Maria Monk and Her Awful Disclosures

In this edition, I revisit a topic that I briefly explored as background in my very first foray into blogging and podcasting, which looked at the demagogue Lewis Charles Levin and his influence on the 1844 nativist riots in Philadelphia. I’ve decided to delve more deeply into nativism in American history not only because I feel that this story deserves a better telling than I gave it in 2016, but also because, over the last couple of years, we’ve seen the embers of nativist sentiment that candidate Donald Trump fanned during his campaign erupt into flames during his presidency. And Donald Trump, during his first term, has done much to further encourage the nativist feelings that helped carry him into office. Say what you want about him as a chief executive, but he is not one to forget about the constituency that elected him and has consistently and tirelessly appealed to his base, which of course may help him in his bid for reelection. Soon after taking office, within days of being sworn in, in fact, he signed a series of executive orders that would certainly appeal to xenophobes and Americans that are fearful of foreigners. These orders stripped federal funds from cities that provided sanctuary to undocumented immigrants, drastically increased the numbers of immigration enforcement and border patrol officers, and built detainment facilities at the border. During the ensuing years, his administration faced significant criticism for a continuing year-over-year increase in arrests and removals by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE officers as well as for the policy of separating families and interning children at the U.S.–Mexican Border. Meanwhile, he has consistently pushed during budget negotiations to fund the concrete barrier, or wall, that he promised his supporters in 2016, even allowing the government to shut down over this sticking point, the most recent being the longest government shutdown in American history. As I write this, after a State of the Union address in which he threatened to do so, Trump has declared a state of National Emergency over a border crisis that he insists can only be resolved by building his proposed wall, while many insist there is no border crisis, or that the crisis is actually humanitarian and has been mischaracterized, or that the wall will cost too much and be ineffective. Clearly, the fear of immigrants and their perceived pernicious influence on society is a current issue, and so the situation demands an awareness of America’s history of nativist politics, lest we risk true historical blindness. In particular, Trump’s so-called Muslim Ban, the executive order that barred the entry of immigrants from certain countries whose inhabitants happened to share a predominate religion puts one in mind of the original objects of nativist aversion: European Catholics. Anti-Catholicism was the original engine of anti-immigrant sentiments, and to couch our analysis of that part of American history in a narrative, we shall look to the most popular, most influential anti-Catholic work every published in America. In 1836, the first edition of this book sold 40,000 copies, and it was the best-selling book in America for years, until it was finally surpassed by Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is certainly strange, then, that when the woman credited as its author died in 1849, she expired in an almshouse, and rather than remembering her accomplishments in her obituary, newspapers reported her death as though taking pleasure in the passing of a villain.

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The woman presented as the author of the book in question, Maria Monk, told of her chaste Protestant youth. Her father, an officer of the British garrison in Montreal, died before she could know him, and her mother sent her away to a nunnery for her education, a common practice even among Protestants because of the well-known quality of Catholic schools. As she grew older, Maria Monk became interested in converting to take the veil and join the Black Nuns of the nearby Hotel Dieu Nunnery, a convent highly regarded for its charitable contributions to the community. So she converted and entered as a novice, toiling for years at the arduous tasks of sewing and candlemaking until such time as she received the black veil, took oaths and learned some terrible truths about the nunnery in which she had resided for so long. The Mother Superior explained to her that she must “obey the priests in all things,” and the principal thing they would demand of her was to have sexual intercourse with them. The Mother Superior explained that in this case, it was no crime but rather a virtue to offer this relief to the poor, secluded, ascetic priests without whose service all of mankind must burn in hell for lack of the pardoning of their sins. So after all, the convent was little more than a harem for the priesthood, she discovered, and on that first night, as a baptism of sorts, one priest summoned her to his private chambers, where she was brutally raped by three priests. And as if this violation were not horror enough, she also learned that beneath the nunnery lay a warren of secret tunnels connecting to other convents and churches through which the nuns were forced as a humiliation to walk on their hands and knees, and dungeons and torture chambers in which uncooperative nuns were held and branded like cattle and whipped with rods until they bled. Perhaps the most horrifying discovery she made was the fate of the children produced by the rape of the priests: these newborns were baptized, strangled to death, and discarded into a lime pit. Of course, Maria considered escape, but the example of another nun discouraged her. St. Frances, a beautiful nun, resisted the priests for fear of having a child that would be murdered, and for this crime they sentenced her to death, forcing the other sisters to watch as they laid her on a bed, threw another bed on top of her, and then jumped up and down on it, as many as the bed would hold, not only smothering St. Frances but battering and crushing her body. When she no longer drew breath, they threw her into the pit along with the decomposing infants.

L'ancien Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal sur la rue Saint-Paul, et le charrieur d'eau, via Wikipedia

Maria Monk often found herself imprisoned and tortured in those secret places beneath the convent, usually for an ill-considered comment to her Mother Superior. While there, she met a mentally unstable nun named Jane who shared her knowledge all of the secret places of the Hotel Dieu. Armed with this knowledge as well as the certainty that any child she bore would be promptly put to death, Maria Monk finally resolved to escape the nunnery when she discovered she was pregnant. Upon the pretense of seeking supplies for the physician, she managed to get herself out of the Hotel Dieu and fled Montreal for New York, where she ended up almost dying in childbirth at a charity hospital. It was there that she spoke frankly to a Protestant minister about her terrible experiences at the nunnery, and the minister encouraged her to tell the world. Thus was born her book, The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, as Exhibited in a Narrative of Her Sufferings During a Residence of Five Years as a Novice and Two Years as a Black Nun, in the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal. First news of the book and its shocking revelations was published in October of 1835 in the Protestant Vindicator, teasing only that a nun was being sheltered by a group of Protestant ministers, and that she had recently escaped the Hotel Dieu nunnery pregnant with a priest’s child. Immediate outrage erupted in Montreal newspapers, from Catholic and Protestant alike, insisting the Vindicator retract their libel, for the nuns of the Hotel Dieu were looked upon as saintly women for feeding and clothing the poor and the sick, and ministering to the dying and their orphans. Moreover, the idea that such abominations would be ignored by everyone in their city or that they were all so blind as to be ignorant of them entirely was enough to incense nearly every resident of Montreal. But the publishers of the Protestant Vindicator insisted that more details and proofs would be forthcoming, and soon other Protestant publications joined in the promotion of the book, thus ensuring it would sell well and be widely read upon its publication, and indeed, within weeks, it had sold 20,000 copies.

The advance press and the scandal itself might seem an obvious explanation for the book’s success, but from another view, it may seem anomalous in the otherwise staid and prudish 1830s for so lurid a tale to find so wide an audience. For context, we must consider the rise in anti-Catholicism in those years. Since 1820, a fear of Catholic influence in America, as spread by Catholic immigrants, specifically Germans and the Irish, had welled up like sewage after a storm. Catholic populations had been growing in America since the Revolutionary War, but they had largely been communities of businessmen and artisans, and their religious institutions were admired for the way they gave back to their communities, as with the Catholic private schools in convents, to which even Protestants desired to send their children. In the early 19th century, however, the influx of poor and uneducated Catholic immigrants put many Protestants on guard. They saw diseases spreading in slums, as in New York in 1832, where cholera thrived among new immigrant populations, and they saw social services like poorhouses, asylums, and prisons spread thin because immigrants disproportionately filled them. Looking at these problems, Protestant ministers settled on the Catholic Church as the cause of many societal woes. Whereas before they had focused on doctrinal differences and theological disputes in their anti-Catholic messages, in the 1830s they began to attack them on moral grounds, selling a great number of pamphlets, books, and newspapers like the Protestant Vindicator by publishing sensationalist material that played on the public’s anxieties over gender roles and sexuality. Nuns who devoted themselves to God rather than to a husband, and priests who took vows of celibacy, could be seen as subverting traditional domestic and family roles, and some have seen this as the reason why much of the anti-Catholic literature of the day was focused on female sexuality and on seduction and rape narratives. Thus, when Maria Monk’s disclosures were published, they had a waiting audience ravenous for more and more lurid revelations about the Catholic bogeyman.

Cholera prevention poster from New York City, via Wikimedia Commons

Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures fit comfortably into this genre of anti-Catholic literature that was doing well at the time. Some of the earliest entries in this category, like the 18th century titles Master-Key to Popery and Mysteries of Popery Unveiled, were simple exposes of priestcraft, illuminating the minutiae of sacramental rituals and the practices of inquisitors. Even these prefigure Monk's narrative, however, as they were often preoccupied with the practice of confession, which since the Middle Ages had been frowned upon for its suspected inappropriate contact between priests and the virtuous young women who confessed to them. This was the first sex scandal of the Catholic Church, and priests were sometimes subject to Inquisition themselves, for the crime of "solicitation," which today might be called sexual harassment. Interestingly, the confessional was invented during the Reformation to combat this precise problem, and originally they had been open air dividers to be used in public, meant to separate the confessor from her priest but not afford the priest any privacy. But these were not exposés of convents or heinous crimes committed therein. Some more contemporary anti-Catholic literature took the form of conspiracy theorizing, such as in Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, an 1835 collection of letters that Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, had written to the New York observer cautioning against the political influence of popery--a concern that would soon come to dominate Anti-Catholic thought. For more direct predecessors to Monk’s Disclosures we must look to fiction, particularly the gothic novel, among the many contemporary popular examples of which we find more than one story of nuns being exposed to the corruption and lechery of priests. The Nun, published in 1834, portrayed monks as nefarious sorts who lured women into nunneries, depicting a heroine, Clarice, who is held captive in a convent. That same year, in Lorette, History of Louise, Daughter of a Canadian Nun, readers followed a protagonist that was ill-used by a lecherous priest. And nunnery exposés were not just the stuff of fiction but explored in non-fiction as well, such as in 1834’s Female Convents and Open Convents in 1836, the latter of which claimed nuns were subject “to the savage and brutal lusts of men professing to be ministers of religion” (qtd. In Pagliarani 111). Nor even were Monk’s disclosures the first of their kind. A year earlier, one Rebecca Reed wrote of escaping from the terrors of another convent in Charlestown, outside of Boston, Massachusetts, in her Six Months in a Convent. Reed’s book did not sell as many copies as Monk’s, and in the long run, due to problems of credibility stemming from her unreliable character, neither was her story given as much weight as Monk’s, nevertheless it contributed significantly to a notorious riot in Charlestown.

During the year prior to its publication, Rebecca Reed’s manuscript was circulated locally, its allegations of captivity and abuse at the local Ursuline convent stirring up rumor and anti-Catholic resentment in an area where it already festered. By 1834, the population of indigent Irish Catholic immigrants in the greater Boston area had soared to 20,000, a fact resented by Yankee Protestant laborers who felt their work prospects were being undercut by this cheaper labor supply, a fear that had already led to numerous skirmishes among these workmen. Into this explosive atmosphere Reed injected her claims, further rousing suspicion and anger against a convent school whose students were actually predominately Protestant. Then one day, a nun from the convent showed up at a local man’s door, incoherent and wearing only a nightdress. A carriage soon arrived from the convent, from which the mother superior and a bishop emerged, explaining that the nun was suffering from a brain fever. They took the poor nun back to the convent and let it be known that her condition improved after her return. But that didn’t stop the rumors which Reed’s book had already set in motion. As the story spread, it was said that a nun had escaped her convent only to be recaptured and dragged back to her captivity. Newspapers took up the rumors, suggesting the poor escapee had endured torture prior to her escape and speculating that she had likely been murdered once recaptured. Placards appeared in public with threats, indicating that if the convent were not investigated, it would be demolished in four days’ time. These were not put up by anti-Catholic ministers but by truckmen, lower class workers of Boston who felt great resentment toward the Irish laborers who had become their competitors. In order to prevent this threatened mob action, town selectmen went the next day to inspect the nunnery and were led in their tour of the building by the very nun whose recent brain fever and wanderings had encouraged the furor. She was quite well now, and her thorough tour turned up no torture chambers or secret tunnels. But even as the selectmen prepared a statement for the newspapers, a mob gathered at the nunnery, three days before the time they had appointed.

"Ruins of the Ursuline Convent, at Charlestown Massachusetts," 1834, via Wikimedia Commons

They shouted for the mystery woman who had escaped and been recaptured to be set free, and the mother superior, in high dudgeon, threatened the mob, announcing sarcastically that if they didn’t leave, the bishop would unleash the power of the “twenty thousand of the vilest Irishmen at his command.” Of course, this only made matters worse. Pistol reports filled the night sky, and the mob increased, setting barrels of tar on fire to light the area and illuminate the imminent riot. When they finally broke through the front entry, the nuns were ushering their students out the back to hide by a tomb in the garden. From this vantage, they watched as the rioters, finding no evidence of the evils they imagined within, set about looting, breaking windows and dishes and picture frames, pushing furniture out onto the grounds, and setting fire to the interior of the beautiful school, hollering and laughing all the while. Firemen arrived, and they did nothing. In the aftermath, some few rioters were charged for their crimes, but all were either acquitted or pardoned. Rather than fueling anti-Catholic hysteria, the Ursuline riot of 1834 garnered sympathy for the plight of the Catholic in America and caused many Protestants to temper their anti-Catholic rhetoric. After this egregious incident and the subsequent publication of Reed’s book, which was implicated in the affair, it is perhaps not surprising that the most popular convent exposés and escaped nun narratives tended to expose the goings-on of nunneries in foreign countries, which could safely be accused of improprieties and iniquities without fear of accidentally inciting violence against them. So in 1836, we see Rosamond: or, a Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of an American Female under the Popish Priests, in the Island of Cuba, and we see The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, with its horror stories set in a Canadian convent.

