Celebrating Reverend / Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (7th post)

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Join in tonight on 102.5 FM /DAB / Online Black Country Radio (www.blackcountryradio.co.uk in the 'Suite' at 10 pm (UK time/check your local time zone for airing) Captain Matt along with in-studio guests... gospel singing group "The Projects", will be concluding this week's commemoration and remembrance of...

AMERICAN RELIGIOUS LEADER AND CIVIL-RIGHTS ACTIVIST 

REVEREND / DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

The Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Reverend /Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. received frequent death threats due to his prominence in the Civil Rights Movement. He had confronted the risk of death and made that recognition part of his philosophy. He taught that murder could not stop the struggle for equal rights. After the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963, [King] told his wife Coretta,

"This is what is going to happen to me also. I keep telling you, this is a sick society."

[King] the prominent leader of the Civil Rights Movement and Nobel Peace Prize laureate known for his use of nonviolence and civil disobedience. He was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be called the Poor People's Campaign when he was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, at 6:01 pm CST. [King] was rushed to St. Joseph's Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. that evening.

[King] traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, in support of striking African American city sanitation workers. The workers had staged a walkout on February 11, 1968, to protest unequal wages and working conditions imposed by then-mayor Henry Loeb. At the time, Memphis paid black workers significantly lower wages than whites. Several sanitation workers had been killed on the job due to unsafe working conditions. In addition, unlike white workers, black workers received no pay if they stayed home during bad weather; consequently, most black people were compelled to work even in driving rain and snow storms.

On April 3, King returned to Memphis to address a gathering at the Mason Temple (World Headquarters of the Church of God in Christ). His airline flight to Memphis was delayed by a bomb threat against his plane but he made his planned speech. [King] delivered the last speech of his life, now known as the "I've Been to the Mountaintop" address. As he neared the close, he referred to the bomb threat:

"And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats... or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. [applause] And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! [applause] And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!"

On Thursday, April 4, 1968, King was staying in room 306 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The motel was owned by businessman Walter Bailey and named after his wife. Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, a colleague, and friend, later told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he and King had stayed in room 306 at the Lorraine Motel so often that it was known as the "King–Abernathy Suite"

According to biographer Taylor Branch, [King's] last words moments before his assassination were to musician Ben F. Branch (See legend *), who was scheduled to perform that night at a planned event. [King] said,

"Ben, make sure you play 'Take My Hand, Precious Lord' in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty."

[King] had gone out onto the balcony and was standing near his room when he was struck at 6:01 p.m., by a single .30-06 bullet, fired from a Remington Model 760. (See legend **)

The bullet entered through King's right cheek, breaking his jaw and several vertebrae as it traveled down his spinal cord, severing his jugular vein and major arteries in the process, before lodging in his shoulder. The force of the shot ripped off King's necktie. King fell violently backward onto the balcony, unconscious.

At the time, Reverend Abernathy heard the shot from inside the motel room and ran to the balcony to find King on the deck, bleeding profusely from the wound in his cheek. Andrew Young, a colleague from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), first believed [King] was dead, but found he still had a pulse.

[King] was rushed to St. Joseph's Hospital, where doctors opened his chest and performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation. He never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. According to Taylor Branch, [King's] autopsy revealed that his heart was in the condition of a 60-year-old man, which [Branch] attributed to the stress of King's 13 years in the Civil Rights Movement.

[After being informed of his death] Mrs. King had difficulty settling her children with the news that their father was deceased. She received a large number of telegrams, including one from Lee Harvey Oswald's mother, which she regarded as the one that touched her the most.

That night New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy, running to gain the presidential nomination to represent the Democratic Party, spoke about the assassination. Kennedy had spoken earlier that day in Indiana and learned about the shooting before boarding a plane to Indianapolis. He had a [last] speech scheduled there, in a predominantly black neighborhood of the city. His press secretary Frank Mankiewicz suggested that he ask the audience to pray for the King family and to follow King's practice of nonviolence. The men did not learn that [King] had died until they landed in Indianapolis.

[Mankiewicz] and speechwriter Adam Walinsky drafted notes for Kennedy's use, but he refused them, using some he likely had written during the ride to the site. The Chief of Police in Indianapolis advised Kennedy that he could not provide protection and was worried he would be at risk in talking about the death of the revered leader. [Kennedy] decided to go ahead. Standing on a flatbed truck, Kennedy spoke for four minutes and fifty-seven seconds.

