When you ask someone who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr? They will more than likely say James Earl Ray. However, if you looked from an unbiased stand point and open you mind to the other possibilities you could end up with the same conclusion as I did. I picked the conspiracy theory over MLK’s death because it’s shocking how unaware we are of it. One of my learning take-aways was that the US government wanted MLK to be killed because he had thousands of followers and the government feared that power of his. Learning about the truth of Martin Luther Kings Juniors death will make a difference because first off nobody knows the truth it’s been covered, and our history books fail to educate us on it. Second, it can make you think differently of our own government and how shady it is. Thirdly, to expand your mind on different possibilities that could happen.
Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I have a dream” on August 28, 1963. It was watched live on television by over 250,000 people and is ranked the #1 American speech of the 20th Century. King was a role model; the voice for the people. It’s hard to think he was murdered in a conspiracy really freaks people, but if you look at the facts and in an unbiased way it may change your outlook. Between the time of his “I have a dream” speech and April 4, 1968 the day he killed a lot happened during those five years that nobody knows about. During, those five years the media began to turn on him and rumors were being spread. His crowds and followers started shrinking in numbers. It seems all those accusations were to harm his reputation. Martin Luther King is known as a Civil rights leader who died by some racist person. However, in other countries he known for standing up to the government and corruption that is involved in it.
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Things for King didn’t start getting bad until he began speaking about the American Violence and the violence that our own government puts out into the world like: war, corruption, and poverty. King started questioning the amount money we were spending on war. President Johnson called for a war on poverty, but then is engaged on war in Vietnam. King then stood up against Vietnam and the president and the white house all came out against him. That’s when King started speaking out against the corruption in the government, and then all the rumors and liberal media started coming after him. His followers’ numbers got smaller. The government did not like how King was going after the foreign policy and not just staying in the civil rights lane. MLK was being blackmail by the government. Saying they had audio recordings that were him and proof of he was having an affair. King was just a target for the FBI. The FBI has admitted to wiretapping him. FBI Domestic Intelligence Chief Willian Sullivan wrote this in a memo two days after Kings speech “I have a dream,” “We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security (Andrew Prokop.2018)” That is when the harassment by the FBI began for Martin. At one point a letter was sent to Kings house that his wife opened. King and his whole team believe the letter was written by the FBI. The letter is written like it came from one of his black supports that turned against him. In the letter it’s threatened him and said that he must kill himself and that he has 34 days to do so, or they (the FBI) will kill him. The government was so afraid of him that J Edgar Hoover listed him as the most dangerous man in American (Federal Bureau of Investigation). Martin Luther King a man who inspired thousands of people. Dangerous by spreading the truth of government? It’s interesting when people speak out against things like this and get assassinated like: JFK, Gandhi, and John Lennon for example. I wonder how many people knew that Martin Luther King was an enemy to the State at one point. Obviously, Hoover was afraid, and the Kennedy brothers were also afraid him. They were afraid that the Communist Party had infiltrated his Civil rights movement and they were terrified of communism. So, on April 4, 1967 King gave a speech exactly one year till his death and that speech was titled “Beyond Vietnam time to break silence.” I believe that speech was the whole triggering point for the assassination. He constantly warned how we were going to lose our democracy if we did not solve three things: racism, poverty, and militarism.
When Martin Luther King was shot; he was in Memphis, Tennessee. He was there to help protest with the sanitation workers who were currently on strike. He was working on his last project he ever worked on it was the poor people campaign. While he was in Memphis, Tennessee he was staying at a motel called the Lorraine and that is where he was murdered. One of the last calls he made before he died was to his church. He was going to be giving a sermon and wanted to tell them what is was about. His last sermon was named “Why America may go to hell.” He planned to touch more on militarism, racism, and poverty in the country, and how the government wasn’t doing nearly enough to help its people. So, April 4th of 1968 in the evening Martin Luther King was standing out on the balcony of his motel. This is where he was shot he was shot in the cheek into his jaw through his neck it severed his spinal cord and stopped at about his shoulder blade. When the shot happened, people pointed where the shot originated Bessie Brewer is rooming house about 200 feet away. Kings friend and fellow civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy was with him and held his head to help keep him possibly alive. There are many reports that he was still alive even when he got to the hospital (History.com Editors. 2018). He was taken to St. Joseph’s where they attempted emergency surgery but was sadly pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. at 39 years old. Immediately, people start pointing fingers at Law Enforcement because there were all ready over three police cars each with three police officers in them circling the area. The Law Enforcement thought Kings team was going to start riot at the Lorraine motel. Martins team was confused on how they didn’t see anyone when King was shot.
