidence, emerged from the 902nd’s working relationship with a Canadian facility of the Union Carbide Corporation. The manager of the facility’s warehouse, with National Security Agency clearance, was one Eric S. Galt. This was the identity given to James by someone he believed was trying to help him. With an NSA- cleared identity, should the escaped con ever be stopped or picked up, he would immediately have been let go and not returned to prison. I obtained a 902nd document that revealed that one of Colonel Downie’s subordinates met with the real Eric Galt in August 1967, only days before we believe that James was given this identity. A photograph of the real Galt was given to me at one point; the resemblance to James was striking.

But there was more. Two other sources, along with Steve Tompkins, one of whom I have called “Herbert” and the other, whose name was Jack Terrell, but was known as “Carson” prior to his death, confirmed separate aspects of the Dr. King back-up sniper operation. Herbert was a longtime official and quasi-official military/CIA operative and mercenary, who boasted about his role in the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz, the Guatemalan president who was ousted in 1954. As early as 1978, seventeen years before Tompkins, he offered to take me to meet with the very same members of the back-up sniper unit who Tompkins knew and with whom he met in 1995. At that very early stage in my work, the price was too high and the level of trust too low.

As for Jack Terrell, I sought him out after reading his book Disposable Patriot, in which he referred to a member of the Thirtieth Special Forces group from Mississippi named J. D. Hill. According to Terrell (whose name was also on a list of Alpha 184 participants provided to me by Tompkins), Hill had participated in the Memphis operation and had begun to talk about the assignment. He had allegedly been killed by his diminutive wife, who fired five bullets from a .357 Magnum, carving a circle in his chest. He was dead before he hit the ground. Jack thought it very unlikely that she could handle such a weapon.

Terrell was blocked by the widow’s protector/boyfriend from talking to her. She was never prosecuted or charged with what appeared to be an act of murder. The case was closed.

Even with this type of independent corroboration of Steve Tompkins’s information and documentation, I knew it was likely that he would feel enormous pressure to recant his work on my behalf. Therefore, being continually prodded to do so by my extraordinary assistant, Jean Obray, I asked him to read the military chapters and confirm the accuracy of the details. He did so under oath in the form of an affidavit.

This section of Orders to Kill was too hot for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation’s publisher Harper Collins, which had won the auction for the book and life-story rights. At the last minute, they demanded that I exclude the military chapters on the basis that since it had been a Mafia, and not a military, killing, the truth would be confirmed. At the same time, the corporate interests and the bottom line would be protected. Military intelligence, the army, and the Mafia were too intertwined, in my view, for this approach. We rejected the ultimatum and the book went to a small house that published it intact. It would, however, not be reviewed in the mainstream media, with one New York Times reviewer confiding (after he had a review ready) that this was the first time in twenty-five years that he had been told not to publish a review of a book. That was in November 1995.

The story of the following six years is referenced in this book.

The alleged murder weapon was tested and the results were inconclusive. Ordinarily, if a weapon cannot be matched to the death slug, that is the end of the story; there is no murder weapon. In this case, however, the state and the media reversed the burden. We were expected to conclusively eliminate the rifle that had been thrown down (in fact, we would learn that the throw-down possibly took place nearly ten minutes before the fatal shot rang out). By not ruling and reserving judgment, Judge Joe Brown denied the State the opportunity to appeal.

As this matter was pending before him, however, he was curiously approached with a very lucrative offer to become a television court judge, an offer he eventually accepted. In the meantime the State eventually moved to recuse him, saying he had become prejudiced toward the petitioner. When Judge Joe Brown refused, the State appealed, and without allowing any argument, the appellate court removed him and remanded the case to the administrative judge. We knew that there was no hope in such a system.

During all of this time, James saw his hopes rise and fall as his health deteriorated. His liver disease had progressed to such a level that only a transplant would save his life. I traveled to the University of Pittsburgh’s renowned Thomas E. Starzl Transplant Clinic and met with Dr. John Fung, head of the Division for Transplantation. Eventually, subject to an extensive examination, and with the confirmation that James could not receive an organ in Tennessee, he agreed to accept him as a patient. We traveled to Tennessee to conduct a preliminary workup and the Pittsburgh doctors agreed to admit him at the University of Pittsburgh Hospital and provide him with an available organ.

I was elated.

I prepared an application to the court seeking an order for the Department of Corrections, requiring them to cooperate in facilitating this surgery. We offered to cover the costs of transportation and security. The hospital would absorb the medical and care costs. It would therefore cost the State of Tennessee nothing. The Department of Corrections opposed the motion, saying that there was no legislative authority for them to administratively grant such permission.

