I am ashamed to admit that, before writing this, I knew little more than the basic facts about Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK)--not much more than what we're taught in our public school systems. We all are aware this man was a prominent civil rights leader in the 1960s. He fought for undeniable equal rights for African Americans, while preaching nonviolence the entire time. A pretty cool dude in that respect, if I do say so myself.
I knew that he was assassinated, but I couldn't tell you the murderer's name. And I didn't know by any means that the FBI itself was historically hostile towards King and wiretapped his home. There are obviously some facts that have been concealed from the public.
What happened on that April 4th when King was killed? I'm not here to make you believe in anybody's conspiracy theory. I'm just here to make sure you know that the details of MLK's assassination are fuzzy--and that, yes, not everyone believes the story printed in the history books.
The story that's typically told is that a pro-segregation, small-time delinquent named James Earl Ray acted alone and killed King. Ray received 99 years of prison time after pleading guilty to the deed (though he never actually stood a full trial, for fear of death by electrocution), and major newspapers today have cited Ray as MLK's "Convicted Killer." Technically speaking, Ray is, simply because he faced punishment for MLK's death.
But did Ray really kill King? That is something those words, "convicted killer," can't really answer. They only mean that Ray was the one who took punishment for the crime, not that he is, without a doubt, the sole or principal assassin. Reportedly, many of Martin Luther King Jr.'s long-standing friends supported Ray's request for a retrial.
Before his death, Ray and Dr. King's son were reportedly on friendly terms with one another, at least enough to sit down and have a conversation about the assassination. Members of the King family also tried to clear Ray's name shortly before his death after looking at the investigative reporting that led to the book "Orders To Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr."
According to a Vice article, the "U.S. military intelligence and CIA agents teamed up with the mafia, renegade Memphis police officers, and (of course) J. Edgar Hoover's FBI because they believed King's ideas were too revolutionary...They assembled a crack team of Special Forces snipers and a civilian shooter named Raoul Pereira." This Raoul figure was a central part of Ray's alibi.
The book, "Orders to Kill" reportedly has the tone of a "spy thriller," making it a little hard to trust as a reputable source. And it's obvious the author had a bias in compiling his theory. However, if the reporting behind it was enough to convince the Kings themselves that there was more to the story than one man acting alone, it certainly is worth a read...or at least a shred of credibility.
The point is that assassinations like that of Martin Luther King Jr. are rarely open cases that are immediately put to rest. There are people out there that believe we can't say for certain that James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King Jr. And they have evidence to support their claims.
We like to look at history as something concrete, as nothing but certainties. It happened in the past, so nothing can change what we know about it. We boil complicated stories--like the killing of a civil rights leader--down to things we can regurgitate to future generations, packets of information that can be turned into test questions in a middle school U.S. history class.
The problem lies in the assumption that history is a finished story and that new evidence never surfaces to challenge that undeniable truth. But, history is just as fluid as breaking news.
