What Is Lost by Hearing Out James Earl Ray? : His testimony is crucial to seeking the truth about any government role in King’s death.

Why is it that the widow of Martin Luther King Jr. cannot rest easily in the knowledge that her husband’s killer was long ago caught and convicted? It is almost 30 years since the heinous act that permanently wounded America, and yet last week, in a scene as sad as it was desperate, Coretta Scott King took the stand to plead for a new trial for James Earl Ray. By challenging the official version of events, initially compiled by the FBI, she has added weight to the conspiracy theories that have swirled since the moment of King’s assassination.

It must not be easy for this regal and self-composed woman, whose husband is lionized annually by presidents, to entertain theories of official indifference and perhaps complicity in his death. After all, she too has been turned into an icon to be trotted out whenever convenient to pay homage to the memory of a man whose full significance has been obliterated by being tamed.

Forgotten is the King who died while supporting striking black sanitation workers in Memphis as part of a militant but nonviolent campaign to bring economic justice to the poor. Ignored is the King who in the last year of his life incurred the wrath of President Lyndon Johnson and the heightened hatred of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover for opposing the Vietnam War. Schoolchildren are rarely told that King condemned his own government as “the major purveyor of violence.”

Most of America accepts a banal rendering of King as a noncontroversial dreamer and therefore would find it incomprehensible that the facts concerning his death might have been distorted by U.S. government agents. But Coretta Scott King has a right to be suspicious. She knows better than anyone that the FBI under Hoover’s direction in the mid-1960s set out to destroy her husband’s reputation and even tried to push him to suicide.

In one well-documented incident, Coretta King was the recipient of a blackmail package, intended for her husband, of taped conversations--salacious fragments culled from the endless hours during which the FBI bugged King’s hotel rooms and as many of his telephone conversations as they could intercept. That blackmail tape was bundled in a package with a crudely written letter threatening King with public humiliation unless he chose suicide: “King, like all frauds your end is approaching . . . your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you . . . The American public . . . will know you for what you are--an evil, abnormal beast.” The package was sent on the orders of Assistant FBI Director William C. Sullivan, who personally wrote the threatening letter.

Thanks to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, we now know that Sullivan’s vile efforts continued over the next five years. Indeed, the campaign to destroy King intensified in the year before his death because of his opposition to the Vietnam War and his determination to extend the civil rights movement into a militant anti-poverty campaign.

One of Sullivan’s smears against King was launched just six days before King’s death and is revealed in a memo to Sullivan dated March 29, 1968, titled “Counterintelligence Program, Black Nationalist-Hate Groups, Racial Intelligence (Martin Luther King).” Under that inflammatory headline, the memo detailed nothing more incriminating than the fact that King, on his visit to Memphis that week, had stayed at a white-owned Holiday Inn rather than the Lorraine Motel, which was owned by blacks. The memo stated: “The above facts have been included in the attached blind memorandum and it is recommended it be furnished a cooperative news media source by the Crime Records Division for an item showing King is a hypocrite. This will be done on a highly confidential basis.” It was done, and as a result of the adverse publicity, King moved to the Lorraine, a much more vulnerable location, where he was killed.

Aside from providing evidence that the FBI was hard at work smearing King into the last week of his life, the memo is further proof that King was under constant FBI surveillance. It is hard to believe that the FBI didn’t have the Lorraine staked out when King was assassinated.

“There are those who feel the FBI had complicity in his death,” notes longtime King associate, the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery. “I do not know if that is true, but I do know that the FBI had to know King was being stalked and his life was in danger.”

As Coretta King testified, “A trial for Mr. Ray is our last hope to reveal the truth about my husband’s assassination.” Let’s get on with it while this seriously ill but crucial witness is still alive.