After an emotional appeal and argument, the judge reserved his decision only to come back hours later and again deny our application.

I was devastated.

This, of course, was a death sentence. Any appeal would have been useless. It was clear that, once and for all, they wanted James dead. Former mob associate Arthur Wayne Baldwin had long ago told me that the Memphis godfather, Gene Luchese, Marcello’s man in Memphis, had tried to have James killed in prison on more than one occasion, in one instance using Baldwin himself to coordinate the attempted hit.

Now was their chance, and his death would be by natural causes. But this was not enough. They still wanted him to confess. They sent an intelligence officer to offer him an opportunity to die outside of prison if he would only confess to the assassination and close the story.

James was incredulous. I was appalled at their audacity. He had not protested his innocence for all those years, suffering an unjust incarceration for decades, to fold on his deathbed and give his persecutors, his executioners, their sordid victory.

Without the liver transplant, James died, and the King family and I arrived at what appeared to be the end of the road.

However, I proposed that we use the vehicle of a civil trial as a means of putting our evidence before a court and testing it under oath. We had hard evidence against Loyd Jowers, some of which only emerged from Jowers’s own admissions in interviews with Dexter King and me, within the statute of limitations. In such a civil trial, the family and heirs of Dr. King would be able to sue him, and it would enable us to finally expose much of the evidence we had gathered. So in the autumn of 1999 we went to trial in Judge James Swearingen’s Memphis courtroom. It would be the black judge’s last case.

Some seventy witnesses and thirty days later, a jury took fifty-nine minutes to find for the King family and against Loyd Jowers and agents of the government of the United States, the state of Tennessee, and the city of Memphis. Jowers’s liability was assessed at 30 percent, while the government’s liability was put at 70 percent. The extraordinary array of verbal testimonial and documentary evidence is set out in detail in my second book An Act of State. Suffice it to say, the roles and link between the Mafia, the military, local law enforcement, and government officials became crystal clear.

Raul’s existence, identity, and role was established, as were the extraordinary efforts made by federal agents to protect him, including visiting him and his family and advising them on what to say and do, while wiring their telephone. These were extraordinarily personal protective services for a retired, alleged automobile plant assembly line worker. This extensive government involvement was revealed to us by a Portuguese journalist who was proudly told about it by Raul’s wife, whom she interviewed. Members of Dr. King’s own organization were implicated, and the long-standing lie of a local pastor who claimed to have been with him during his last half hour on earth was revealed. A local official investigator who headed up a reinvestigation effort admitted on the stand that he had not interviewed, or even known about, twenty-four of the twenty-five key witnesses from whom the jury had already heard.

That 1999 trial led to the opening of the final act of this American tragedy. It is another matter entirely that the corporate mainstream media have ignored the jury’s verdict and that the majority of citizens remain prey to the official story, manipulated by the media and their masters.

The chapters that follow will set out the extraordinarily detailed and conclusive evidence as to how this horrible event in American history came about and who was responsible. Witnesses, now nearing their graves, who have long since held vital information have come forward and revealed what they know about aspects of the events leading up to and including the assassination itself.

The evidence presented will once and for all uncover the crucial role of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover; his Deputy, Clyde Tolson; the ultimate assassins; the medical officials at St Joseph’s Hospital; and finally, the identification of the shooter, including my interview with the primary assassin of Martin Luther King Jr.

Since much of the evidence is provided under oath and is against the penal interests of the declarant, it has significant credibility.

Ultimately, however, that is for the reader, and history, to judge.

Can we at last defy the history of previous human civilizations and the existential reality of our species and move to another level, not for us, the living, but as trustees for future generations yet unborn?

Can we finally listen to their silent pleas? To attempt this feat is to imagine the unimaginable to dream by day of a world that has never been and ask “why not?”

So, let us begin this journey using one of the most significant events in the history of our world as a springboard for a consideration of what is the human condition in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

When one is confronted with the assassination of a major leader who personifies the most treasured values of the species and it becomes clear that those responsible for the murder are officials of his own government acting with the sanction of those in the shadows who actually rule, surely one should strive to understand what that means now and for the future. In other words, when the removal of a leader who has offended powerful forces and special interests in the Republic takes on the status of an act of state, citizens must contemplate what this reveals about their culture and its civil and political systems, their freedom, the quality and status of the rule of law, and their entire way of life.

