Did the FBI Play a Role in King’s Death?

Was the FBI complicitous in the killing of Martin Luther King Jr.? Is it conceivable that America’s greatest civil rights leader, whom we honor with a day of national recognition, was gunned down on the night of April 4, 1968, with the cooperation of government agents charged with protecting our freedoms?

Unfortunately, that question arises in light of recent ballistic tests of the gun allegedly used by convicted assassin James Earl Ray. The tests, while not conclusive, raise fresh doubts about the government’s case against Ray, which relied heavily on a rifle that bore his fingerprints found by the FBI at the scene of the murder. As Tennessee Criminal Court Judge Joe Brown said, “This comparison revealed that the gross and unique characteristic signature left on the 12 test bullets by the James Earl Ray rifle were not present on the death bullet.”

The suspicious markings are not definitive proof that this is the wrong rifle. The judge will soon decide whether to order additional tests. In the meantime, he asked defense and prosecution lawyers to attempt to obtain the original bullet and earlier rifle tests performed by the FBI after the shooting but never made available. Indeed, all evidence in the King case, including the bullet in question, was ordered sealed for 50 years by a congressional committee.

Even before the recent tests, King’s family had reluctantly concluded after years of examining the evidence that Ray was not guilty and joined the growing appeal for a new trial before the seriously ill convict dies. King’s son Dexter, speaking for the family, has charged that the federal government was involved in a plot to kill his father. If such a claim were made by the family of a Nobel Peace Prize winner against a government elsewhere, the U.S. government would no doubt take it very seriously. Yet the Clinton administration, like its predecessors, treats the notion of FBI complicity as pure paranoia.

Admittedly, it is a wildly unnerving charge. King had focused concern on the historic oppression of black Americans as no other leader before or since, and his death left the civil rights movement floundering. The possibility that the struggle of black Americans was so seriously undermined by our own government is chilling.

To suggest such a possibility invites ridicule from mainstream media, but those who dismiss this as yet another groundless conspiracy theory perhaps have not plumbed the depths of then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s hostility toward King.

Hoover called King the “most notorious liar” in America and “one of the lowest characters in the country.” Now-declassified documents attest to Hoover’s compulsive obsession with ending King’s influence. Under Hoover’s orders, King’s phone was continuously tapped and his every movement observed.

At one point, telephone taps were salaciously edited into an inflammatory tape used in an FBI plot to drive King to suicide. An anonymous letter sent to King threatened him with public humiliation unless he took his own life. The letter, accompanied by the blackmail tape, stated: “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 orders of Assistant FBI Director William C. Sullivan, the author of the threatening letter.

Thanks to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, we know that the FBI’s campaign to destroy King continued relentlessly over the last five years of his life. He was staying at the black-owned Lorraine Motel, which offered poor security, because the FBI leaked to the media that the more secure hotel he had stayed at on a previous visit was white-owned.

King was under constant FBI surveillance during his last 48 hours. “There are those who feel the FBI had complicity in his death,” a longtime King associate, the Rev. Joseph E. Lowry, recently asserted. “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.”

We have a right and an abiding need to know if that danger arose from the very federal agency charged with protecting King and all other Americans. It is time the truth be told about the secret government run by Hoover, who compiled blackmail dossiers on millions of citizens, including U.S. presidents. A new trial for Ray would be a step in that direction. But a full accounting of a decades-long attempt to subvert democracy by a clearly deranged director of this country’s secret police is long overdue.