However, Canada was simply not far enough away for the calumnies to go unanswered. While the nuns and the bishop of Hotel Dieu would not lower themselves to respond to such nonsense, the newspapermen of Montreal did. A very public investigation was conducted, with numerous affidavits sworn. A variety of respectable citizens of the city went on record that the Hotel Dieu was a perfectly reputable establishment, and that Maria Monk was known as a vagrant and a woman who made her living by disgraceful means on the streets, a “stroller” (Sullivan). Most damning was the affidavit sworn by Maria Monk’s own mother, which revealed the true life story of the increasingly infamous woman. Maria was born to a Protestant family in Quebec around 1816. She had been an unruly child, made even more disorderly after a brain injury she had suffered as a toddler: a slate pencil had been thrust deeply into her ear. From that time onward, her mother claimed that she had indulged in outrageous fantasies. These troubled her all her life and must have bordered on delusions as eventually, after some time spent in prostitution, she was committed to the care of the Magdalene asylum in Montreal. This had been her only contact with Catholic nuns, and it came to an abrupt end when she became pregnant while an inmate there. The nuns had turned her out into the street, and it was then that she met one William Hoyte, anti-Catholic activist and head of the Canadian Benevolent Society, who took her to New York and encouraged her to spread the story of her captivity in a convent. Maria’s mother even swore that Hoyte had offered to pay her off if she would corroborate her daughter’s claims, but she refused, feeling that he was taking advantage of her brain damaged daughter. All of these statements were published and circulated not only in Montreal but beyond as well, for some Montreal newspapermen collaborated on a book that refuted Maria’s Awful Disclosures called Awful Exposure of the Atrocious Plot Formed by Certain Individuals Against the Clergy and Nuns of Lower Canada, Through the Intervention of Maria Monk. Their book, however, was not widely read, and William Hoyte and the cabal of nativist agitators responsible for promoting Monk’s book, among them certain Protestant ministers such as Reverend J. J. Slocum and Reverend George Bourne, assured the public through their anti-Catholic mouthpiece newspapers, that these affidavits were simply lies promoted by the Catholic Church to dupe the foolish Protestants who lived among them in Montreal.

Cover illustration of Awful Disclosures, via Wikimedia Commons

One American Protestant newspaperman, Colonel William Leete Stone, happened to be travelling through Canada in the autumn of 1836, and harboring some nativist sentiments himself, he could not resist the urge to go see for himself the terrible sins in which the priests and nuns of Montreal might have been engaged. Colonel Stone walked every inch of the Hotel Dieu and the Magdalene asylum and two other convents in the city, never finding any sign of mass graves, torture chambers, or hidden passageways. Upon his return to New York, he interviewed Maria Monk herself, and finding that she could not accurately describe the convent, he declared in his pamphlets and in his newspaper, the Commercial Advertiser, which was one of the most widely read in the city, that Monk was a fraud. This certainly injured her credibility, but still supporters clung to the truth of her book. That same year, however, further revelations emerged from the courts, where a series of lawsuits among the coterie of nativists surrounding Monk hauled the secrets of the whole affair into the open. It turned out that Maria Monk had been the mistress of William Hoyte, but after he brought her to New York and introduced her to the others in his nativist circle, she left him to be the mistress of Reverend J. J. Slocum, and now Slocum was encouraging her to sue for a better share in the profits of the book. As the suits commenced, it became clear that, although Maria Monk’s name appeared on the book, its principal authors were the aforementioned trio of Hoyte, Slocum and Bourne. Nevertheless, when one wants to believe something, all sorts of mental gymnastics can ensure it remains believable, like insisting that these nativists only helped her put down what were her true recollections, that they were ghost writers rather than hoaxers. And so the book kept selling, so much so that a rival nativist newspaperman, Samuel B. Smith, wanted a piece of the action and, unbelievably, produced his own supposed escaped nun, Francis Patrick, whom he claimed had also fled the Hotel Dieu. This Francis Patrick, though, was an outright fiction, played in public by a woman named Frances Partridge, and her story, published by Smith in The Escape of Sainte Francis Patrick, Another Nun of the Hotel Dieu, was more widely disbelieved. Therefore, when Maria Monk met her and wrapped her in a hug and announced through tears that she had known Francis Patrick at the Hotel Dieu, rather than lending credibility to Patrick’s claims, it only further discredited her own. The next year, Maria Monk left Reverend Slocum, then her legal guardian, and ran away to Philadelphia with some unknown man. There she disappeared, eventually turning up on the doorstep of a doctor with a new story, claiming that a band of Catholic priests had kidnapped her and held her in a Catholic asylum in Philadelphia with plans to spirit her back to Montreal. The doctor contacted her guardian, Reverend Slocum in New York, who eventually came to get her, but not before the physician had spoken at great length with Maria about her abduction. Finding her story inconsistent, this doctor further damaged her trustworthiness in the public’s eyes when he published a pamphlet called An Exposure of Maria Monk’s Pretended Abduction and Conveyance to the Catholic Asylum, Philadelphia, by Six Priests on the Night of August 15, 1837: with Numerous Extraordinary Incidents during her Residence of Six Days in This City.

Soon Slocum, trying to rehabilitate her reputation, arranged for the publication of a sequel to Awful Disclosures, titled Further Disclosures by Maria Monk concerning the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, the substantial profits of which, as her guardian, Slocum kept entirely for himself. That same year, Maria became pregnant, and Slocum abandoned her to destitution and public denigration. She disappeared from the public eye after that, only showing up in the historical record again just before her death in a poorhouse, when she was arrested for picking her own boyfriend’s pocket. This woman went from being held up as a paragon of Protestant virtue, inspiring a nation’s sympathy as the ultimate victim of the wicked foreign power that was Catholicism, to being a blurb in an 1849 newspaper, which announced, “There is an end of Maria Monk” (Pelchat).

But there seems to be no end to her awful disclosures. After the conspiracy behind the book was exposed, after she was thoroughly discredited, even after her final ignominious end, her books sold and sold. Throughout the rest of the 19th century and even into the 20th, the worst continued to be believed about what went on behind closed doors in convents. And in the form of tracts circulated by evangelical groups, this known hoax continues to be disseminated, showing up in 1961 when Catholic candidate John F. Kennedy campaigned for president, and again in 1995 when Catholic traditionalist Pat Buchanan sought the Republican nomination for president. Much like the insidious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, this lie just won’t die because if they want to, some people will stubbornly believe even the most thoroughly debunked fraud and will spread it to others who don’t know any better.

One of many cheap reprintings of Awful Disclosures, undated, via The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry

And of course, the fact that the Catholic Church is so mired in current scandals having to do with inappropriate sexual contact certainly doesn't help the public discern what they should believe when exposed to hoaxes like these. Just last month, in fact, Pope Francis declared that his predecessor, Pope Benedict, had dissolved an order of nuns in France because of allegations that priests there kept the nuns in "sexual slavery." A story like this might cause one to wonder if escaped nun narratives like Maria Monk's were actually true... but then the evidence that they were frauds rather causes one to wonder if these modern accusations might not be a similar kind of hoax. But there is every reason to believe recent accusations made by nuns encouraged by the #MeToo movement against abusive priests, as reported on by the Associated Press, not to even mention the massive, ongoing pedophilia scandal. So we are left with some cognitive dissonance, believing accusations against the modern church but disbelieving previous claims. However, the difference of motivation and the presence of ulterior motive must be considered here. The struggle of sexual assault victims to overcome fear and shame in order to bravely expose their abusers must be differentiated from the machinations of those seeking through bald-faced deception to promote the fear and resentment of an entire class of people based on race or religion.

Portrait of Maria Monk, via Catholic Education Resource Center

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Further Reading

Franchot, Jenny. “Two ‘Escaped Nuns’ Rebecca Reed and Maria Monk.” Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism, University of California Press, 1994, publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft1x0nb0f3&chunk.id=d0e2483&toc.depth=1&toc.id=d0e1634&brand=ucpress.

Frink, Sandra. “Women, the Family, and the Fate of the Nation in American Anti-Catholic Narratives, 1830-1860.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 18, no. 2, 2009, pp. 237–264. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40663352.

Hughes, Ruth. “The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk.” University of Pennsylvania, www.sas.upenn.edu/~traister/hughes.html.

Kennedy, Kathleen. “The Nun, The Priest, and the Pornographer: Scripting Rape in Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures.” Genders, no. 57, 2013, Academic OneFile, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A324981030/AONE?u=sjdc_main&sid=AONE&xid=67fbbac8.

Pagliarini, Marie Anne. “The Pure American Woman and the Wicked Catholic Priest: An Analysis of Anti-Catholic Literature in Antebellum America.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, vol. 9, no. 1, 1999, pp. 97–128. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1123928.

Pelchat, André. “Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures” Beaver, vol. 88, no. 6, p.28. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login/aspx?direct=true&db=f6h&AN=36006571&site=ehost-live.

Prioli, Carmine A. “The Ursuline Outrage.” American Heritage, February/March 1982, www.americanheritage.com/ursuline-outrage.

Sullivan, Rebecca. “A Wayward from the Wilderness: Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures and the Feminization of Lower Canada in the Nineteenth Century.” Essays on Canadian Writing, no. 62, Fall 1997, p. 201. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=339667&site=ehost-live.

Blind Spot: The Jowers Affair

Just when it seemed that James Earl Ray’s dubious and discredited claims would fade into the background noise of history, leaving him to rot in his prison cell, disregarded by the press and the culture generally, events conspired to haul his claims of being a patsy out of mothballs. In 1993, on the ABC program Prime Time Live, Sam Donaldson interviewed a beshadowed man on national television, and this man claimed to have accepted money and hired a gunman to murder Dr. King, making it clear that he had far more to say if he were granted immunity from prosecution. This man was one Loyd Jowers. Sixty-seven years old at the time of his television appearance, Jowers was the owner of Jim’s Grill, the restaurant beneath the rooming house that served as a sniper’s perch to the assassin. Jowers’s confession began a new line of investigation leading to a new conspiracy claim for Ray’s then lawyer, a conspiracist named Dr. William Pepper—that’s right, Dr. Pepper—to focus on and promote. In 1997, Dexter King, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s second son, visited James Earl Ray and confronted him about his involvement in the murder. Shockingly, he then announced on behalf of his whole family, that they believed in Ray’s innocence. A few months later, Dexter also met with Loyd Jowers. Likewise, the Kings believed that Jowers’s testimony was the key to proving the murder of Dr. King had been the result of a conspiracy. This marked the beginning of a campaign by those who had survived Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to get Jowers’s story on the record. When they, along with Ray’s legal counsel, failed to get Jowers immunity, Coretta Scott King brought a civil suit against Jowers as well as “other unknown co-conspirators” for the wrongful death of her husband, seeking only $100 in symbolic compensation, as their true goal was not monetary reward but rather to finally get the truth. To some, the result was the final revelation of James Earl Ray’s innocence and proof of a conspiracy to kill Dr. King. But sometimes, the act of muddling or obscuring truth can masquerade as its disclosure when in fact it’s only making the truth harder to discern.

Loyd Jowers claimed that Frank Liberto, a Memphis produce dealer with a reputation for mafia connections who had long been suspected of involvement in the King assassination, had given him a substantial sum of money to arrange for King’s death, out of which he had paid the assassin. Now, patrons on Patreon will recognize the name Liberto from January’s Patreon exclusive Blindside edition of the podcast, in which I explored the conspiracy claim about his and the mafia’s involvement. Suffice to say here that there is every reason to doubt Liberto had anything to do with the murder of Dr. King, but his name had been floated in the immediate aftermath of the assassination and had never really disappeared from the conspiracy theories surrounding the murder, so it’s no great surprise that Jowers would name him in the late 1990s. However, as the Jowers angle was looked into by Ray’s attorney Dr. Pepper and his investigators—who themselves have major credibility issues, as outlined in my most recent Blindside Patreon episode and as I will further discuss shortly—they claimed to have uncovered numerous witnesses who could corroborate Jowers’s involvement in the murder. One was a cab driver, James McCraw, who told an investigator on Dr. Pepper’s team that Jowers had shown him a box with a rifle in it and bragged that it was the very rifle that had killed King. Another was one Bobbie Spates, a waitress at Jim’s Grill, who said Jowers had told her the day after the assassination that he’d found the murder weapon. And finally, there was Bobbie’s sister, Betty, a 16-year-old girl and Loyd Jowers’s erstwhile lover who worked across the street from the grill at a paper company. Betty Spates also put the rifle in Jowers’s possession, for she said she went to the restaurant that afternoon and saw him on his knees disassembling it. Moreover, Betty corroborated the claims that Jowers had an influx of money, for she claimed to have seen a great deal of cash secreted away in a disused stove a week prior to the King slaying. And as Dr. Pepper’s investigation continued, Betty’s revelations became more and more outrageous. She said she had visited the grill several times on the day of the assassination, each time seeing Jowers with a rifle. Before noon, she saw him with the gun; around noon, she saw him in the foliage back of the restaurant, aiming the gun up at the Lorraine Motel as though rehearsing the assassination; at around 4pm, she saw him disassembling the rifle; and then at 6pm, right after the moment of the assassination when she had heard a firecracker sound, she saw Jowers running back into the restaurant by the back door, the knees of his trousers muddy, his hair disheveled, his face pale and agitated. In his hands was a second, different rifle from the one she had earlier seen him carrying. Not only did this testimony seem to corroborate Jowers’s involvement, but it also contradicted his own claim that he had merely paid someone else to shoot King, instead indicating that he himself had been the shooter. And one other claim of Betty’s tends to confirm that she was not conspiring with Jowers in a hoax: she said that a known employee of Jowers’s, Willie Akins, had come into her home in the mid-1980s, fired a gun into the sofa beside her, and told her that Jowers had paid him to kill her.