Accordingly, in an ever more integrated and mutually dependent world, our brothers and sisters, fellow human beings, wherever located, should be concerned.

Concern, however, must inevitably be preceded by an understanding of the factual events (to which this thirty-seven-year investigation has been devoted) and also to the dynamics and reality of underlying power and how it impacts public policy. Any void in this process may result in a deficient analysis and inevitably lead to a superficial assessment. In other words, to see government agents carrying out a scenario in collaboration with private contractors—the Mafia—and view this team effort as an understandable alliance that affords plausible deniability to the state officials, while accurate, does not go to the next, and most important, level of operative power.

This deeper-level analysis requires one to view the involved state agents as more than governmental officials acting on behalf of the state—following the orders of their superiors. In fact, these officials, and their superiors, function in such instances as messengers for and agents of those entities and individuals who wield the real hidden power. Decisions are taken by these corporate/financial masters and implemented by the appropriate governmental bodies by way of law enforcement, intelligence, and defense/security apparatus. All of this will come as no surprise to many readers, but it will to others because of the degree of deception used by those in authority from the very outset. Yukio Mishima makes the salient point in his The Decay of the Angel that when deception is used at the starting point by authority, the authority will only be able to sustain itself by continuing and spreading deception like a given culture. More insidious is the effect on the citizen whereby the external deception is believed to the extent that he/she engages in self-deception, which itself becomes integrated into the individual’s self-image. For many people, a subsequent rejection of their previously perceived truth amounts to a denial of self.

As much as I reject Cicero’s enlarged adoration of the protection of private property, above all, in Rome, I am compelled to agree with his belief that the “frailty” of man’s character, if unrestrained by the rule of law, will lead to tyranny. In another era, Lord Acton saw the human lust for power and the corrupting effects of too much as leading to absolute corruption and an unjust government, one that rules in the interests of a few rather than the common good.

The driving force in this process is, of course, money—profit in all its attendant forms—and the control of access to it as well as control over any use of it and through its use in controlling others.

The use of power is inextricably linked to and essential for any understanding of the acquisition of wealth. Since, throughout history, the road to power is paved with money or numbers, any movement or leader who denies or defies the established values and priorities optimized by corporate, consumer capitalism, such as Martin Luther King Jr., and who has the potential to mobilize large numbers, indeed masses, of the body politic must be ultimately discredited or physically removed. Such a person is out of place—such as Ruskin, Gandhi’s mentor, who believed that the most precious jewels in any family are the children produced and that the quality of a good soul is far more valuable than manufactured wealth.

Dr. King was such an inconvenient person for the corporate/ financial power interests. Let us look at the reasons.

His commitment and energy of leadership was against war and toward the establishment of a public domestic and foreign policy dedicated to living in peace with cooperation as an all-embracing ethic. He saw all of mankind as related and sincerely believed that death and destruction imposed on another people—no matter where they were located—was an injury and insult to all other human beings. He was a man of peace in his deepest being. For him, truth and peace were inseparable. Like Gandhi, he equated personal truth with the personal readiness to suffer for it. Gandhi also embraced this principle. It constitutes the only dogma in Gandhian philosophy—that the only real test of truth is action based upon a refusal to do harm. One should be prepared to get hurt in defense of the truth, but not to hurt. Dr. King traveled along this Gandhian pathway and combined a commitment to nonviolence with self-suffering. As for the war being fiercely waged at the time, he was committed not only to ending it when his leadership was at its most influential, but to the total disarmament of nations and the gradual elimination of the forces and implements of war. If anyone epitomized the vision of turning weapons into plowshares it was Dr. King. Instead of spending hundreds of billions of dollars on more efficient killing machines, he advocated converting those huge resources to address social and economic needs and long-standing injustices and massive poverty in the United States as well as throughout the world.

I believe that it is fair to say that at the end of his life he began to realize that the civil and political rights for which he had long fought were seen as secondary to the long-ignored social, economic, and cultural international human rights that were anathema to his capitalist homeland. In many ways the focus on the highly manipulatable political civil rights provided a drug-like distraction from the real human deprivation resulting from the ever-increasing disparity in wealth and income between the privileged few and the struggling masses. This reality, today, is indeed much worse, overwhelmingly so. In this realization he was in the company of Franklin Roosevelt, whose last State of the Union speech addressed this great national issue. His widow, Eleanor, represented the United States from 1947 to 1951 and drafted parts of the covenant language for the UN International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, which focused on the social, economic, and cultural rights. The United States has never subscribed to that commitment, only ratifying the Civil and Political Rights Covenant in 1992.

