Conspiracies

I first heard of Dr. Martin Luther King at least nine or ten years before he died. My parents bought us a comic book about his early involvement with the civil rights movement, so I was somewhat aware of what he was doing, though I wasn’t closely following him. I did happen to be watching TV at my grandmother’s when he made his “I have a dream” speech, the emotion of which gave me the shivers. He was someone I absolutely trusted was doing the right thing.

Watching a program on PBS about his appearance in Memphis to support the striking black public works employees, where he was assassinated, I wonder about it. Someone who wrote about Ray said that there are many conspiracy theories, but that all the circumstantial evidence we have points to him as the killer. Maybe he was, but that contradicts other narratives I’ve heard, and I don’t feel especially comfortable with that conclusion.

One of my friends told me he met someone who claimed to have known Ray, and that, while he was pretty much a career criminal, he wasn’t a very successful one. As my friend recounted the discussion, the person said Ray was a fuckup, and that he couldn’t believe he could have pulled off an assassination.

That’s more or less the position of the man whom I remembered as Ray’s lawyer (but apparently was not), who never believed he did it, thought he had discovered who had, and had had a very interesting interview with an armed forces veteran.

Art Hanes who, with his father, was hired as a lawyer by Ray, said that he never believed Ray had committed the crime, and that there was evidence pointing in other directions. I read a book years ago,  which said Ray was hired to be in the Memphis area at the time of the King shooting, but didn’t do it. A man named Raul is who that writer claimed did the shooting, and he believed he had managed to contact Raul by phone years after the killing, though he couldn’t manage to get Raul (if it was him) to talk about anything. In other words, Ray was hired to be there to be a patsy, as he later claimed.

Even more eye-opening was that the writer claimed to have interviewed a veteran of the armed forces who said he had been there with a squad to assassinate King, but hadn’t done it. Someone else had gotten him first.

When King was killed it was a shock and terribly disappointing to those who supported his work. It couldn’t be a surprise, though. There must have been at least hundreds of people who wanted him killed, and maybe that many would have gladly done it themselves. King was upsetting the status quo in a way hard for many to accept. It wasn’t just poor whites who didn’t like him. It was also some very powerful people who didn’t like what he was saying and advocating. Powerful people disliked his critique of wealth and power in America, and his critique of the Vietnam War too. Some were willing to accept his views on race (though that was, in itself, divisive enough), but not on the other things his journey had led him to investigate.

There were at least five assassinations in the 1960s that may have been connected to the civil rights movement. The first chronologically was Medgar Evers, killed in Mississippi in the middle of 1963. John F. Kennedy was soon to follow. Malcolm X was killed little over a year later, then King, then Robert Kennedy. There were probably more, but these were the most prominent.

Civil rights is only one of the possible reasons John Kennedy was killed. His death may also be connected with the Cuban  missile crisis, and that Cuban refugees may have blamed him for failing to support them in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. It could also be attributed to the Mafia, with whom Kennedy’s father reportedly had ties, and who had allegedly helped him steal votes in Chicago to be elected president. After taking office and appointing his brother Attorney General, various Mafia leaders were said to have gotten very irritated at Robert Kennedy’s crusade against the mob.

The official explanation of his death was that he was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, who was some kind of lone nut. It’s true Oswald behaved in very contradictory ways before the killing, but there has long been a suspicion he was connected with the CIA, and of course he had been in Russia. After returning to America he apparently worked with both left- and right-wing groups. Was this schizophrenia, or was it the kind of thing undercover agents sometimes do? Since law enforcement never got to interview Oswald (whose killer himself had Mafia ties), we’re unlikely to ever know for sure.

What seems more certain is that during every investigation of the assassination (there were at least two after the Warren Report) people with any possible connection to the crime were murdered–according to one account, about seventy.

Whether or not the murder John Kennedy was motivated by civil rights (possible as at least a partial motive, though he had done little effective about the issue), civil rights was almost certainly the motive for the murders of Malcolm X (though the Nation of Islam, for whom he had previously spoken might also have been involved) and Martin Luther King. It’s a possible motive in Robert Kennedy’s death too. Though he had done little about the issue until then, he had begun talking about it in his campaign for president, and he was known to be very tough and tenacious.

We know the death of Medgar Evers was  the result of conspiracy, and the death of Malcolm X pretty clearly was too. In his case, we don’t know for certain the source of the conspiracy. But in the cases of King and Robert Kennedy assassination by rogue individuals would be too coincidental to be believable, considering the powerful individuals they alienated. Powerful people and segments of society are rarely if ever willing to give up power voluntarily, and almost certainly they saw these individuals as a threat to their power. “Violence,” as H. Rap Brown put it, “is as American as apple pie.” Whether earlier American assassinations were the result of conspiracy is unclear: but there’s a great deal of reason to believe conspiracy was involved in these.

The writer who gave the closing statement in the PBS documentary about James Earl Ray said all the circumstantial evidence pointed to Ray. It takes little research to find that this is untrue. Ray did confess to the murder, but then withdrew his confession three days later, and maintained his innocence from then on. Investigations didn’t confirm his story, the story of a man who owned a bar in Memphis and claimed to have been involved, or the story of an ex-FBI agent who claimed to have found evidence in Ray’s car pointing to someone else.

On the other hand, Ray’s car was found in Atlanta, where he abandoned it, with its ashtrays full of cigarette butts. According to his attorney, Ray never smoked. Authorities also found a coat in the car too small to fit Ray.

It’s interesting too that the King family believes that Ray is innocent, believing instead that J. Edgar Hoover was the prime mover behind the killing, plausible because he greatly disliked King, kept him under surveillance, and stated he was unfaithful to his wife, which may or may not be true. But investigators haven’t been able to corroborate that either.

I clearly don’t know enough to say exactly what happened in any of the assassinations, but it seems unlikely to me that any of the murders were by lone gunmen who spontaneously decided to kill someone important. All of the victims were working for causes that were extremely unpopular in certain circles. I think that was the cause of their deaths, because they threatened the power of important people. We probably will never find out just who bore the responsibility.