He was the first to tell the audience that [King] had died; some of the attendees screamed and wailed in grief. Several of [Kennedy's] aides were even worried that the delivery of this information would result in a riot. When the audience quieted, [Kennedy] acknowledged that many would be filled with anger. He said: "For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with—be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man." These remarks surprised his aides, who had never heard him speak publicly of his brother John F. Kennedy's death. [Kennedy] said that the country had to make an effort to "go beyond these rather difficult times", and quoted a poem by the Greek playwright Aeschylus, "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." In conclusion, Kennedy said that the country needed and wanted unity between blacks and whites, and asked the audience members to pray for the King family and the country, quoting the Greeks again.

His speech was credited in part with preventing post-assassination rioting in Indianapolis, on a night where such events broke out in major cities across the country. It is widely considered one of the greatest speeches in American history.

[Kennedy] subsequently canceled all of his scheduled campaign appearances and withdrew to his hotel room. Several phone conversations with black community leaders convinced him to speak out against the violent backlash beginning to emerge across the country. The next day, [Kennedy] gave a prepared response, "On the Mindless Menace of Violence", in Cleveland, Ohio. Though still considered significant, it is given much less historical attention than the Indianapolis speech.

President Lyndon B. Johnson was in the Oval Office that evening, planning a meeting in Hawaii with Vietnam War military commanders. After press secretary George Christian informed him at 8:20 p.m. of the assassination, he canceled the trip to focus on the nation. He assigned Attorney General Ramsey Clark to investigate the assassination in Memphis. He made a personal call to [King's] wife, Coretta Scott King, and declared April 7 a national day of mourning for Reverend. King on which the U.S. flag would be flown at half-staff.

Vice President Hubert Humphrey attended on behalf of Johnson, who was at a meeting on the Vietnam War at Camp David. (There were fears that Johnson might be hit with protests and abuses over the war if he attended).

At Coretta Scott’s request, [King's] last sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church was played at the funeral; it was a recording of his "Drum Major" sermon, given on February 4, 1968. In that sermon,

“He asked that at his funeral no mention of his awards and honors be made, but that it be said that he tried to "feed the hungry", "clothe the naked", "be right on the [Vietnam] war question", and "love and serve humanity".

For some, [King's] assassination meant the end of the strategy of nonviolence. Others in the movement reaffirmed the need to carry on King's and the movement's work. Leaders within the SCLC confirmed that they would carry on the Poor People's Campaign that year despite [King’s] loss. Some black leaders argued the need to continue [King's] and the movement's tradition of nonviolence.

Colleagues of [King] in the Civil Rights Movement called for a nonviolent response to the assassination, to honor his most deeply held beliefs. James Farmer Jr. said:

Dr. King would be greatly distressed to find that his blood had triggered off bloodshed and disorder... I think instead the nation should be quiet; black and white, and we should be in a prayerful mood, which would be in keeping with his life. We should make that kind of dedication and commitment to the goals which his life served to solving the domestic problems. That's the memorial, that's the kind of memorial we should build for him. It's just not appropriate for there to be violent retaliations, and that kind of demonstration in the wake of the murder of this pacifist and man of peace. (See legend ***)

However, the more militant Stokely Carmichael called for forceful action, saying:

White America killed Dr. King last night. She made it a whole lot easier for a whole lot of black people today. There no longer needs to be intellectual discussions, black people know that they have to get guns. White America will live to cry that she killed Dr. King last night. It would have been better if she had killed Rap Brown and/or Stokely Carmichael, but when she killed Dr. King, she lost.

Despite the urging for calm by many leaders, a nationwide wave of riots erupted in more than 100 cities. After the assassination, the city of Memphis quickly settled the strike on favorable terms to the sanitation workers.

On April 8, King's widow, Coretta Scott King, together with the couple's four small children, led a crowd estimated at 40,000 "in a silent march through the streets of Memphis to honor the fallen leader and support the cause of the city's black sanitation workers”.