These values and this proposed redirection of American public policy were in direct conflict with the Cold War garrison state and corporate profiteering engine that had driven America during the last twenty-five years of King’s life. The ever-increasing devotion of the Republic’s resources to keeping American society on a war footing and the consolidation of the military/industrial/political complex that dominated American life and public policy and that was feared by Dwight Eisenhower—himself a product of that culture—could not have been more opposite to the orientation advocated by Dr. King.

Bombastic, chauvinistic, corporate propaganda aside, where the slaughter of innocents is, and always was, justified in the name of patriotism and national security, it has always and ever been about money. Corporate and financial leaders trusted with the keys to the Republic’s treasure moved from boardrooms to senior government positions and back again. Construction, oil and gas, defense industry, and pharmaceutical corporations, their bankers, brokers, and executives thrive in a war economy. Fortunes are made and dynasties created and perpetuated and a cooperating elite permeates an entire society and ultimately contaminates the world in its drive for national resources wherever they are.

This American militaristic ethic held sway before Dr. King was born, with the seizure of massive land areas belonging to Mexico, the subjugation of Hawaii, the Philippines, and Cuba. In Dr. King’s, lifetime, after World War II, American corporate/military power overthrew governments in Iran, Guatemala, and Brazil, to name only a few, and even brought to power a young, ambitious assassin in Iraq named Saddam Hussein.

If this commitment to militarism had a focus in King’s life, it was the brutal war against the ancient, beautiful people and culture of Vietnam. He would have shed equal tears had he been alive to witness what his beloved nation has been doing to the impoverished masses, not only of Iraq, but against Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and Syria, resulting in the creation of the greatest number of refugees since the Second World War.

In his time, Vietnam was his Rubicon and it was here that he and I joined forces. Once he appreciated the extent of his beloved country’s barbarism, he was not for turning his back—not for shying away from this defining struggle. Here, as never before, would he seriously challenge the interests of the power elite. Those interests all came down to money. The reader should keep in mind President Lyndon Johnson’s outburst at his CIA Vietnam briefer, Colonel John Downie, who in 1966 regularly urged him to get out of Vietnam. Finally in their ultimate session, a frustrated LBJ pounded the table and exclaimed: “I cannot get out of Vietnam, John, my friends are making too much money.”

For me, that says it all.

PART I

Chapter 1

THE ROAD TO MEMPHIS

The elite say

You are what you do

There is no other way.

Discard illusions that you woo

Pick up the trash

Do not complain

About the petty cash

And then, ignore the rain.

Beginning in February 1968, Dr. King had received regular reports from his friend, Memphis clergyman James Lawson, pastor of Centenary Methodist Church, about the sanitation worker’s dispute in the city. Ninety percent of the thirteen hundred sanitation workers in the Memphis were black. They had no organization, union or otherwise, to defend their interests and no effective means to air grievances or to seek redress. However, to most of the citizens of Memphis, black and white, a strike against the city was nothing less than rebellion.

In a bitter and frustrating setback for the black community, Henry Loeb, who had been the mayor from 1960 to 1963, retuned and defeated incumbent William Ingram, who was regarded as friendly to black Memphians, in the mayoral election. Considering the new mayor’s history and reputation, there was no reason for black workers to hope that their working conditions or salaries might improve.

The grievances were many. Salaries were at rock bottom, with no chance of increase. Men were often sent home arbitrarily, losing pay. Much of the equipment was antiquated and poorly maintained. In early 1968 two workers, thirty-five-year-old Echole Cole and twenty-nine-year-old Robert Walker were literally swallowed by a malfunctioning “garbage packer” truck. We would later learn this was a planned murder by the Dixie Mafia family of Russell Adkins, in coordination with Memphis Police Department Director of Police and Fire Frank Holloman, in order to compel Dr. King to return to support the strikers. There was no workmen’s compensation and neither man had life insurance. The city gave each of the families a month’s pay and $500 toward funeral expenses. Mayor Loeb said that this was a moral but not a legal necessity. After the deaths of Cole and Walker, talk of a strike was widespread.

Maynard Stiles, who was second-in-command at the Memphis Public Works Department, told me years after the event that T. O. Jones, the head of the local union, called him the night before the strike with what Stiles regarded as a very reasonable list of demands. Stiles said that Jones wanted him to go to the union meeting scheduled for that night and announce the city’s agreement with the terms. An elated Stiles called Loeb to advise him that a settlement was at hand on very reasonable terms. Loeb ordered him not to dignify any such meeting with his presence and insisted that no terms be accepted under any circumstances. The union meeting went ahead that evening without Stiles. The next day the strike was on.

