(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Museum Pieces: The Assassination of Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-01
Civil rights icon Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr was shot and killed on April 4, 1968, on a motel balcony in Memphis.
"Museum Pieces" is a diary series that explores the history behind some of the most interesting museum exhibits and historical places.
The Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where King was killed
One of the earliest successes of the civil rights movement was a boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1955, after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person, a boycott of the city bus system was organized by local preacher Martin Luther King Jr. After a year, a Federal Court ordered Montgomery to desegregate its mass transit system.
During a desegregation campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, police commissioner “Bull” Connor unleashed fire hoses and attack dogs on the marchers. King was arrested and, in his cell, wrote “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”, spelling out the goals of the civil rights movement.
That summer, King organized the March on Washington, and King’s address to the 250,000 marchers, “I Have a Dream”, became one of the most famous speeches in American history. For most Americans, King became the public face of the African-American civil rights movement.
By 1968, King had begun to speak out against America's military involvement in the Vietnam War, and had begun planning for a “Poor People's March” in Washington DC to address issues of poverty. When the sanitation workers in Memphis walked out on strike to protest against low pay and substandard work conditions (two workers had been killed while sheltering from the rain inside one of the garbage trucks), King agreed to lead a march in their support.
When a group of people in the march turned violent and began breaking windows, King vowed to return and hold another march, which would adhere to strict nonviolence. On his return flight to Memphis on April 3, 1968, King's flight was delayed by a bomb threat.
That evening, he delivered his famous “I've Been to the Mountaintop” speech at the Mason Temple, in which he seemed to contemplate his own assassination, saying, “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”
The next evening, April 4, King was staying in the Lorraine Motel, one of the locations in the segregated city which catered to African-Americans. He was scheduled to have dinner with local minister Billy Kyles. As he was preparing to leave, he walked out onto the motel balcony and leaned over the railing to talk with Ben Branch, a musician who was to play that night. King asked him to play the hymn “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”. “Play it real pretty,” he said.
At that moment, 6:01pm, a single rifle shot rang out. King was hit by a bullet that entered his right cheek and passed into his neck, cutting the blood vessels in his throat, breaking his spine, and lodging near his left shoulder blade. He fell to the ground and was immediately surrounded by aides and was rushed to the St Joseph Hospital two miles away, where he was pronounced dead shortly after 7pm.
Immediately after the shot, a man described as “a young white male, well dressed” was seen running out of Bessie Brewer's rooming house, directly across the street from the Lorraine Motel, drop a bundle wrapped in a green blanket in the door of a shop next door, and leave in a white Ford Mustang. When the Memphis Police arrived and examined the bundle, they found a newspaper with an article about King's stay at the Lorraine, binoculars, a portable radio, some clothing, and a 30.06 Remington Model 760 Gamemaster rifle. The police determined that a man named “John Willard” had rented a room in the building and he drove a white Mustang. The next day, the FBI traced the rifle to a shop in Birmingham and identified the purchaser as “Harvey Lowmeyer”.They also traced the laundry tags on the clothing to a laundromat in California, under the name “Eric Galt”. They now believed that the assassination was a possible conspiracy of three men named Willard, Lowmeyer and Galt.
Then the police found a white Mustang that had been abandoned in a parking lot in Atlanta and had been registered to “Eric Galt”. That led them to an apartment in Atlanta, where they found a map which marked King's home. They also found fingerprints which matched those found elsewhere under the other names (including on the rifle dropped at the scene), and now concluded that they were all the same suspect who was using a number of aliases. After two days of additional work, they finally matched all of the fingerprints to the prison records of James Earl Ray.
Ray was a petty criminal from Illinois who had been kicked out of the Army and had already served several jail terms. Convicted of armed robbery in 1959 and sentenced to 20 years, he had escaped from the Missouri State penitentiary in 1967 by hiding in a bread truck.
On April 19, two weeks after King's assassination, the FBI began issuing “Wanted” posters for James Earl Ray. By this time, Ray had made his way to Canada under yet another assumed name and obtained a passport for London. From there he had planned to travel to Rhodesia, a country that was run by white supremacists and which had no extradition treaty with the United States. But when Ray arrived in London he ran out of money, attempted several unsuccessful robberies, and was arrested by British authorities on June 8, 1968, as he tried to fly from London to Brussels.
At his trial in March 1969, Ray avoided the death penalty by pleading guilty to the assassination in exchange for a 99-year sentence. Then, just days later, he recanted his guilty plea, fired his attorney, claimed his innocence, and presented a story in which he had been unwittingly set up for the crime by a Cuban criminal that he knew only as “Raoul”, and that he had purchased the Remington rifle as part of Raoul's gun-running schemes. Ray would spend the next thirty years protesting his innocence, seeking a new trial, and producing various conspiracy theories. He made the news again by briefly escaping from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Tennessee in 1977 before being recaptured. Ray died in prison in April 1998.
From the day of the assassination, however, various conspiracy theories have surrounded King's death, and they began within minutes of the shots. While most witnesses at the scene described the shot as coming from Bessie Brewer's rooming house, a few told the police they thought the shot had come from a clump of bushes behind the building at ground level. No evidence for any “second gunman” was ever found.