There are, however, a myriad of reasons to doubt Betty Spates’s claims. Firstly, the story of Akins’s murder attempt was not very believable, and she had never even called the police about it. Secondly, there was the way her story expanded proportional to Dr. Pepper’s interest in it, a telltale sign of someone saying what an investigator wants to hear. Then there was the fact that elements of her statements proved untrue. At one point she said she was working at Jim’s Grill that day, but she had never worked there as her sister Bobbie had. She also claimed that Jowers had bought her a house to keep her quiet, and that government men had approached her with an offer to place her in witness protection, neither of which turned out to be true. And she went on to recant major aspects of her story, such as that Jowers had asked her to dispose of the rifle and that she had been at the restaurant at the time of the assassination, the latter detail having already been disproven since the police locked down Jim’s Grill just after the shooting to interview those inside, among whom she was not listed. But perhaps the biggest red flag on Betty Spates’s testimony comes from statements she had made to investigators at the time of the assassination. Twenty-four years earlier, back when the two had still been romantically involved, Betty Spates was already making claims about Jowers’s involvement in the crime. After the assassination, Betty was spreading the story that, very close to the time of the shooting, she had seen James Earl Ray outside the rooming house, making it impossible for him to be upstairs pulling the trigger. Instead of Ray, she was offering Jowers as a suspect, failing to disclose their relationship, which, if strained, might have been a motive for falsely accusing him. However, when Ray’s prosecutors visited her in 1969, she admitted her claims were a hoax, explaining that she had been promised five grand to make the false statements by friends of Martin Luther King who wanted to force investigators to expand their scope beyond James Earl Ray.

Loyd Jowers, via Wikimedia Commons

The final nail in the coffin of the Spates testimony was hammered in when she revealed that one of Dr. Pepper’s investigators, eager to obtain some smoking gun evidence of Ray’s innocence, in this case both figurative and literal, had actually offered Betty money. She called the $500 the investigator gave her a Christmas present, and the investigator told Gerald Posner, the author of my principal source, Killing the Dream, that he had only been helping Betty out with some overdue utility bills, but Spates eventually made a clear confession that she had taken monetary compensation for the story that she offered. And this was not the only time that Dr. Pepper’s team of investigators would prove themselves dishonest. At about the same time they were encouraging Betty Spates’s stories, they had also found another woman, Glenda Grabow, who was willing to go on the record that she knew who Raoul was. She said she had been involved in an abusive relationship with him when she was fourteen, and he had admitted to her that he had killed Dr. King. On her testimony, Dr. Pepper tracked down an actual suspect, a Portuguese immigrant living in New York named Raul, spelled slightly differently than James Earl Ray had always spelled it. Nevertheless, in 1995, after decades of playing coy and not identifying anyone as his Raoul, Ray pointed at this suspect’s photo and confirmed it was his mystery man. But there were numerous problems. Grabow’s story was so implausible that Dr. Pepper himself left most of it out of his book. Besides his claims to have killed King, Grabow’s Raul was involved with Carlos Marcello, the famous New Orleans crime lord, and met with Jack Ruby, with whom Grabow says she was also romantically involved. Moreover, Grabow happened by chance to have seen her Raul standing on the hood of his car outside the Houston airport upon JFK’s arrival in Texas, training a scoped rifle in the president’s direction, asserting that she had accidentally foiled the first attempt on Kennedy’s life, resulting in Raul moving to Plan B at Dealey Plaza. Of course, none of this helped Ray, so Dr. Pepper omitted it. And to further demonstrate the untrustworthiness of the Pepper team’s investigative practices and therefore the unreliability of all their witnesses, Gerald Posner describes audio tapes of Dr. Pepper’s investigators questioning Grabow, in which they ask leading questions and even put Raoul’s name in her mouth, as she had only referred to him by a racial epithet that they assured her was only his nickname: Dago. But the really unforgivable part of this farce Dr. Pepper’s team created is the fact that the Raul that Grabow and Ray identified was an innocent family man whose life was turned upside down by these accusations, ruining him financially and leaving him no peace in his retirement.

Likewise, then, considering the unprincipled techniques of Dr. Pepper’s investigators, the statement of Betty’s sister Bobbie is also suspect. As for the taxi driver, McCraw, like Betty, we know that he told a far different story when questioned during the months after the assassination. Back then, the only thing he had to say was that, on the day of the assassination, he had picked up Charlie Stephens, the chief witness placing Ray in the rooming house, and that Stephens was drunk. But even this appears to be a fabrication, as taxi company records do not indicate he was even there. It’s possible McCraw said what he did in order to corroborate the claims his friend Loyd Jowers was making. So then we must finally examine Jowers’s own reliability, already troubled by the fact that he had been an alcoholic for decades, as attested to by his own attorney (Posner 289). But disregarding that, we see inconsistencies in the stories he has told about what happened that day as well. Originally, much like Betty Spates, Jowers only told authorities things that might help exonerate James Earl Ray, making one wonder if he too was hoping to claim the money Spates said was being offered by King’s supporters. He said that at around 4pm, he saw the white Mustang out front, and inside his restaurant was a white man he didn’t recognize, eating sausages and eggs. At 6pm, he said, he heard the report of the rifle sounding like a skillet crashing onto the floor and walked toward the rear of the establishment to investigate. At that time, and just after, the white stranger was still present and asked him for a beer. But of course, this stranger could not have been Ray, because Jowers remembered that the Mustang had disappeared while the man remained. And the white stranger came back the next day, and the suspicious Jowers called the police, who identified him as a drifter named Gene Crawford. But this did not stop Jowers from spinning tales about the man, saying sometimes that he was a regular customer named Jim Sanders and other times that he was a CIA operative named Jack Youngblood, neither of which are true.

Further indications of Jowers’s penchant for changing his story around whenever his details are proven false came after his dramatic television appearance, when he named the gunman he had paid to kill King. He claimed to Dr. Pepper and his team that he had hired Frank Holt, a black day laborer. In Jowers’s version, Holt pulled the trigger in the foliage out back, and Jowers disposed of the murder weapon. And before anyone went looking for Holt, he said he had hired Willie Akins to kill the gunman, so there was no point spending any time trying to track him down. Willie Akins, of course, was the same inept assassin who supposedly shot the heck out of Betty’s couch but never actually harmed her despite accepting money to murder her, and here again, he appears to have failed, for Holt was alive and denied involvement and even passed a polygraph. After this, Jowers began to claim that his co-conspirators were members of the Memphis police department, and that the gunman in particular was Lieutenant Earl Clark. This time, he was slippery enough to only implicate men he knew were dead and could not defend themselves.

In Jowers’s favor, one might point out that he had nothing to gain from his confession. He was elderly; perhaps, the guilt had weighed on him and he only wanted to come clean before he died. But just as we know the Pepper team gifted some money to Betty Spates, there are indications that much greater promises of money were being made. In the end, when Betty Spates confessed that her story of seeing Jowers with the gun had come from Dr. Pepper’s team, she also indicated that Jowers’s attorney was involved. According to her, they wanted her to say she had seen Frank Holt hand the rifle to Jowers by the back door before running around to the street, where the police then led him right back in the front door of the restaurant, for the record showed that police officers had pushed Frank Holt into Jim’s Grill from the sidewalk that day. And they told Betty that if she said this thing, she and Jowers could divide $300,000 dollars. So, if this story is true, then it’s clear Jowers believed there was something in it for him to make his confession. After all, if he were only motivated by his guilty conscience, why would he play so coy and refuse to divulge any particulars until he had an immunity deal? Where this money might have come from is a trickier question. Perhaps there would be money in television appearances, like the one Jowers had already made, but not three hundred grand. More likely, Dr. William Pepper anticipated his book, Orders to Kill, would make a killing, so to speak, and he could comfortably apportion a few hundred grand to the little people whose wild stories made it so incendiary. This was similar, in fact, to how James Earl Ray had managed to obtain the services of so many famous lawyers: by offering them a slice of the money his story would make.

Cover of Orders to Kill, via Google Books

But of course, Dr. William Pepper and his team could not have made a media circus of James Earl Ray’s case some 30 years after the assassination without some help. One figure that helped to keep the case in the limelight was Judge Joe Brown, whom you may know as a television personality. Judge Brown actually fought to get Ray’s case assigned to him and afterward refused to recuse himself when it became apparent that he strongly supported the defense and believed there was a conspiracy to murder King. Then of course, the support of Dexter King and other King family members certainly helped to legitimize Dr. Pepper’s efforts. It would be one thing for the family to publicly forgive Ray for his crime, something that many SCLC preachers and friends of King have done as a testament to the power of God’s grace and mercy. It is another thing entirely for Dr. King’s son to shake the hand of the man who murdered his father and tell him he got a raw deal. It is, however, completely understandable for the King family to seek the whole truth about the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. It is therefore especially troubling and distasteful for someone to mislead them and misrepresent the facts in order to make them believe something that isn’t true. This is how blind spots crop up in history. Believable lies are propagated, provable truths are twisted and purposely misinterpreted, and falsehoods are taken to heart and spread by those who are most drawn to believe them. In fact, heap enough untruths on anyone and they’ll find it hard to sift through for the truth. In the civil case of Coretta Scott King vs. Loyd Jowers, for example, after sitting, and even sometimes dozing, through hours and hours of second- and third-hand testimony, the jury found in favor of Coretta Scott King, suggesting that the evidence proved Loyd Jowers and other conspirators, “including government agencies,” were responsible for King’s death, not James Earl Ray. But in response to all the noise made by Dr. Pepper and the Kings, Attorney General Janet Reno launched a Department of Justice investigation and essentially concluded what the House Select Committee on Assassinations had concluded, that Ray was not framed but rather was the shooter. And as for indications that Ray’s brothers may have been co-conspirators, while they did not deny this possibility, they simply could not justify its further investigation because, after 30 years, they just didn’t have any leads on new evidence. There the case of the conspiracy to murder Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stands, and people, it seems, as always, will believe what they want to believe.

The Killing of Dr. King, Part Three: Ray's Reasons

Having examined Ray’s version of events—that he was manipulated by a mystery man named Raoul into bringing the murder weapon to the Memphis rooming house that served as the sniper’s perch, but that he himself did not pull the trigger—and finding it sorely lacking in credibility, we now move on to consider the scenario that Ray was the shooter. Some of the points raised against this version include that he was a bumbling and failed crook and could not have possibly planned such a nearly perfect assassination, a perspective that doesn’t take into account his successful capers, like his bank robberies and his prison escape—and in fact, he would go on to escape from prison again for a short time while serving his sentence for murdering King. Others point to the fact that he was not a murderer and therefore seems an unlikely culprit. However, he had made a career of armed robbery, of threatening people with murder if they didn’t give him what he wanted, and once he is said to have stabbed someone in a Kansas City bar for no reason other than that they had spoken to him. Then there is the point that Ray was no sniper and therefore isn’t likely to have been the shooter, but to suggest that he couldn’t possibly have made the shot that killed King from 200 feet away doesn’t take into account the fact that when he joined the Army in 1946, he qualified as a marksman during basic training. Therefore, the real question needs to be one of possible motivation, of what may have driven Ray to commit the crime. He claims that not only was he not aware that Dr. King would be in Memphis at the same time as he would be there, but also that he didn’t really know who Martin Luther King was and that he certainly never talked about him. Moreover, he and his surprisingly numerous supporters, which include many people of color, insist that he is not a racist. Therefore, it would seem that he had no concrete reason to plan Dr. King’s murder and must have been a patsy. But are his supporters only seeing what he wants them to see? And what evidence is there to belie his true motivation?

Expectedly, after his arrest, Ray was grilled about his feelings toward African Americans in an effort to ascertain whether racism was a driving factor in his assassination of Dr. King. Did he hate black people? Was he connected to white supremacist organizations? Ray has always consistently denied any racist views, though his denials often included odd quibbling and admissions of feeling estranged from people of other races, which one might take as the equivocation of a guilty mind or as an attempt at complete honesty. Certainly many African American believers in a conspiracy have embraced the idea that Ray harbored no hatred toward them. Yet a close investigation into James Earl Ray’s past, as Gerald Posner provides in his book, Killing the Dream, which I’ve relied on extensively in this series, turns up some real evidence that Ray’s ideas about race tended toward bigotry all his life. He grew up in a poor little area of Missouri that some called Little Dixie, as it had been settled by Southerners and had a strong Ku Klux Klan presence (Posner 80). Although Ray himself has never been connected to the Klan, beyond the fact that later in life he accepted the representation of a famously Klan-associated attorney, he did evince some social and political ideas that would line up perfectly with that notorious hate group. While working at a tannery in 1944, he befriended a German named Henry Stumm who spoke admiringly of Hitler and the Nazis. It has been reported by people who knew Ray during this period—including one of his brothers, who shared some damning information about Ray with book authors before later denying he had said them—that it was during this time that James Earl Ray developed an intolerance of and hatred toward Jews and African Americans. From his point of view—again according to statements made by his own brother—Ray believed that the U.S. would be a better place if Nazis took control because they would ensure that it would be a racially homogeneous nation: all white. He thought not that they would exterminate all other races, but that they would exile them, deport them to some other country. In fact, so charmed was he with Nazi race politics that when he joined the Army after the war had ended, he requested to be stationed in occupied Germany, where more than one family member assumed he hoped to learn from or even support the Nazis.