The national office of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) sent in professional staff to handle the negotiations, which the mayor insisted on conducting in public, giving neither side any opportunity to change position. With no solution in sight, an interdenominational group of clergy intervened but made no progress.

The deadlock led to a protest march on February 23, which got out of control in the face of heavy police provocation. Ultimately, the police used Mace on men, women, and children marchers and bystanders. Afterward, a strike strategy committee was formed with the Reverend James Lawson as its chairman. Reverend Lawson had been one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and had worked with the organization for a decade. Dr. King regarded him highly and he was Dr. King’s best friend in Memphis.

Meanwhile, Dr. King was closing a leadership conference in Miami. While knowing that most of his audience disagreed with the Poor People’s Campaign, he insisted that the nation had to be awakened to the issues of poverty and hunger. The shantytown he planned to erect in Washington would ensure that the plight of the American poor would be foremost in the consciousness of the people of the nation, even the world.

“We are Christian ministers and … we are God’s sanitation workers, working to clear up the snow of despair and poverty and hatred….” he told them.

In Memphis, a city injunction against the strike intensified the black community’s support for the sanitation workers, and consumer boycotts and daily marches through the downtown areas were organized. The director of the Memphis police and fire departments, Frank Holloman, who had agreed that he would allow the marches if they were peaceful, withdrew many of the visible, uniformed police. Holloman had been a special agent of the FBI for twenty-five years. For seven of those years (1952–1959), he had been in charge of Director Hoover’s Washington office. In Memphis he had no support from the black leaders. Internally he relied heavily on his chief, J. C. MacDonald (who in 1968 was close to retirement), a group of seven assistant chiefs, and Inspector Sam Evans (who was in charge of all special services), and Lieutenant Eli H. Arkin of the police department’s intelligence bureau.

The growing involvement of young blacks, particularly high school students who were being organized by the Invaders and their parallel organization, the Black Organizing Project (BOP), brought increased volatility to the strike. During a boycott of the local merchants, these young people harassed blacks who made purchases in downtown stores. The militants made themselves heard throughout the dispute; various Invaders were arrested for disorderly conduct for trying to persuade students to leave school and for blocking traffic. In retrospect, the Invaders’ actions seem mild in comparison with those of black power groups in other parts of the country. I interviewed each of the members of the Invaders.

Community on the Move for Equality (COME), a coalition of labor and civil rights groups spearheaded by an internal committee of local clergy that was now running the strike, sought national as well as local publicity, scheduling nationally prominent leaders to speak in Memphis in support of the workers. The local NAACP chapter asked Roy Wilkins to come; the local union sought to bring in longtime civil rights leader Bayard Rustin; and Reverend Lawson raised the possibility of bringing Dr. King to Memphis. Wilkins and Rustin finally agreed to come on March 14.

Lawson, who had been keeping Dr. King abreast of developments, approached him in late February when the civil rights leader was close to physical exhaustion. It was around this time that his doctor had ordered complete rest.

At first, Dr. King had been reluctant to become directly involved. He had delivered speeches in Memphis but had never headed any civil rights activity there aside from leading the so-called “march against fear,” which was organized in response to the Mississippi shooting of James Meredith, the first black to enroll at the University of Mississippi. But even though some SCLC executive staff wanted to stay away from the strike, Dr. King came to see it as being directly relevant to the national campaign.

What group could be more illustrative of the exploitation he sought to dramatize than these lowliest nonunion workers who daily removed the garbage from the city’s homes? Dr. King’s involvement was potentially a high-profile activity (though with some risks) that would lead naturally into the Washington Poor People’s Campaign. Because Memphis contained a small, militant, black organizing group (the Invaders) as well as the more conservative southern black congregations, it was in his view a microcosm of the nation, with all of the attendant problems and obstacles to the development of a successful coalition. How could he turn his back on the real, current struggle of the Memphis sanitation workers?

In early March Reverend Lawson made the announcement that the city had been waiting for. The SCLC had transferred a March 18 staff meeting scheduled for Clarksdale, Mississippi, to Memphis, and on that evening Dr. King would address a gathering of strike supporters.

Although Dr. King had experienced problems and setbacks, particularly concerning his position against the war, no one approached his signature on the national scene as a spokesman of the black and poor of America. His involvement would inevitably focus national attention on the strike, its issues, and its nonviolent tactics.