The first memorial service following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., took place the following day at the R.S. Lewis Funeral Home in Memphis, Tennessee. This was followed by two funeral services on April 9, 1968, in Atlanta, Georgia. The first held for family and close friends at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King and his father had both served as senior pastors. This service was nationally televised, as were the the funeral procession transported [King's] body for 3.5 miles through the streets of Atlanta, followed by more than 100,000 mourners, from the church to his alma mater of Morehouse College for a public service where his good friend Mahalia Jackson sang his favorite hymn, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", at the funeral.

After [King's] death the plan to set up a shantytown in Washington, D.C., was carried out soon after the April 4 assassination. Criticism of [King's] plan was subdued in the wake of his death, and the SCLC received an unprecedented wave of donations for the purpose of carrying it out. The campaign officially began in Memphis, on May 2, at the hotel where King was murdered.

Thousands of demonstrators arrived on the National Mall and established a camp they called "Resurrection City". They stayed for six weeks.

In the wake of [King's] assassination, journalists reported some callous or hostile reactions from parts of white America, particularly in the South. David Halberstam, who reported on King's funeral, recounted a comment heard at an affluent white dinner party:

One of the wives—station wagon, three children, forty-five-thousand-dollar house—leaned over and said, "I wish you had spit in his face for me." It was a stunning moment; I wondered for a long time afterward what [King] could possibly have done to her, in what conceivable way he could have threatened her, why this passionate hate.

But reporters also recounted that many whites were grief-stricken at the leader's death. In some cases, the shock of events altered opinions. A survey later sent to a group of college trustees revealed that their opinions of King had risen after his assassination. The New York Times praised King in an editorial, calling his murder a "national disaster" and his cause "just".

Public figures generally praised [King] in the days following his death. Others expressed political ideology. Governor George Wallace of Alabama, known as a segregationist, described the assassination as a "senseless, regrettable act". But Governor Lester Maddox of Georgia called [King] "an enemy of our country" and threatened to "personally raise" the state capitol flag back from half-staff. California Governor Ronald Reagan described the assassination as "a great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order and people started choosing which laws they'd break". Strom Thurmond, South Carolina Senator, wrote to his constituents: "We are now witnessing the whirlwind sowed years ago when some preachers and teachers began telling people that each man could be his own judge in his own case. He confessed to the assassination on March 10, 1969. On the advice of his attorney Percy Foreman, Ray took a guilty plea to avoid a trial conviction and potential sentencing under the death penalty. Ray was sentenced to a 99-year prison term; he recanted his confession three days later.

[Ray] fired Foreman as his attorney and claimed that a man he met in Montreal with the alias "Raul" was involved, as was [Ray's] brother Johnny, but that he was not. He said through his new attorney Jack Kershaw that although he did not "personally shoot [King]", he may have been "partially responsible without knowing it", hinting at a conspiracy. In May 1977, Kershaw presented evidence to the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he believed exonerated his client, but tests did not prove conclusive. [Kershaw] also claimed [Ray] was somewhere else when the shots were fired, but he could not find a witness to corroborate the claim.

Ray and seven other convicts escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee, on June 10, 1977. They were recaptured on June 13, three days later, and returned to prison. A year was added to Ray's sentence, totaling it to 100 years.

A church minister, Ronald Denton Wilson, claimed his father, Henry Clay Wilson, assassinated Martin Luther King Jr., not James Earl Ray. He stated, "It wasn't a racist thing; he thought Martin Luther King was connected with communism, and he wanted to get him out of the way." But Wilson had reportedly admitted previously that his father was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

[Ray] worked for the remainder of his life attempting (unsuccessfully) to withdraw his guilty plea and secure a full trial. In 1997, Martin Luther King's son Dexter King met with Ray; he publicly supported Ray's efforts to obtain a retrial.

William Francis Pepper remained James Earl Ray's attorney until [Ray's] death on April 23, 1998, at the age of 70 (from kidney and liver failure, caused by hepatitis C (probably contracted as a result of a blood transfusion given after a stabbing while at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary). He carried on the effort to gain a trial on behalf of the King family. The King family does not believe that Ray was responsible, but that there was a conspiracy by elements of the government against [King]. Ray died in prison.

In 2004, Jesse Jackson, who was with King when he was assassinated, noted:

The fact is there were saboteurs to disrupt the march. [And] within our own organization, we found a very key person who was on the government payroll. So infiltration within, saboteurs from without and the press attacks. ...I will never believe that James Earl Ray had the motive, the money, and the mobility to have done it himself. Our government was very involved in setting the stage for and I think the escape route for James Earl Ray.