A young James Earl Ray, already in trouble with the law, via the LA Times

After the Nuremberg trials, however, he became disillusioned with the Nazis and with the Army, going AWOL and getting himself discharged from duty and sent back to the states. On the ship back, he was enraged, according one of his brothers, because black soldiers who had married German girls were put in first class while single white soldiers like himself were left in second class. Once home, Ray turned to a life of crime, and some who knew him said he developed an unreasonable hatred for African Americans, making occasional statements about how they should all be kicked out of the country, or even that they ought to be killed (Posner 111). This bigotry apparently continued or even worsened during his time in prison. Beyond the statements of his brothers and others close to him, some of which have since been recanted, some two dozen men who served time with Ray testified to his hostility toward black people. In fact, his animosity kept him from taking advantage of the opportunity to get out of his cell at Leavenworth and enjoy more freedom. In 1957, he had the chance to live on the prison’s honor farm, but he refused because it was integrated and apparently he much preferred the segregated living arrangements of the prison. Then while serving a sentence at Missouri State Penitentiary, he refused to attend any sporting events because the teams were comprised mostly of black players, and he once said of a black guard that worked his cell block, “that’s one nigger that should be dead.” And upon hearing of JFK’s assassination, he remarked, “That is one nigger-loving SOB that got shot. After his escape from the penitentiary, during his time courting Claire Keating in Montreal, Keating remembered their conversations turning to race and to black people specifically, saying that Ray told her, “You got to live near niggers to know ’em,” adding that everyone who knows them hates them (Posner 165). And after that, Ray again showed his true colors to the next woman he spent any significant time with, a prostitute in Mexico. One night, while drinking at a cantina, Ray seemed bothered by the fact that four black men had come in to drink at the same establishment. He began insulting and provoking the men before leaving the bar and coming back in to abuse them more. Returning to his seat, he had his companion feel inside his pocket, where she found that he was now carrying a pistol. One of the black patrons approached him and tried to make peace, but Ray snubbed him. Eventually, Ray drove all four men from the cantina with his disrespect, and he would have gone after them if his companion hadn’t stayed him by convincing him that police would be making their rounds.

Among the racist sentiments that Ray revealed in prison were comments about other countries to which he’d like to immigrate because they were less diverse or had ideas about relations between races that he found more sensible. For example, he told other inmates that he was considering moving to Australia because, as he understood it, there were no black people there. And he spoke a lot about the country of Rhodesia, a southern African nation built on harsh segregationist laws that was frequently in the news at the time because of its social and political turmoil. There, some 200,000 whites had maintained their extravagant lifestyles and their hegemony over the more than three million black native inhabitants by refusing to concede to black rule like the rest of the British colonies in Africa. Under Prime Minister Ian Smith, the colony declared a Unilateral Declaration of Independence and broke away from Britain. According to his brother John, James Earl Ray had not only expressed interest in travelling to Rhodesia but admiration for their stand against black majority rule, telling his brother during a prison visitation that he believed Ian Smith was doing a fine job. Things quickly fell apart, however, as The ensuing economic sanctions did little to bring the Rhodesians to heel, and as the white Rhodesians faced economic sanctions and a guerilla war at home, with multiple black nationalist groups, some armed and trained by Russia and others by China, engaged in a bush war with the relatively small Rhodesian army. This war was framed as a stand against Communism and heathenism, but to be certain, at its heart, it was a struggle to preserve a way of life made possible by white minority rule. And rather than Rhodesia’s troubles discouraging Ray’s interest in immigrating there, he seemed even more drawn to go and contribute in some way to their cause. While in Mexico, he wrote to an address he found in U.S. News and World Report advertising for immigrants to Rhodesia. Later, from Los Angeles, he wrote to the American-Southern African Council, expressing his interest in immigrating to Rhodesia and asking how he might obtain a passport since the U.S. wasn’t issuing them for travel to Rhodesia at the time, and then to the Friends of Rhodesia, Orange County chapter, purchasing a subscription to a pro-Rhodesian publication called the Rhodesian Commentary and asking further questions about immigrating there.  Indeed, his flight to Europe after the assassination seems to have been an effort to make his way to Africa and offer his services as a mercenary. After his London bank robbery, he flew to Lisbon, which was a hotspot at the time for recruiting white mercenaries to fight in Angola’s civil war. In Lisbon, he visited the South African Embassy and asked them about mercenary recruitment, but finding that they were no longer recruiting, he went to the Rhodesian mission and the legation for Biafra, making clear his desire to join a white mercenary group at each location. Thereafter, when he was caught with his pistol back in London Heathrow Airport, he said he was carrying it because he intended to make his way to Rhodesia, where it was quite dangerous. Judging from these actions, it would appear that his plan to go to Africa centered either on some ideological desire to support a country fighting for white supremacy or on some deep yearning to shoot at black Africans.

Rhodesian Army recruitment poster

Another point supporting the notion that, despite whatever weak denials he made or tolerant facades he adopted after his arrest for King’s murder, James Earl Ray did indeed harbor racist ideology is his vociferous support of Alabama governor George Wallace, whose conflict with Dr. King and stringent stand against civil rights I discussed in the most recent installment of this series. By the time Ray escaped from Missouri State Penitentiary, Wallace was concentrating on a bid for the presidency of the United States. His populist campaign has been aptly compared to the campaign of Donald Trump numerous times by many historians, like Wallace biographer Dan Carter and presidential historian Ronald Feinman, as well as by respected news organizations, including the New York Times, and National Public Radio. Like Trump, Wallace fanned the fires of resentment and fear of progressive social change, in his case specifically over the Civil Rights Movement and its recent legislation, calling the Voting Rights Act “one of the most tragic, most discriminatory pieces of legislation ever enacted” and bemoaning the civil rights legislation for setting “race against race and class against class.” With this reactionary message, he drew massive crowds to disorderly rallies, just like his 2016 counterpart, and like Trump, he appealed to the poor white demographic, suggesting that politicians in Washington were out of touch with the people and that they had a rude awakening coming. As were Trump’s rallies, Wallace’s were troubled by protesters who called him a racist and whom Wallace mocked from his lectern. While Trump called his followers to Make America Great Again, Wallace urged his supporters to Stand Up for America. It’s almost as if Trump was working from a George Wallace playbook when he decided to declare the press his opposition and spend more time discrediting them than his opponents.  And much like Trump, he surprised many pollsters and analysts with his unexpected success, winning some 10 million popular votes and carrying 5 states.

We know that James Earl Ray was a strong George Wallace supporter because his brother John Ray, another Wallace supporter, has stated that James approved of his politics and even suggested that, after leaving Montreal following his failure to obtain a passport, he probably chose to go to Birmingham not because a shadowy mystery man directed him there but rather because he wanted to go somewhere people shared his views on race. After his sojourn in Mexico, Ray ended up in Los Angeles at the same time that Wallace was holding his raucous rallies up and down the state of California, and it would be no stretch to think he attended one of them. But even if he didn’t, we know that he read the Los Angeles Times, which devoted much column space in those months to Wallace’s effort to get his third party on the California ballot, and we know that in establishing his Eric S. Galt alias in L.A., he told people he was in town working for the Wallace campaign. In fact, he even appears to have done some stumping for them, of a sort. It turns out that his first trip to New Orleans from Los Angeles had not been made in order to rendezvous with Raoul—a character that he never mentioned to anyone until after his capture—but rather he made it as a favor to a woman he’d met, driving her, her brother and another friend there to retrieve her two daughters, but before he would take them, he demanded that all three sign a petition to get Wallace on the ballot. Finally, there is the indication that Ray may have been planning Dr. King’s assassination long in advance, and that George Wallace was an integral part of the plan. Ray’s brother Jerry told George McMillan, one of the writers researching the assassination, that there had been such a plan, and that Ray chose to establish his Eric S. Galt identity in Birmingham after returning from Canada because, much like Donald Trump can be counted on to use his pardon power as a sort of political patronage, James Earl Ray assumed that if he murdered Dr. King in Alabama, Wallace would make sure he went free. Of course, Jerry Ray would later deny that he said any such things, even though the statements are present in McMillan’s interview notes (Posner 169). And this would not be the only such statement indicating that James Earl Ray had entertained the idea of killing Dr. King for years.

Wallace campaign poster, via Wikimedia Commons

Ray claimed that he had only the vaguest knowledge of Dr. Martin Luther King’s existence, a dubious notion considering how much we know he read and kept up with the news, and that he certainly never spoke about him to anyone, but statements collected from people who knew him prior to the assassination contradict this. Back in prison, more than one inmate remembered how Ray would become agitated while reading weekly newsmagazines over the actions of civil rights leaders and King specifically, and one inmate, Cecil Lillibridge, recalled him scornfully calling Dr. King “Martin Luther Coon” (Posner 135). Likewise, statements made by Ray’s brothers, Jerry and John, who had visited him in prison and appear to have rendezvoused with him more than once after his escape, indicate that James Earl Ray was more than aware of Dr. King, that he was actually entertaining ideas about killing him.  Several weeks after his escape, according to Jerry Ray, all three brothers met in an old, rundown Chicago hotel and plotted some ways they might make money. Ideas bandied about ranged from as dangerous as kidnapping someone of importance for a ransom to as seedy as making and selling pornography, the latter being a scheme James Earl Ray found quite enticing. During this meeting, though, James told his brothers, “I’m going to kill that nigger King. That’s something that’s been on my mind. That’s something I’ve been working on.” According to their story, told to author George McMillan, both brothers refused to have anything to do with this plot. And later, both brothers claimed such a meeting had never taken place and denied they’d ever told McMillan it had. But the brothers were known to lie about their meetings with Ray. For example, John had visited James in prison the day before James’s escape, and there is reason to believe he aided his brother’s escape since James afterward used an alias and a social security number that John had previously been known to use. And despite prison records that prove the visitation happened, John claimed he had not visited James the night before the escape. And years later, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations questioned Jerry Ray about this meeting in Chicago at which James reportedly expressed intentions to murder Dr. King, Jerry tellingly did not deny it happened but rather refused to talk about it, hiding behind the Fifth Amendment on the grounds that discussing this meeting might incriminate him. Considering the fact that the bank robbery the brothers are suspected of committing together took place shortly after the meeting, it is possible that their discussion of kidnapping and robbery plans was what Jerry worried would be incriminating, but there is the further possibility that the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., was one of the plots hatched by the brothers in that Chicago hotel room, and that rather than it being James’s plan alone, the brothers raised it and planned to pursue it together. The question, then, is why? After the assassination, Jerry said that if Ray had done it, “there had to be a lot of money involved” (Posner 41). But he told McMillan that he had refused to go along with Ray’s plan of killing King because “There ain’t no money in killin’ a nigger” (Posner 152). Yet shortly after the manhunt for his brother had begun, he reportedly told a friend who asked him if Ray had done it that “This is his business… If I was in his position and had eighteen years to serve and someone offered me a lot of money to kill someone I didn’t like anyhow, and get me out of the country, I’d do it.” So was there, after all, money in it for the man who killed Dr. King? And did the brothers discuss this, among other moneymaking schemes, during their brainstorming session in that Chicago hotel room?

Of course, it is part of Ray’s legend of Raoul that he was drawn unwittingly into a plot to kill King on a promise of money, but if Ray had taken it upon himself to plan King’s murder as a moneymaking scheme before he claims he ever even met Raoul, then where would he have gotten the impression there was money in it? His prison acquaintance Cecil Lillibridge, who had listened to him rail against civil rights leaders, says that Ray also used to wonder aloud whether or not there might be some group out there that would reward the killer of a civil rights activist like King (Posner 135). Other inmates told interviewers that Ray spoke about murdering Dr. King for money, speculating that he might get as much as $10,000 for it. One inmate, Harry Sero, remembers suggesting to Ray that, what with King advocating boycotts, some wealthy businessmen might pay a lot to have King put out of the way. Ray’s comments appear to have graduated after that from speculative to seemingly assured, telling other inmates that some “businessman’s association” was offering a hundred grand for King’s murder, though he couldn’t name the group, simply saying he would find out who they were (Posner 136). Were there such bounties on Dr. King? The short answer is yes, of course there were, bounties ranging from $50,000 to $100,000 offered by a variety of far right hate groups like the KKK, the National Socialist White People’s Party, the Minutemen, and the American Nazi Party. Which of these groups Ray might have come into contact with, however, is a more important question to demonstrating that Ray may have undertaken the assassination in the hopes of collecting a bounty. There are reports that some prisoners in the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City were aware of a $100,000 bounty on King from the White Knights of the Mississippi KKK as well as of another bounty by a local criminal enterprise calling itself the Cooley’s Organization (Posner 137). But one such supposed bounty stands out. In the late ‘70s, the House Select Committee granted immunity to a St. Louis man in exchange for his testimony about being offered money to assassinate Dr. King. Russel Byers testified that in late ’66 or early ’67, a real estate developer with ties to the criminal underworld named John Kauffmann approached him about an opportunity and took him to see a wealthy segregationist named John Sutherland. Byers’s tale has him entering a well-appointed study adorned with memorabilia from the Confederacy to discuss a proposition. Sutherland, with a Confederate hat on his head, offered Byers fifty grand to kill King or to arrange his death, a bounty he said would be provided by a wealthy organization out of the South. Byers said he declined to take part in their plot. The House Select Committee was able to corroborate Byers’s story, and it seemed quite feasible that Ray might have found out about this offer before he escaped the penitentiary, as Byers’s brother-in-law was incarcerated in the same cell block with him, and Ray has admitted to knowing him. Then there is the fact that Kauffmann, the guy who brought Byers in on the plot, was a convicted amphetamine dealer, and during his trial, it came out that he was having the drugs smuggled into Missouri State Penitentiary, where James Earl Ray was using and selling them. A strong indication that Ray had heard of the Sutherland bounty on King comes from another inmate’s testimony, given long before Byers ever spoke about the bounty, that Ray had tried to bring him in on a plot to kill King for money, no longer claiming the bounty was ten grand or a hundred, but now naming the $50,000 amount we know was offered by John Sutherland and assuring the fellow prisoner that, if they killed King in the South, it wouldn’t even matter if they were caught because “who in the South like niggers?” (Posner 139).