Most of the conspiracy theories have centered around the US Government, and the FBI in particular. King was one of the primary targets of the FBI's COINTELPRO operation, and J Edgar Hoover seemed to hate him with a particularly intense passion, asserting that King was a Communist and was acting at the direction of Moscow. Federal agents (and local police) were monitoring King constantly and watching his every move (which is why there were law enforcement personnel at the assassination scene within minutes of the shooting), and the FBI was illegally wiretapping nearly every room that King stayed in. It was through this spying that the FBI learned about a number of sexual dalliances that King had, and sent him an anonymous letter threatening to expose the story and suggesting King kill himself to avoid embarrassment.
Accusations were also made against the Memphis Police, who had been shadowing King with officers ever since he arrived in the city. According to one conspiracy theory, though, the police officers who were assigned to monitor King had been mysteriously ordered to withdraw just before the shot was fired, allegedly in order to allow the assassin to escape.
In 1976, the US House of Representatives appointed a Select Committee on Assassinations to re-investigate the deaths of President John Kennedy and Martin Luther King. After three years of hearings and testimony (including from James Earl Ray himself, who repeated another version of his “Raoul” story), the Committee concluded that although “The Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation performed with varying degrees of competency and legality in the fulfillment of their duties . . . . No federal, state or local government agency was involved in the assassination of Dr King.”
The Committee summarized its findings: “Dr. King was killed by one rifle shot fired from in front of him. The shot that killed Dr. King was fired from the bathroom window at the rear of a rooming house at 422 1/2 South Main Street, Memphis, Tenn. James Earl Ray purchased the rifle that was used to shoot Dr. King and transported it from Birmingham, Ala. to Memphis, Tenn., where he rented a room at 422 1/2 South Main Street, and moments after the assassination, he dropped it near 424 South Main Street. It is highly probable that James Earl Ray stalked Dr. King for a period immediately preceding the assassination. James Earl Ray fled the scene of the crime immediately after the assassination. James Earl Ray's alibi for the time of the assassination, his story of 'Raoul', and other allegedly exculpatory evidence are not worthy of belief.”
However, the Committee then went on to conclude: “The committee believes, on the basis of the circumstantial evidence available to it, that there is a likelihood that James Earl Ray assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King as a result of a conspiracy.”
The Committee found evidence of “bounties” being offered by segregationists and white supremacists to anyone who would kill King. The Committee's report concluded, “There was in existence, in 1966 or 1967, a St. Louis conspiracy actively soliciting the assassination of Dr. King.”
After concluding that Ray's “Raoul” story was actually based on help given to him by his brothers while he was on the run as an escaped prisoner, the Committee decided that either Ray or one of his brothers had probably heard about this “bounty” placed on Martin Luther King's head, and that Ray then shot King with the idea that he would be rewarded afterwards. “In sum,” the Committee's report says, “the committee believed that the weight of the evidence bearing on James and his brothers, taken in combination with the evidence of the St. Louis-based conspiracy, established the likelihood of a conspiracy in the death of Dr. King.”
The Committee's conclusion, however, was promptly rejected by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, who pointed out that there simply was no solid evidence linking Ray to any other conspirators.
Then in 1993 the King assassination case took another bizarre turn.
In 1993, the cable TV channel HBO aired a docudrama depicting a fictional trial of James Earl Ray, in which “evidence” was introduced which led the “jury” to conclude that Ray was innocent and that the assassination had been a government conspiracy.
After the movie aired, though, Memphis businessman Lloyd Jowers contacted the ABC News program Prime Time and told a strange story claiming that back in 1968 he had owned a coffee shop near the Lorraine Motel, and he had been paid $100,000 by a Memphis mobster to help assassinate King as part of a conspiracy involving the Memphis Police, the Mafia, and Ray's gun-runner named “Raoul”. According to Jowers, Ray had been framed for the crime, and the real shooter was a Memphis Police Lieutenant.
Jowers's story was promptly rejected by nearly everyone as nonsense, but one person who did believe it was Dexter Scott King—Martin's son. Along with several other family members, Dexter sued Jowers for his involvement in the assassination, and was represented by attorney William Pepper—who had “defended” James Earl Ray in the HBO docudrama.
After four weeks of sometimes bizarre testimony, the jury took only one hour to find that Jowers had been involved in the assassination, along with the Mafia and unnamed “governmental agencies”, and that Ray had been an innocent patsy. The King family had only asked for $100 in damages for “wrongful death”, which the jury now awarded. Dexter claimed it was a vindication: most others, including Robert Blakey (who had been chief counsel for the House Assassinations Committee), declared the trial a miscarriage of justice.
Today, the Lorraine Motel is the site of the National Civil Rights Museum which honors Dr King and the civil rights movement. King's room at the motel is presented exactly as it was on April 4, 1968. The Museum also includes Bessie Brewer's rooming house across the street, which preserves the tiny bathroom from which Ray fired the shot, and exhibits the Remington Gamemaster rifle found at the scene. The Museum is operated by a nonprofit group and is a Smithsonian Affiliate.
The assassination scene. King was standing here on the balcony. Ray was in the small square window across the street.
The bathroom window of the rooming house overlooked the Lorraine Motel
Ray’s view of the balcony
Ray’s rifle
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/1/2257313/-Museum-Pieces-The-Assassination-of-Rev-Dr-Martin-Luther-King-Jr?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