According to biographer Taylor Branch, King's friend and colleague James Bevel put it more bluntly: "There is no way a ten-cent white boy could develop a plan to kill a million-dollar black man"

Many documents related to this investigation remain classified and are slated to remain secret until 2027. In 2010, as in earlier years, some argued for passage of a proposed Records Collection Act, similar to a 1992 law concerning the Kennedy assassination, in order to require the immediate release of the records. The measure did not pass.

Legend

*[Branch] (born 1924 – August 27, 1987), held a degree in music from Memphis State University was a jazz tenor saxophonist, and bandleader). He was [once a] member of the horn section on B.B. King's first recordings for Bullet Records in 1949. He was also an entrepreneur, the president of Doctor Products Inc., founded in 1983, in Chicago, Illinois, the nation's only black-owned soft-drink manufacturing company. The company eventually signed a $355 million agreement with Kemmerer Bottling Group, bottler of several well-known soft drinks, including 7Up, to distribute the Doctor Products beverages.)

** The Federal Bureau of Investigation was assigned the lead to investigate [King's] death. J. Edgar Hoover, who had previously made efforts to undermine [King's] reputation, told Johnson that his agency would attempt to find the culprit(s). TheI investigation found fingerprints on various objects left in the bathroom from where the gunfire had come. Evidence included a Remington Gamemaster rifle from which at least one shot had been fired. The fingerprints were traced to an escaped white convict named James Earl Ray. Two months after King's death, [Ray] was captured at London's Heathrow Airport while trying to leave the United Kingdom for either Angola, Rhodesia or South Africa on a false Canadian passport in the name of Ramon George Sneyd. [Ray] was quickly extradited to Tennessee and charged with [King's] murder.

***There was immediate rioting after the assassination of Dr. King referred to as “The King assassination riots”, also known as the “Holy Week Uprising”. 

 There was a wave of civil disturbance which swept the United States following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. They were the greatest wave of social unrest the United States experienced since the Civil War.

[King] was not only a beloved leader in the civil rights movement but also a major advocate for nonviolence. He was a symbol of direct engagement with the political system (as opposed to the separatist ideals of black nationalism). His death led to anger and disillusionment, and feelings that now only violent resistance to white racism could be effective.

The rioters were mostly black, but not all were poor. Middle-class blacks also demonstrated against systemic inequality. Although the media called these events “race riots,” there were few confirmed acts of violence between blacks and whites. White businesses tended to be targeted, however, while public and community buildings such as schools and churches were largely spared. 

 Some of the biggest riots took place in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, and Kansas City.

****FBI records show that [King] had been targeted by COINTELPROCOINTELPRO (a portmanteau derived from COunter INTELligence PROgram) and had also been under surveillance by military intelligence agencies during the period leading up to his assassination under the code name Operation Lantern Spike.whose resources targeted groups and individuals that the FBI deemed subversive, including anti-Vietnam War organizers, activists of the Civil Rights Movement or Black Power movement (e.g., Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Panther Party), feminist organizations, anti-colonial movements (such as Puerto Rican independence groups like the Young Lords), and a variety of organizations that were part of the broader New Left.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover issued directives governing COINTELPRO, ordering FBI agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, neutralize or otherwise eliminate" the activities of these movements and especially their leaders. Under Hoover, the agent in charge of COINTELPRO was William C. Sullivan Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy personally authorized some of these programs Although Kennedy only gave written approval for limited wiretapping of [King's] phones "on a trial basis, for a month or so", Hoover extended the clearance so his men were "unshackled" to look for evidence in any areas of [King's] life they deemed worthy.

Conspiracy theories

In 1998, CBS reported that the two separate ballistic tests conducted on the Remington Gamemaster allegedly used by Ray in the assassination were inconclusive. Moreover, witnesses with [King] at the moment of the shooting say the shot was fired from a different location; from behind thick shrubbery near the rooming house, and not from a window of the rooming house.

[King's] friend and SCLC organizer, Reverend James Lawson, has suggested the impending occupation of Washington D.C. by the Poor People's Campaign was a primary motive for a federal assassination. Lawson also noted during the civil trial that King alienated President Johnson and other powerful government actors when he repudiated the Vietnam War on April 4, 1967—exactly one year before the assassination.