An older Ray, in trouble with the law again, via Newsweek

So there is good reason to believe James Earl Ray had it in his head that he and his brothers might make a considerable amount of money by planning and carrying out King’s assassination. After their meeting in Chicago, Ray made his way to Birmingham in order to establish his alias Eric S. Galt as an Alabaman because, as Jerry Ray explained to George McMillan, James Earl Ray thought getting rid of King would help the George Wallace campaign, and he believed that, if he were caught, Wallace would surely pardon him for the murder, maybe not right away, but eventually, when the outrage had subsided (Posner 169). And in fact, John Sutherland, the wealthy lawyer who had put up the fifty grand bounty on king, was a major player in the George Wallace campaign, a fact that lends credence to the conspiracy theory that the Wallace campaign may have actually been linked to the King assassination. Months later, after Ray’s vacation in Mexico, when he made his visit to New Orleans while living as Galt in Los Angeles, rather than meeting with Raoul as he claimed, there is a chance that he actually met with one of his brothers there and that they further discussed the idea of killing King and collecting the Sutherland bounty. Since Ray’s departure, his brother John had opened a tavern in St. Louis in an area where numerous Wallace rallies were held, and it had quickly become a haunt for ex-cons and underworld types looking for jobs, just the kind of place where the bounty would have been whispered about. Then, after Ray’s visit to New Orleans, John converted the tavern into a Wallace campaign center, distributing literature and helping to register voters. And in another connection to the Sutherland bounty, John employed a woman whose husband was friends with Russel Byers, the man Sutherland had propositioned about killing King. After Ray’s visit to New Orleans, there are clear signs that he wasn’t just looking forward to skipping the country or engaging in some more light smuggling but rather planning something big. He underwent plastic surgery to change his appearance. He would later explain that he did this because he expected soon to show up on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, a rather telling excuse, since surely he didn’t think a small-time escaped armed robber would be placed on the Most Wanted list so long after his escape unless he had it in his head that he would soon be committing a far more heinous and high-profile crime. He even went so far as to manually adjust his bandaged nose after his rhinoplasty so that even his plastic surgeon wouldn’t know exactly what he looked like. As James Earl Ray prepared to leave L.A., Dr. Martin Luther King visited the city and spoke at numerous events over the course of a couple days. Less than a month later, King would lie shot on the balcony at the Lorraine, and James Earl Ray had also begun the final leg of his journey to be in that same city block at the same time. As he headed east, staying at cheap motels, newspapers reported that Dr. King would be in Selma, Alabama, on the 22nd, and Ray drove straight there, indicating that, after all, he was stalking the reverend. When King left Selma, Ray took his leave as well, driving then to King’s hometown, Atlanta, Georgia, and it is worthwhile now to remember the map the FBI would eventually discover in one of his rooms, with King’s home and the church where he preached both circled in pencil. It was during this stay at a rooming house in Atlanta that Ray made the two hour drive west to Birmingham several times to visit multiple gun stores, and of course, if he really had no idea that the gun he would be buying was going to be used to murder someone and instead just thought it was going to be a showpiece to impress their Mexican connection, there would have been no reason not to buy the gun right there in Atlanta. Driving so far to buy it betrays Ray’s concern that the gun might later be traced back to him. Astonishingly, Jerry Ray, in the 1975 interview with George McMillan that he would later claim never happened but which is corroborated in McMillan’s notes according to Gerald Posner, the author of my principal source, Killing the Dream, Jerry said he actually met up with James in Birmingham, cagily implying they had test-fired the first rifle Ray bought together and that he had concerns about whether the gun could “do it in one shot” (Posner 223). Recall that when Ray returned  the first rifle he’d bought, he said that he’d changed his mind after speaking with his brother. After exchanging the rifle, Ray brought it to Memphis. There is some debate over when Ray left for Memphis with the rifle, whether it was before or after the announcement that King was returning to that city for another march, but we know that he only arrived at the New Rebel the night before the assassination.

The details coalesce to form a clear picture, it seems to me, that there may have been numerous conspiracies to have King killed in the form of bounties being put on his head, whether implicitly or explicitly, by hate groups as well as, perhaps, by some Southern boosters of the George Wallace campaign, but that Ray was not necessarily part of those conspiracies in the sense that he may only have heard of the bounties second or third hand and undertook to murder King with the hope of collecting on them after the fact. The clearest evidence of any conspiracy is between James Earl Ray and his brothers John and Jerry, who if McMillan’s interviews can be believed, might more accurately be called accomplices than co-conspirators. And there is little reason to trust known dissemblers and convicted felons over George McMillan, whose journalistic work appeared in the most distinguished of publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Saturday Evening Post. Nevertheless, while close scrutiny of the available research paints a surprisingly clear picture of a virulent racist and lifelong outlaw driven to murder out of greed who after his capture and conviction devoted the remainder of his life to spinning a web of lies and conspiracy innuendo, there are still a couple details that give one pause and prove a bit harder to explain away. For example, most of the aliases that James Earl Ray used, among them Eric S. Galt, John Willard, and Ramon Sneyd, were the names of real people, all of whom lived near each other in the same suburb of Toronto. The fact that a few of these Canadian men could’ve passed for Ray has led some to believe that the mysterious Raoul, Ray’s supposed handler, had provided him with these cover identities, although Ray himself never claimed this. Instead, he said he probably got the names out of a phone book, a believable enough explanation until one discovers the fact that the real Eric Galt’s middle name was not “Starvo,” as Ray had given it, but rather St. Vincent. Curiously, though, the real Galt customarily wrote out his middle name abbreviated, as St. V., with the periods looking like little o’s, so that it appeared to read as StoVo. So the only reasonable explanation seems to be that, rather than getting this name from a phone book, Ray must have seen some paper on which Galt had handwritten his name and simply guessed at pronouncing the middle name, corrupting it from Stovo to Starvo. But there is evidence that Ray stalked some of the men whose names he would later use, as among his possessions was another map with marks on it, this one of Toronto with marks near the homes of these men. And we know that after the assassination, he contacted the real life counterparts of several of his known aliases, pretending to be a government official in order to ascertain whether they already had passports, since he would be trying to get a passport in one of their names. So considering this, it is perhaps not impossible to imagine that he had previously gone to Toronto, stalked some men who looked like him, and took some papers from Galt at least, perhaps from his trash in order to find out what his signature looked like. It certainly is a complicated routine to go through when other fugitives might just make up a name, but perhaps it just reflects the fact that he had given a lot of thought to how he might establish an ironclad identity and obtain a Canadian passport, which eventually he did.

Ray’s Canadian passport photos, via Another Nickel in the Machine

Then there are the hypnosis sessions he underwent in Los Angeles before setting out to assassinate Dr. King. Assassination conspiracy theorists are no stranger to the notion that unwitting patsies can be programmed to commit murder through hypnosis. This is a major element of the conspiracy theory that Sirhan Sirhan was not alone responsible for the shooting of Bobby Kennedy. Sirhan Sirhan was an enthusiast of self-hypnosis and actually practiced it on himself by following the instructions provided by a group of supposed Rosicrucians. Now, who the Rosicrucians are, or were, is a topic better left for its own likely sprawling edition of Historical Blindness, but it’s understandable that this tidbit has fueled many conspiracy theories. Well, it turns out that James Earl Ray was interested in self-hypnosis as well. He had read about hypnosis in prison, bought more books on it in Canada, and attended several sessions with a psychologist in L.A. who specialized in hypnosis and found Ray to be an excellent subject of it—much like it was found that Sirhan Sirhan was easily hypnotized. This, of course, all sounds very suspicious and sinister, until you read what his hypnotists had to say about him. When interviewed, Dr. Freeman, his L.A. psychologist, said Ray revealed no secret plan to kill King while under hypnosis, but that he did betray his immense dislike for African Americans. Ray also visited the International Society of Hypnosis and spoke with its head, Rev. Xavier von Koss, who disagreed about Ray being easy to hypnotize, saying he showed a “strong subconscious resistance” (Posner 209). And for what it’s worth, during his encounter with Ray, Koss also claims to have surmised that Ray wanted recognition above all else. And the simple truth about these assassins’ interest in self-hypnosis might be far more mundane that one would anticipate. The fact is, self-hypnosis was something of a self-help fad at the time. It was becoming popular as a self-improvement technique that could improve memory and sleep and help one overcome personality problems like shyness and social disorders like anxiety. Some more common uses of self-hypnosis that many may be more familiar with are its use in helping people quit smoking or lose weight. So rather than it being a nefarious brainwashing technique that some mysterious conspirators used to program both Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray, isn’t it a simpler and therefore more logical explanation that they just used it to overcome the shyness with which they were both known to struggle? In fact, as an escaped convict who may have also been planning a high-profile assassination, Ray’s shyness, his tendency to not look people in the eye and seem squirrely and nervous, was something he would have certainly wanted to correct, as it could very well get him caught. In fact, in the end, it did, as the immigration officer at the passport desk in Heathrow on June 8th, 1968, looked a little closer at him and his papers, double-checking his name against those on his “Watch For and Detain” list, because he seemed “slightly nervous” (Posner 45).

Time, it is said, marches on, and like the marchers at whose head Dr. Martin Luther King strode, it has gone on to remember him well. Just days after his murder, with his killer still on the loose and the fires of rioters still burning, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, and several months later, before an election that LBJ had backed out of, he spoke again on the passage of a landmark Gun Control Bill that was directly inspired by the horrendous murders of both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy by men that never should have been allowed to get their hands on a firearm. But, of course, even after these tragedies which roused our nation to action, much like today, the influential gun lobby prevented the passage of comprehensive gun control legislation. Within weeks of the Gun Control Bill’s passage, we elected president Richard Nixon. After the failure of his presidential campaign, George Wallace returned to Alabama and licked his wounds, winning the governorship back in 1971 and once again campaigning for president in 1972, when he became the victim of his own assassination attempt. Unlike King, surviving the attempt, he lived to the age of 79. Despite publicly moderating his views on race, Wallace is not remembered well, unlike Dr. King, who is popularly viewed today as a visionary, a hero, a saint, and a martyr. As for James Earl Ray, he died in 1998 at 70, failing to ever win a new trial despite decades of sowing doubt about his guilt. Nevertheless, speculation about Ray’s innocence and the possibility of a conspiracy will not die.

View of Lorraine Hotel from the window where James Earl Ray was alleged to have fired the fatal shot at Martin Luther King, Jr., via Flickr (uploaded by Mr. Littlehand, licenced under the terms of the cc-by-2.0.)

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Further Reading

Posner, Gerald. Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Random House, 1998

The Killing of Dr. King, Part Two: The Legend of Raoul

Last time, after honoring Dr. King’s life and work before the day set aside for remembering him, we followed the FBI on the killer’s trail, looking at the evidence turned up along the way, until the suspect, James Earl Ray, was captured at a London airport. Already, conspiracy theories abounded, suggesting that the CIA, the FBI, Memphis police, the mafia, white supremacists, or black militants had plotted King’s murder. Flatly listing these theories tends to make them sound ridiculous, but there were good reasons to harbor suspicions in those post-Warren Report years, when New Orleans DA Jim Garrison was making noise about a conspiracy behind JFK’s assassination. And there were certainly some details around King’s death that contributed to the speculation. First, the failure of the police to set up road blocks and inform neighboring states about their search for a white Mustang suggested to many that local authorities were letting the assassin get away. The fact that a hoaxer led police on a wild goose chase with a phony CB radio broadcast also suggests to some the idea that a conspirator was working to help the assassin escape, even though that hoax broadcast took place more than half an hour after the shooting, when the shooter was likely already in another state. Then there was the fact that the principal witness at the rooming house, Charlie Stephens, who claimed to see a man matching Ray’s description leaving the shared bathroom carrying a rifle-length bundle, was a known drunk who appears to have been intoxicated that day, though police who took his statements indicated he was not exceedingly drunk. And Stephens was important to placing James Earl Ray in the rooming house, for while police did find Ray’s fingerprints on items in the abandoned bundle, they found none in the room he had rented and only a partial palm print in the bathroom. This is easily accounted for by the fact that, a career burglar and escaped convict, Ray himself spoke in some interviews about his habit of wiping his fingerprints. As for ballistics evidence, the FBI determined that the bullet fired into Dr. King matched the other bullets in the abandoned bundle, but that it could not be confirmed that it had been fired from the rifle in the bundle. This was simply because the bullet had been damaged and identifying marks could not be perceived, and in no way indicated that the bullet had not been fired from the gun discarded on the street outside the rooming house. Nevertheless, it has contributed to theories that the bundle was planted as part of a frame-up. As for the sniper’s perch, though most were certain the gunshot had originated from the building across the street from the Lorraine Motel, some few others thought it had come from some shrubbery above a retaining wall. Dr. King’s driver thought he saw some movement in those bushes, and months later, one of the rooming house residents said he was in the bushes drinking wine and had seen a figure with a gun dashing through the foliage. Later, it came out that the driver, who was known for telling tales, had actually been in the pool area and would have been unable to see the foliage across the road, and the rooming house resident had previously told the authorities that he’d been in his room, not in the bushes, and that he’d seen nothing. Nevertheless, the foliage above the retaining wall has since become a legendary place, like the grassy knoll at John F. Kennedy’s assassination. And just as Lee Harvey Oswald proclaimed himself a patsy before his murder by Jack Ruby, James Earl Ray insisted he had been set up. The difference was that great care was taken to protect Ray from a similar fate, and so he survived and had far more to say. The story he told his lawyers and the author William Bradford Huie involved a mysterious figure whom he had met in Montreal while on the lam. This man, named Raoul, had drawn Ray into a smuggling operation, bought him the Mustang and paid his living expenses, maneuvered him various places on the promise of eventually providing him with a passport, ordered him to buy the rifle as part of an arms deal, and eventually schemed to get him in Memphis, in the wrong place at the wrong time, a completely oblivious patsy.