The impact the Martin Luther King’s death created was insane. America went wild. There were major riots, outbreaks of looting, and arson. People were going nuts. It all happened in over 100 cities in the country and there was so much property damage and violence. People were so angry which Martin Luther King would not have wanted that because he was all about a nonviolent protest he took a lot of his inspiration from Gandhi. An additional 43 men and women were killed in riots approximately 3,500 were injured and 27,000 people were arrested. The government had to bring in 58,000 National Guardsmen and army troops to help with all the chaos because people were that angry. There was an alpha 184 Special Forces team in Memphis on the day and no one knows what they were doing there (Gerald Posner. The Truth about Memphis). The main that apparently killed Martin Luther King was named James Earl Ray. Everybody wanted a single assassin a racist that would then say James Earl Ray did, and we can go on about our business. James did have criminal record his first conviction was in California and that was in 1949. His second conviction was in 1952 he served two years for armed robbery of a taxi driver in Illinois. In 1955 he was convicted a mail fraud after stealing money orders in Missouri. He was again convicted of an armed robbery of stealing 120 bucks at St. Louis Kroger store in 1959. He escaped from prison but wasn’t arrested until June 8th this happened April 4th, so over two months later they finally arrested James Earl Ray. Who said he was innocent. There fingerprints on binoculars in the room and a rifle. However, there have been misuse of fingerprints and fraud in pass court cases (forensic colleges). Ray would not confess to this crime he maintained that he was innocent. It wasn’t until March 10th of 1969 that finally confessed in a plea and this was called an Alford plea. An Alford plea mean even if you are not actually guilty and you were pristinely innocent you may plead guilty to the charge if you think that doing so is in your best interest under all the circumstances as you know them to be and you’re doing so freely understanding and intelligently. Till the day James Earl Ray died he maintained that he did not have anything to do with the assassination. So many people don’t know this, but Coretta Scott King and her family believed that this was FBI. They believed that Ray was not guilty, and they fought for a long time to prove that he was not the one who assassinated King. On March 27th, 1997 Dexter King Visits Ray at a prison hospital in Nashville Tennessee. Dexter askes ray if he killed his father. James Earl Ray responds with a simple, “No. No I didn’t.” Dexter offered Ray is families support to help prove his innocents. There was a real trail that happened, and it was a wrongful death lawsuit from the King family against Mr. Jowers and co-conspirators. Mr. Jowers was the man that ran the restaurant across the street called James, and Judge Joe Brown made an amazing explanation for why he believes the gun could not have been a gun that was used by James Earl Ray. The thing that the state relied upon was the rifle but modern scientific methodology excluded that rifle from being the murder weapon the bullet they pull out a king’s body has a rate of rifling twist of one turn in every eleven and a quarter inch the rifle that Ray had had a rate of rifling twist of one turn in every ten inches in a bad manufacturing defect that is not apparent on the death slope. One thing that is that’s interesting is if you look at the picture when King was killed they were pointing in the opposite direction from where the government says the bullets came from. Nineteen years ago, the only trial ever held concerning the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. was concluded in a civil trial in 1999 a jury found the US government agencies along with others guilty of assassinating MLK in Memphis in 1968. After hearing from 70 witnesses including Loyd Jowers who assisted the sniper and owned Jim’s grill the jury took less than an hour to decide that one government agencies were responsible for the murder of MLK. Two, James Earl Ray the man we’ve always been told pulled the trigger had nothing to do with it. Loyd Jowers said he received $100,000 from a Memphis produce merchant, Frank Liberto, to arrange Dr. Kings murder. Mr. Liberto had died by the time of the interview, in which Mr. Jowers said that he had hired the assassin and that is was not Mr. Ray (The Associated Press. 2000).
After learning more about this conspiracy theory I don’t really know who killed Martin Luther King jr. However, I believe it was not James Earl Ray. He died in prison and until the day he died he maintained that did not kill King. Ray would have been an easy target to blame because he had so much criminal record and history to make it more believable. The true story of Kings assassination has never been told to us I believe. We basically get half-truths told to us about pretty much everything. How untrue our history books can be, and the version we get from the media. The media is the biggest problem we have it’s our biggest issue because people will believe the media wholeheartedly. That was Martin Luther King’s problem the media turned on him and that ruined his reputation from him. I find this conspiracy theory interesting because it has facts and proof of it. Although, so many people are unaware of the truth of it. This is just a theory. A theory proven in court, however.
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