When considering the likelihood of a plot against King, one has to begin with the local authorities. Dr. King had been considered a thorn in the side of numerous municipal and state authorities in areas he had visited. Alabama serves as a principal example. One of Dr. King’s most zealous adversaries was Alabama governor George Wallace, a segregationist who had staked his political career on racism, famously standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama to prevent black students from entering. His calls for Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever helped make Birmingham the frontlines for the Civil Rights Movement, and under his auspices, led by his terrible example, Birmingham police resorted violence during the SCLC campaign in that city. Another of King’s worst opponents had been the Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, “Bull” Connor, who, taking his cues from the bigoted governor, callously turned the hoses of the firemen and the batons of the policemen he commanded against King and his protesters. And later, demonstrating against illegal, racially motivated obstacles to voting registration that Governor Wallace tacitly allowed to persist in his state, King and the SCLC planned a historically lengthy march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, where on Bloody Sunday unarmed protesters were welcomed by tear gas and truncheons. Indeed, if Dr. King had been assassinated in any city in Alabama, the very first suspects might have been members of its police force, with implications that orders might have come down all the way from the governor’s office to rid their state of the troublesome activist. But King was killed in Tennessee, a state where he had not done any extensive organization previous to the sanitation strikes, which had only begun about a month before his arrival there. This is not to say that Tennessee had not seen its fair share of struggles for civil rights. On the contrary, since the ’50s there had been multiple bombings in Nashville in response to the desegregation of schools and in retaliation for student-led sit-in campaigns in the ’60s aimed at integrating lunch counters. And Dr. King did have some influence on the activism in Tennessee, as it was spearheaded by the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference, an affiliate of King’s SCLC, and King had sent one of his own to tutor them in the techniques of non-violent resistance. But Dr. King himself only came to Nashville after a bomb destroyed the home of a lawyer who represented sit-in participants, and he came not in a leadership capacity, but rather to express his admiration for all the work that had been done there without him, saying he was there “not to bring inspiration but to gain inspiration.”  

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. being arrested in Alabama for "loitering," via Wikimedia Commons

It’s not impossible to imagine that he had enraged many in Tennessee simply through his very famous work, which had spread to states all over the country, or even that police in Memphis blamed King, despite his non-violent message, for the violence that erupted during the March 28th demonstration that he attended, but it would have been a drastic step to resort to assassinating him, and they would have had a very short time to organize their plot. Some have pointed to the fact that police were not providing any security for Dr. King as proof that they were part of a conspiracy bent on seeing him killed, but in truth Dr. King preferred not to be surrounded by police officers, who of course represented the immediate opposition in any street demonstration and who only days earlier had shot a 16-year-old rioter to death. So wary was he of having a police escort that he and his group actually made an attempt to elude their police security detail before it was finally called off them in favor of surveilling the group from a distance. Others have contended that King and his entourage had been maneuvered to the Lorraine Motel in order to put him in the cross-hairs, a contention that is also untrue. King and his group customarily stayed at the Lorraine, an establishment owned by African Americans, and moreover always stayed in the same room. In fact, days earlier, during the March 28th violence, the police had warned him away from the Lorraine for his own safety, directing him to stay at a Holiday Inn instead, a change of lodgings for which Dr. King was subsequently criticized. Their failure to order roadblocks or extend their APB certainly reflects poorly on them, but they were dealing with rioting in the wake of the news that Dr. King had been murdered. And a bigger problem with the notion that King’s assassination was the object of a plot by Memphis police is that it simply doesn’t work with the idea that James Earl Ray was a patsy. Ray had only just arrived in Memphis the night before the assassination. Even King himself had not long been there and had been in and out of the city three times in the preceding weeks on impromptu visits, making a Memphis-based plot unlikely. Moreover, for the local conspiracy theory to work with Ray’s story about Raoul, it would require that the authorities in Memphis or Tennessee generally so wanted Dr. King dead that they planned his assassination long before the sanitation strike that drew him there had even begun. And it would mean they sent an agent to Montreal, of all places, to skulk around bars scoping out promising scapegoats, only to lead him on a circuitous escapade all over North America, from Canada to Mexico and from California to Georgia, before finally sending him to Memphis in order to frame him. While this seems manifestly unlikely, the idea that Ray was groomed as part of a plot at a higher level of government may seem less unlikely. After all, the FBI were present with the Memphis police in that nearby fire station, spying on Dr. King at the Lorraine.

A plot against King at the FBI is certainly not unbelievable, for it’s well-documented that one actually existed. The FBI had been keeping an eye on Dr. King’s activities since his earliest activism in Montgomery in 1955, with Director J. Edgar Hoover suspecting that King harbored Communist leanings and classifying him as a national or domestic security risk.  Indeed some of those closely involved with King and SCLC leadership were known members of Communist organizations, including Bayard Rustin, Hunter Pitts O’Dell, and Stanley Levison, but this should not be surprising of progressive activists in their era. Today, we know that the FBI tasked a sophisticated surveillance network with spying on King, complete with wiretaps on his phones and paid informants on his staff. Because of this surveillance, there is ample evidence of just how little Dr. King thought of Communism, which he called “an alien philosophy contrary to us.” But despite evidence that he was not a Communist insurgent, in 1964, King incurred the redoubled wrath of Director Hoover when he declared that the FBI was “completely ineffectual in resolving the continued mayhem and brutality inflicted upon the Negro in the deep South,” to which, like a child, Hoover responded by calling King a liar. True to his peace-loving nature, Dr. King arranged a meeting with Hoover, who received King with no outward animosity. Meanwhile, Hoover’s FBI engaged in an all-out smear campaign, maligning his character to Roman cardinals in an effort to prevent a meeting between Dr. King and the Pope that year, and sending a notorious package to his house in an effort to sow discord in his marriage. This package contained a tape with moaning sex sounds and a letter that addressed him only as “King,” continuing, “In view of your low grade, abnormal personal behavior (sic) I will not dignify your name with either a Mr. or a Reverend or a Dr. And, your last name calls to mind only the type of King such as King Henry the VIII and his countless acts of adultery and immoral conduct lower than that of a beast.” The letter called him an immoral, sexually psychotic fraud and a liability to the cause of civil rights, insisting that his extra-marital liaisons with both women and men would soon be made public, suggesting that the tape was a recording of him and insinuating that the only thing left for him to do was to kill himself. Although the letter made statements intended to indicate it had been written by an African American and perhaps someone in his own organization, Dr. King perceptively guessed that it had been sent by the FBI. Indeed, now, due to recently declassified files, we know that the FBI was preparing reports on Martin Luther King all the way up to the time of his assassination, still claiming that he was a Communist agent and that workshops King held were really only fronts for drunken orgies at which attendees committed adultery with prostitutes and engaged in homosexual acts. It is certainly true that Dr. King was no saint. Indeed, he once penitently confirmed as much to activist and singer Joan Baez who had seen him intoxicated the night before. In response, Baez said, “And I’m not the Virgin Mary. What a relief!” Ralph Abernathy, in his autobiography, did reveal that King, a man frequently on the road and away from home and family, had been involved in extramarital affairs, but there appears to be no evidence whatsoever for the salacious and defamatory claims made by the FBI in their efforts to ruin Dr. King.

NY Herald Tribune article from 1964, via the University of Virginia’s Office of African-American Affairs

Clearly the thought that Hoover’s FBI might have been responsible for the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., was well justified. But this would have to be a compartmentalized plot, for surely the President of the United States, to whom the FBI answers, would not condone such action against a non-violent reverend. Or can some credence be given to the conspiracist who claims the plot went all the way to the top? Well, above Hoover was the Attorney General, a role Ramsey Clark served at the time of King’s murder, but Clark is an unlikely suspect for involvement in a plot against King as he was a consistently staunch supporter of the civil rights movement. And above the Attorney General, of course, would be the President himself. Now, many take it for granted that King had positive relationships with both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, but both executives had J. Edgar Hoover pouring poison in their ears, trying to convince them of what a threat Dr. King really was. While Kennedy had made promises to King about getting civil rights legislation passed, behind his back he was signing his approval of the wiretaps Hoover had requested. After Kennedy’s assassination, President Johnson reached out and made clear his intentions to take up Kennedy’s civil rights agenda. And in fact he did, working with Dr. King on passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in an effort to end segregation and discrimination. King found in Johnson an accommodating ally. Although sometimes he prioritized other objectives, like his War on Poverty initiatives, over the most pressing concerns of Dr. King and the SCLC, like ensuring obstacle-free black voter registration in order to get black Southerners on juries and into civic service, nevertheless King found that with a little persistent pressure, LBJ always seemed to do the right thing, and in 1965 Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act to help remove illegal barriers to black voter registration in the South. And certainly, after Dr. King’s death, Johnson expressed grief publicly and continued to work to cement King’s legacy in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. It would be misleading to suggest, however, that Dr. King never represented a problem for LBJ. The simple fact that he was known to work with King, whom so many others in power despised, appears to have been an issue for him, and he was known to distance himself from the reverend, denying their relationship like Peter denying Jesus. And their partnership was certainly strained in the end, when Dr. King very publicly split from him on the issue of the Vietnam War. And of course, taking a stand against the conflict in Vietnam surely gave Hoover more ammunition against him, more reason to claim he was a Communist. So the question, then, is could Hoover have exploited this rift between Johnson and King to convince the Commander-in-Chief that some covert action was warranted to rid the country a man he portrayed as a dangerous agitator? This is pure conjecture based on speculation. All we really know is that the President’s often positive partnership with King was lately troubled and that the director of the largest domestic law enforcement organization was waging a very personal campaign against King, one that even included threats. Beyond this, to support the notion of a conspiracy, there is only the legend of Raoul.

LBJ and MLK, via Wikimedia Commons

Even before his extradition to the United States, James Earl Ray, still stubbornly sticking to his alias Ramon Sneyd at the time, began shopping his story around through his attorney. Indeed, from the time of his extradition to the time of his guilty plea, he went through a couple of prominent lawyers, all of which he retained on the promise of sharing the profits from his story, which he anticipated would be substantial. William Bradford Huie was first to sign a deal with and interview him, but before long numerous authors were hard at work on numerous books. Nevertheless, Ray worked exclusively with Huie, a journalist known for checkbook journalism, or paying handsomely for his stories, and famous for his recent work in what would today be considered the true crime genre, with particular focus on notorious cases of interracial murder, such as those of Emmett Till and the Freedom Summer murders. When Huie published the first of his interviews with Ray in Look magazine, he faced contempt of court charges, and not for the first time, for the judge feared Huie’s inflammatory revelations would influence the outcome of the trial. Huie’s article told of how Ray had escaped from prison in Missouri and hid out in Illinois before making his way to Montreal in hopes of getting travel documents and going overseas. There, he haunted a waterfront tavern, making it known that he was in trouble with the law in the U.S. and that he would be willing to engage in unlawful activity in order to gather some money and obtain false identification. That was when Raoul, a man Ray described as being a blond Latin, approached him. Over the course of several meetings, Raoul convinced Ray to make a few trips over the border to Detroit with some packages that he assumed contained narcotics. After receiving some money for this apparent smuggling operation, on Raoul’s promise of an eventual bigger payoff and provision of a passport, Ray made his way to Birmingham, where Raoul eventually caught up with him, bought him the white Mustang, and sent him down to Mexico to do some gun running south of the border. After a significant period of time in Mexico and thereafter in Los Angeles, Ray used a New Orleans contact number and arranged to meet again with Raoul in that city. At this rendezvous, Raoul continued to string Ray along, urging him to come out to Atlanta for some more gun-running, still dangling the promise of a big payoff and the paperwork that would finally ease Ray’s passage out of the country. Chasing after those promises, Ray returned to LA and made preparations to move to Atlanta. Once he’d settled in Georgia, he met with Raoul, who gave him $700 to buy a hunting rifle with a scope and some ammunition. The reason Raoul gave him was that the rifle would serve as an example to their Mexican connection of the kinds of guns they could provide. Raoul then directed Ray to take the rifle to Memphis, thus setting the stage for the final scene of the plot.

This was the story of James Earl Ray’s grooming by Raoul as Ray told it. And on the surface, to a lot of people, it makes sense, for how could James Earl Ray, a hapless small-time burglar, manage to get away with a high-profile murder and then obtain the money and the false identification necessary to make his escape to Europe like some smooth secret agent? But there are significant issues with this tale, even beyond the simple foundational flaw that he was encouraged to come up with a sensational story in order not only to defend himself but also to sell books and thereby make a tidy profit. One issue is that for most of the rest of his life, Ray failed to identify this Raoul character, and his descriptions seemed to constantly change, shifting from a Latin to a French Canadian, with hair that changed color from blond to red, to dark, auburn, and sandy and skin that was at times pale and at others dark and ruddy (Posner 162). Once he fanned the flames of conspiracy theory by identifying Raoul with one of the Three Tramps photographed at JFK’s assassination, but even then he only admitted some similarity. Then there are the simple logic problems. Why would any smuggler worth his salt even trust Ray with stashes of narcotics and guns on the promise of a later payment for delivery, when Ray might easily have just taken the contraband for himself? Moreover, why would their Mexican buyers have even needed them to procure guns when U.S. gun stores at the time were selling firearms over the counter without requiring any identification? And if all these smuggling operations were simply a ruse meant to draw Ray into their machinations, why on earth would they engage him, a wanted escapee, in risky criminal activity that could have easily landed him back in prison, abruptly foiling all the time they had spent grooming him as a patsy?

A young James Earl Ray, via the LA Times

It is also not entirely inconceivable that James Earl Ray might have financed his own travels. He was after all, a burglar known for keeping himself in money by pulling the occasional heist. Immediately after his escape from prison, he took a straight job while lying low, washing dishes in a restaurant. Yet somehow he had enough money to live on when he made his way up to Montreal some weeks later. There is some indication that he met up with his brothers, Jerry and John, during this period, so perhaps they loaned him some money, but interestingly, at just that time, a nearby bank was robbed by two masked men with shotguns. Taking 27 grand, even a share of this haul would have easily bankrolled Ray’s subsequent travels, and records show that the next day, Ray bought the car he would drive to Canada for some $200. Moreover, the FBI suspected James’s brother John of the robbery, as he may have been involved in five similar holdups during the last two years, for one of which he was actually convicted. And the indications of James Earl Ray’s continuous thievery during the time between his escape from prison and his arrest for murder does not stop there. Ray told Huie that the night before paying a lease on an apartment in Montreal, he visited a brothel and after availing himself of its services, he robbed its pimp. By the time he got to London, he lacked the money to move on. He told Huie that he should have committed a robbery in Canada before getting on the plane. To renew his capital, he ended up robbing a bank there in London, leaving a thumbprint behind to prove it (Posner 249). He is often portrayed as being a bumbling and incompetent thief based on an early robbery of a taxi driver that had earned him a year in prison, but based on his successful escape from prison, the reports of various successful robberies he pulled, and indications of even greater heists he may have been involved with, the idea that he financed his own travels seems a lot more likely than that he relied on the piecemeal payments of the tightfisted Raoul.

Likewise, the notion that he would have allowed himself to be strung along for so long on the unfulfilled promise of obtaining a passport also strains credulity. For one thing, Ray had an idea of how to get a passport in Canada back when he was still in prison. He had read a newspaper article about an Italian criminal that had exploited the simple process of getting Canadian papers and had spoken with a fellow inmate about how one could use newspaper archives and city records to get a birth certificate and establish identity. Indeed, that appears to be the reason why he had gone to Canada in the first place. He had one misconception that held him back, though. He was under the impression that in order to get his passport he needed a voucher, a Canadian citizen willing to attest to his identity. So in Montreal, he bought himself a suit and got himself a haircut and went about trying to meet a lady friend that he could eventually convince to vouch for him. And he did meet someone, a polished woman in her thirties by the name of Claire Keating, with whom he had a fleeting romance. One of the bigger logical flaws of his story about Raoul was that he continued pursuing women, and Ms. Keating specifically, in his effort to obtain a passport even when Raoul had supposedly already offered to obtain the papers for him. One might suggest that he continued to pursue her for genuine romantic reasons, and considering the fact that she was by all accounts quite lovely and throughout his life his only other liaisons appear to have been with prostitutes, this would be quite plausible, were it not for the fact that he abandoned his pursuit of her as soon as he learned she worked for the Canadian Department of Transport. He was using her, and when he felt she represented a threat, he dropped her. Regardless, even according to Ray’s own legend of Raoul, the mystery figure never actually provided him with those long-promised papers. After making his escape from the scene of the crime and getting himself back up to Canada, he did that himself, using his old tricks to establish false identity and this time scheming to create a second identity that could vouch for him until he discovered he had no need for a voucher. In the end, we know exactly how he got himself overseas, and we have a clear idea of how he kept himself in money.

James Earl Ray’s fake Canadian Passport, via ABC News

As for the day in question, Ray contends that not only was he unaware of the plot against King, but he was wholly ignorant that King was even present in Memphis when he followed Raoul’s directions and drove there. We know that he checked in to the New Rebel Motel, alone, under his known alias Eric S. Galt, on the evening before the murder, and we know he was up late based on the clerk’s report of seeing his light on at 4am. What Ray tells us is that he met Raoul at the New Rebel, received directions to check into the rooming house across from the Lorraine Motel the next day and meet Raoul at the nearby restaurant Jim’s Grill at three in the afternoon. Ray claims he handed the hunting rifle he’d recently purchased in Birmingham over to Raoul in the New Rebel and never saw it again, the implication being that Raoul had asked him to buy it not for some weapons deal but merely to connect him to the murder weapon and to get his fingerprints on it. Of course, this story already doesn’t make sense in a few ways. For example, if the gun deal were real, they could have done it right there at the New Rebel, with no reason to switch hotels, and if that were just a ruse to get Ray into the rooming house and connect him with the sniper’s nest, why wouldn’t Raoul have just had him take the rifle there as well, on the understanding that they’d be completing their gun deal in the room? But regardless of why or at whose direction, Ray did indeed head to the rooming house the next day and check in under the alias John Willard, and then the various stories he has told over the years in crafting his alibi become muddled. He met with Raoul either at Jim’s Grill, in the parked Mustang, or in room 5B in the rooming house (Posner 230). We know that after checking into the room, Ray drove to buy a pair of binoculars, and he says he did that on Raoul’s instructions. After returning to the room and giving Raoul the binoculars, Ray made himself scarce at Raoul’s insistence. This is the critical hour before the assassination, and Ray asserts that he wasn’t even in the rooming house, claiming instead that he was in Jim’s Grill, or perhaps another restaurant or an ice cream parlor, but also at a movie theater, and maybe in a drugstore, plus sitting in his car for a while (Posner 231). Quite the vaguely busy hour. It was when he was sitting in his car that he heard the shot, and then Raoul, he claimed, burst out of the rooming house and got into the Mustang’s backseat, pulling a sheet over himself to hide. Ray drove him several block away, let him out, and that was the last he ever saw Raoul. The only problem with this alibi was that there were witnesses at a record store who saw a single man climb into an empty white Mustang after the shooting and drive off alone. True to form, Ray laughed it off, said that first story was just a joke, and emended his alibi (Posner 231). A gas station attendant named Willie Green had been quoted in a newspaper as reporting that during the assassination, a suspiciously nervous man was at his filling station pacing around the public phone. He said he believed Ray was the man he had seen and had identified him from a photo, and moreover, he believed there had been a white Mustang in the lot. In truth, the attendant’s claims to have identified the nervous man from a photo of Ray must have been false, as police did not have a photo of Ray when the attendant was questioned. And Gerald Posner, in his fantastic book Killing the Dream, which has been instrumental in creating this series, uncovered in the notes of the journalist who first quoted Green the detail that the gas station attendant had actually seen this nervous fellow sometime after the assassination, and that he had hung around the station until long after Ray would’ve been out of state.  Nevertheless, Ray’s new alibi became that he had been at a gas station—one he couldn’t quite pinpoint in his memory—getting a spare tire repaired. As for why he suddenly fled the city and the country, he explained that he spooked when he ran into a police roadblock—already a doubtful scenario since there was a recognized failure of the police to establish roadblocks—and afterward, hearing on the radio news of the assassination and the fact that police were looking for a white Mustang, he put the pieces together and headed to Canada.

Ray’s story about Raoul has been found by many, including the House Select Committee on Assassinations that convened in 1978 to further examine conspiracy claims in both the King and the JFK slayings, to be wholly unreliable. Some of the strongest evidence against his claim that he had bought the rifle at Raoul’s direction simply to show a prospective Mexican buyer the kind of weapon they might provide in an arms deal comes from the testimony of the several gun store clerks who dealt with Ray in and around Birmingham during the weeks leading up to the assassination. They said he asked numerous questions about different rifles’ accuracy and about the quality of different scopes. They remembered him inquiring how far a bullet might be expected to drop over certain distances. When he finally did purchase a rifle, he returned it the next day, explaining he needed a more powerful gun as he intended “to hunt bigger game” (Posner 13).  These appear to be the statements of a man with specific needs who plans to make a particular use of the firearm, not of a man picking up a rifle on behalf of someone else just to show to a third party. In the end, the House Select Committee on Assassinations determined that all evidence suggested James Earl Ray had pulled the trigger and killed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but they were a bit less definite on the question of whether he acted alone, suggesting that he may have had some help. So, if Raoul was simply a fabrication, meant to stir up conspiracy claims and help Ray sell his story, it seems the issue becomes who else might have aided or been aware of Ray’s plans to assassinate King, and in the reports of gun store clerks we have some further clues to this mystery. In explaining why he was exchanging the rifle he had bought for another, he said he had made the decision after speaking with his brother about it.

James Earl Ray and his lawyer testifying before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, via The Telegraph

Be on the lookout for the next installment in this continuing series, as we examine this and the further mystery of why James Earl Ray murdered Dr. King, in Part Three: Ray’s Reasons.

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Further Reading

Posner, Gerald. Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Random House, 1998

The Killing of Dr. King, Part One: A Dream Defied

It occurred fewer than 5 years after the murder of the 35th president of the United States at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, during the era of disillusionment and mistrust that his assassination provoked. And it was followed within 2 months by the murder of Robert F. Kennedy, presidential hopeful and bearer of the standard of hope that many believed had been torn asunder by his brother’s assassination. Thus the optimism of the 1960s was killed by a handful of bullets, and trust in our government was forever diminished by the persistent questions of who was really behind these slayings. And of course you’ve heard plenty of conspiracy theories about the JFK assassinations, from the plethora of books and films that explore it. You have likely heard quite a lot about the RFK assassination as well; in fact, the creators of podcast giant Crimetown recently produced a fantastic mini-series on it called the RFK Tapes. But there appear to be fewer books and less media attention generally on the assassination that occurred between the two Kennedy assassinations. The victim of this assassination was a champion of the marginalized, so this may reflect a further historical disregard for him and those he represents.  I am writing, of course, of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., firebrand and spearhead of the American Civil Rights Movement. His assassination differed from that of the two Kennedys in several regards. Aside from simple differences of race, King, while a political figure, was not a politician. He was not a candidate for the presidency; he was the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a preacher and activist, a symbol of non-violence and proponent not only of equality and social justice but of peace and harmony. After his murder, an international manhunt commenced, concluding in the arrest at Heathrow Airport in London of a white Missourian named James Earl Ray. This accused assassin accepted responsibility for King’s death in a guilty plea, but over the course of the next 30 years, he fought for a new trial and encouraged the conspiracy theories that swirled around the crime. By the time of his death, incredibly, he had convinced even those closest to Dr. Martin Luther King of his innocence, and today, many still believe he was a patsy in a nefarious and well-planned plot. But we know, readers, that an idea being popular or even prevalent doesn’t make it true.

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Dr. King had not planned to visit Memphis, Tennessee, in March of 1968.  At the time, he was busy planning a march on Washington, the Poor People’s Campaign, meant to unite poverty-stricken populations across racial lines. But recent events in Memphis drew his attention. The predominately African-American sanitation workers had gone on strike over poor pay and lack of benefits, driven to action after two workers were accidentally crushed to death in a garbage truck and the city refused to provide any compensation to their bereaved families. The impasse reached during their strike precipitated the city’s first civil rights march, which ended in violence between marchers and police after a police car rolled over a marcher’s foot. When Dr. King came to speak at the strike headquarters on March 18th, he was met by 15,000 people, and despite all his plans and busy schedule, he agreed to return later that month to lead them in another march. However, upon his return, before he and other members of the SCLC could hold their planned workshops on non-violent resistance with the Memphis protesters, a new element of violent protesters had invaded the city, rioting, looting and starting fires. 4,000 National Guardsmen were sent in, and three hundred rioters were arrested. King was distraught, but not defeated. Holding a press conference, he announced that he would return within a few days to lead a non-violent march.

“I am a Man (Sanitation Workers Strike, Memphis, 1968)”, by Ernest Withers, image courtesy St. Lawrence University Art Gallery, licensed via Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

After a brief time at home in Atlanta, the time had come to fly back to Memphis. It was April 3rd, and when his friend Xernona Clayton came to pick him up and drive him to the airport, his children began to behave strangely, begging him not to go, almost as if they had some premonition about what would befall him on his trip. Then in another ominous sign, once he had boarded his plane, it remained on the tarmac and King waited as they searched the plane from nose to tail, for a bomb threat had been made. Eventually, the plane took off, and King joked that it looked like he wouldn’t be killed after all, prompting his friends to assure him that no one was going to kill him. Upon arrival in Memphis, though, another dark portent arrived in the form of their car and driver, which had been provided by a funeral home. That night, King had turned in, but a phone call roused him. It turned out that some 2,000 people had gathered at the strike headquarters hoping to see the newly arrived Dr. King speak. Reluctantly, King dressed and made his way there. His friend, SCLC Program Director Reverend Ralph Abernathy, delivered a grand, impromptu introduction for him that has since been likened to a eulogy, and then Martin Luther King, Jr., took the pulpit.  Based on the content of the now famous speech he delivered that night, it is clear that death was on his mind. He had faced it throughout his career, in countless states where he had gone to confront systemic racism and violence as well as to curb the rioting of his own brothers and sisters. In his speech, he spoke of one incident in particular, in which a deranged woman had stabbed him at a book signing. He quoted the letter of a little white girl who had written him thankful he had not sneezed, remarking that if he had sneezed he would have died. And he listed all of the accomplishments in the Civil Rights Movement that he would not have been around for if he had sneezed. Then, uncharacteristically, he remarked upon risks to his life that he may still face, expressing a sense of peace tinged by defiance. Watching the speech is a remarkable experience, especially knowing its context. King steps suddenly away from the microphone to sit back down, seemingly overcome with emotion, collapsing into Reverend Abernathy’s arms looking almost shocked. He seems to have truly confronted his death, facing his fear and overcoming it. The next day, he is described as being in a far more hopeful and joyous mood than he had been in some time. Before the end of that day, Dr. King would be dead, his life taken before he even reached his fortieth year.

This man, who inspired and outraged the world, was born on January 15, 1929, to a family of preachers, and his name was actually Michael. For generations, members of his family had served as the pastors of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, first his maternal grandfather, then his own father. When he was six years old, his father decided to change both their names; they would be known from then on as Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr., after the Great Reformer. From a young age, Martin Jr. showed himself to be devoted to non-violence, turning the other cheek when bullies brutalized him at school or when he encountered the scorn of bigots. Not to say that he was a preternaturally mature or saintly character as a child. He was also a bit of a scamp, an innocent prankster, tying his mother’s furs to a stick and thrusting them through bushes to scare passersby. He loved board games and ice cream and was less than enthusiastic about washing dishes and reciting bible verses, skirting the latter chore by choosing John 11:35, the shortest verse in the bible, in which Jesus weeps. He was indeed precocious, however, when it came to his intellect and education. He breezed through high school over the course of only two years and entered college at 15. Early in his college years, it is apparent that Martin Luther King, Jr., was already wrestling with what he would later call “the race problem.” This is evident in a letter to the editor of the Atlanta Constitution that he wrote at just 17 years old. In it, he censured people who “raise the scarecrow of social mingling and intermarriage” when the question of racial equality is discussed, saying, “We want and are entitled to the basic rights and opportunities of American citizens: The right to earn a living at work for which we are fitted by training and ability; equal opportunities in education, health, recreation, and similar public services; the right to vote; equality before the law; some of the same courtesy and good manners that we ourselves bring to all human relations.” During those years, he also became interested in Henry David Thoreau’s treatise on Civil Disobedience and “became convinced then that non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.” In grappling with the problems his race faced, he began to consider how he might best contribute to a solution, and that was when he considered the church. He explains his reasoning most clearly himself: “I had been brought up in the church and knew about religion, but I wondered whether it could serve as a vehicle to modern thinking. I wondered whether religion, with its emotionalism in Negro churches, could be intellectually respectable as well as emotionally satisfying.” So he applied himself to following in his father’s footsteps. Graduating with a sociology degree at 19, he immediately began preaching at Ebenezer Baptist with his father and continued his education, earning his theology degree at 22 and entering graduate studies in theology at Boston University, where he earned his doctorate at just 26 years old. His father did not appreciate his more cerebral style of preaching, nor did some of his associates understand some of his allusions to Thoreau and Nietzsche, https://theundefeated.com/features/hbo-king-in-the-wilderness-reveals-the-loneliness-of-martin-luther-king-last-years/ but all doubts about the efficacy of his approach evaporated when in the mid-fifties he helped organize and lead numerous historical civil rights protests. 

Ropsa Parks with Martin Luther King, Jr., via Wikimedia Commons

The same year he earned his PhD, King became involved with Rosa Parks and the Women’s Political Council of Montgomery in organizing the bus boycotts and establishing the Montgomery Improvement Association to protest segregation. Within a month, he was receiving threats and facing angry crowds. His home was bombed. But before the year was out, bus segregation was defeated in the courts, and King himself rode on the unsegregated transportation system. His success in Alabama led to his appointment as chair of the Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration, as African American ministers across the South sought out his guidance in making strides in their own states, and it is this organization that King would transform into the SCLC. He was thrust into sudden fame, appearing on the cover of Time in 1957, and during the next few years meeting Vice-President Nixon, President Eisenhower, and presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy, travelling abroad to meet foreign dignitaries and the followers of Mohandas Ghandi, and giving national addresses—his first, a plea for enfranchisement, given before the Lincoln Memorial.  Meanwhile, his civil rights work continued. In Atlanta, he participated in a department store sit-in and was arrested. He was arrested twice more in ’61 and ’62 during segregation protests in Georgia. Then in 1963, he faced fire hoses and attack dogs in Birmingham and led 200,000 marchers on Washington, where he delivered his most famous speech. As if in response to the historic demonstration, 2 weeks later, a bomb killed four children at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, and King attended the funeral service to eulogize them. Two months later, JFK, with whom King had been working to advance the cause of civil rights, was gunned down in Dallas. Following the assassination, Dr. King began working with President Lyndon B. Johnson, a collaboration that would eventually bear fruit in the form of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, and in recognition of all his tireless and fearless activism, King received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Despite all this progress, King still saw a long and hard road ahead. During an attempted march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, he and his marchers were met with violence, a day remembered as Bloody Sunday. And later that year, King confronted racism that was also tied up with economic issues when the riots erupted in Watts, California. He traveled there to preach non-violence, but he was met with scorn by some who saw lawlessness as their only recourse and heckled him during his pleas for peaceful resistance. Therefore it wasn’t only white racists by whom he was met with resistance in that turbulent period, as he entered a new phase in the SCLC’s struggle for change. Learning from what he saw in California, he expanded the scope of their activism beyond segregation, tackling the problem of slums and inequality in housing practices and education in Chicago in 1966. In the process, he met resistance from black community leaders as well, like Reverend Henry Mitchell. Many African American ministers in Chicago liked the system the way it was, being that they wielded power in the community through the patronage of the mayor, Richard Daley, who ran the city through machine politics. This was by no means the first time Dr. King had encountered criticism from members of his own race. At the beginning of his career, racial separatist Malcolm X had strongly criticized Dr. King’s non-violent approach, and after Watts, it seemed that other elements of the civil rights movement were also beginning to turn away from his message of peaceful protest. In Mississippi, young activist Stokely Carmichael of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee began to express disillusionment with non-violence despite his organization’s name. He began to call for a show of strength from the black community, a push for so-called “Black Power” in opposition to the racist creed of “White Power.” King stood with Carmichael and marched beside him, but he never endorsed his message, instead preaching his consistent message of non-violence and racial alliance, not conflict.

King giving his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, via Wikimedia Commons

Finally, a year before his death, answering the entreaties of many despite the reservations of many others, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., began to speak out against the war in Vietnam. To King, it would be hypocrisy to protest violence at home when our country acted as a purveyor of violence abroad. In 1967, he identified three evils in society. The first was racism, which he had fought his entire career. The second was poverty, which he had come to realize was hopelessly entangled with the race issue. The third he acknowledged was militarism. He encountered stiff backlash from quarters both expected and unexpected after opposing the Vietnam War, as he began organizing the Poor People’s Campaign. Thus when called to Memphis in March of ’67, he struggled to sustain his hope and confidence, but those around him on his final day saw a change in his disposition after delivering his Mountaintop speech, as though he were renewed with purpose and had exorcised the fears and doubts that plagued him. In fact, he was downright playful, engaging in a pillow fight with his friends in their room at the Lorraine Motel and looking forward to a dinner of real soul food at a friend’s house. Unbeknownst to them, across the street from the Lorraine, past some bushes, a wall and an embankment, at a cut-rate rooming house full of drunk and infirm tenants, a thin white man calling himself John Willard had checked in. During the next hour or so, tenants remember hearing someone stalking back and forth between a room and the shared bathroom at the end of the hall, which had a clear line of sight from its window to the Lorraine, and tenants who tried to use the bathroom during this hour found it always occupied. At approximately 6:01 p.m., the tenants heard what sounded like the pop of a firecracker, and on the balcony of the Lorraine, little more than 200 feet from the rooming house’s bathroom window, Martin Luther King, Jr., collapsed. A .30-06 bullet had shattered his jaw, entered his neck, and opened his jugular vein. Despite attempts by his friends to stop the bleeding and rush him to medical care, the single shot fired that day killed Dr. King.

Police were on the scene immediately, as they happened to be ensconced at a nearby fire station keeping King and his entourage under surveillance. They went to the Lorraine first, where witnesses indicated that they believed the shot had come from the direction of the boardinghouse. Converging on the building, they found other witnesses who had seen a man leaving the building with a bundle, which he had abandoned at a storefront before fleeing in a white Mustang. In the bundle, they found a rifle, bullets, clothing, a radio, binoculars, and a toiletry bag, and in the rooming house bathroom, they found the window screen pushed out, the tub moved under the window, and a scuff mark on the sill. In Mr. John Willard’s room, they found a chair by an open window and binocular straps on the floor. Not ten minutes had passed since the shooting before police had a description of both the suspect and his vehicle, but from the rooming house, it was quite possible to have driven out of state within that time frame. Authorities changed all traffic lights to red in order to slow the suspect’s escape, but in an egregious failing, they did not establish road blocks or extend their all-points bulletin to neighboring states. Meanwhile, a CB radio operator led police on a wild goose chase, claiming to be in a high speed pursuit of the white Mustang. This hoax, in addition to the fact that a large portion of the police force did not engage in the hunt because of the growing threats of rioting, contributed to the assassin’s escape.

King’s friends pointing to the rooming house as King lies in a pool of blood at their feet, image courtesy Mr. Littlehand, licensed via Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0)

As the killer, it was assumed, had crossed state lines, the FBI took over the manhunt, while riots broke out across the country. Tracing the rifle as well as a laundry mark on the discarded clothing, they soon had a number of aliases other than John Willard, including the name John S. Galt, all for a man matching the suspect’s description. Then a white Mustang was reported abandoned in Atlanta by a man matching the same description. It was registered to one Eric Starvo Galt, connecting the Mustang to the abandoned bundle containing the rifle, garage service and tourist visa stickers showed the Mustang had been in Mexico and Los Angeles during the last year. Fiber evidence further indicated that the Eric Galt who drove the car had been in the rooming house across from the Lorraine, and as they traced his movements in California previous to the assassination, they came up with a photo of him from a bartending school he had attended in LA. The seller of the rifle thereafter picked that photo out of a lineup to identify him as the purchaser of the firearm. Finally, a lead on Galt’s whereabouts came their way when a money order purchased in California was used by an Eric Galt for a correspondence course in locksmithing that had been completed in Montreal, Canada. When they investigated Galt’s rooming house lodgings in Montreal, they found a map of Atlanta on which Ebenezer Baptist Church, SCLC headquarters, and the King family residence had been circled. The manager of the rooming house also identified Galt’s photo from among others. Fingerprints from the bundle items and from the map found in the room in Montreal eventually came up as belonging to one James Earl Ray, a career thief and escaped prisoner from Missouri State Penitentiary. Now with a real name and more photos, the FBI put Ray on the Most Wanted list, went to the press and disseminated wanted posters all over North America. Eventually, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, through a painstaking search of passport applications, connected Ray to another alias, Ramon Sneyd, and further traced his activities under that alias to a travel agency that had booked him on a flight to London. So the manhunt went international, while back at home, on June 5th, the country suffered yet another horrifying tragedy in the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Two days later, James Earl Ray turned up at Heathrow airport, trying to use his false Canadian passport to travel to Brussels. He was detained for having a handgun without a permit. More than 2 months after Dr. King’s assassination, the chief suspect in his murder was caught and awaiting extradition.

From the beginning, conspiracy theories abounded. Dubious informants claimed that Ray had escaped to South America with the CIA or to Cuba aboard a yacht, or that like Knight Rider, he had driven his Mustang into a moving truck and was being harbored by the Ku Klux Klan. JFK conspiracy theorists asserted that Ray greatly resembled one of the Three Tramps, the unidentified vagrants photographed at Dealey Plaza, while white supremacist groups claimed that the real people behind the killing were the SCLC themselves, unhappy with King’s leadership, or perhaps militant black youth disillusioned with King’s insistence on non-violence. To others, the likely culprits were the mafia or the FBI or perhaps both! Among the most vocal supporters of conspiracy claims was Ralph Abernathy himself, who spoke for others in the SCLC and for King’s family in demanding further investigation. Conspiracy theories multiplied and grew ever more specific after Ray began to talk to a writer, William Bradford Huie. Long before his trial was set to start, Huie began publishing a series of articles in Look magazine detailing James Earl Ray’s claims that a man named Raoul had manipulated him, maneuvered him to Memphis, and arranged for him to take the fall for a murder he didn’t commit. On Ray’s 40th birthday, during a special hearing ahead of his trial, he pleaded guilty on his lawyer’s advice, but he insisted that he was only “legally” guilty, and that he did not accept sole responsibility for the crime, actually dropping the word “conspiracy” to the judge. Within hours, Dr. King’s widow, Coretta, released a statement confirming that she did not believe Ray had acted alone and demanding that authorities continue their investigation until all those responsible had been brought to justice. Within days, Ray recanted his guilty plea, for the rest of his life, he fought to win a new trial and convince the world of his innocence. Even today, many are inclined to believe him, subscribing to some conspiracy scenario or another. But how logical and credible are these theories? Keep an eye out for the next part in this series as we examine the legend of Raoul.

FBI Wanted poster for James Earl Ray, via Wikimedia Commons

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Further Reading

Posner, Gerald. Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Random House, 1998.