Justice for King

Interesting article on MuckRock

2021-01-18T08:34:00.004-08:00

A new article on muckock.

They don't adequately explain where they get the documents and images they select from documents.

They try to FOIA the NSA for records they may have on James Earl Ray. Their response is bat-shit crazy.

My original Memphis Miasma article as it appeared in John Kelin's "Fair Play."

2020-06-13T17:01:00.001-07:00

Hello, I recently rediscovered my article on the internet archive's "wayback machine" search engine.

Here it is. This was written some years ago now. John Kelin's "Fair Play" website is no longer active.

Fair Play was a web journal back in the very early days of the internet. I did not know anything about websites and HTML. Back then it was more difficult and more expensive to be able to have a computer and run a website. So, I did the traveling and research and my friend John put the info. on the web. I'm glad to find this article again and to represent it so people can see it as it was originally presented.

Rev. Billy Kyles dies

2016-05-01T06:55:00.000-07:00

In early 1968, the Rev. Samuel Billy Kyles and another local minister beckoned the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis to demonstrate support for a strike by 1,300 black city sanitation workers. The strikers were demanding a minimum 10-cents-an-hour wage increase, workplace safeguards and dignity. Their placards proclaimed, “I Am a Man.”

Dr. King was reluctant at first; he was preoccupied with his Poor People’s Campaign. But he came to see that the Memphis strike converged with his national agenda for economic equality and social justice, so he accepted.

After Dr. King arrived, Mr. Kyles invited him to a home-cooked soul food dinner. Aware that Dr. King was perennially tardy, Mr. Kyles promised to pick him up promptly at 5 p.m. at the black-run Lorraine Motel, where Dr. King was staying, in Room 306. The date was April 4.

But when Dr. King later phoned the Kyles home to confirm the invitation, he learned that the dinner would actually be at 6. So when Mr. Kyles arrived around 5, Dr. King procrastinated.

He and a lieutenant, the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, remained in the room with Mr. Kyles and enjoyed almost an hour of what Mr. Kyles later described as “preacher talk.”

Before they left, Mr. Kyles picked out a necktie for Dr. King to wear to dinner.

When they finally emerged from the room, on a second-floor balcony, Dr. King was gunned down by a sniper from across the street.

Mr. Kyles died on Tuesday, at 81, in a Memphis hospital. He was the last surviving witness to that motel-room conversation (Mr. Abernathy died in 1990) and, from the balcony, to Dr. King’s assassination.

Continue reading the main story

close story-body close supplemental close story-body-supplemental

“A lot of people claimed to have been on the balcony when Dr. King was shot down,” Mr. Kyles said.

Why had he been there? He often asked himself that question, he said.

“Over the years, God revealed to me why I was there,” he said. “Crucifixions have to have witnesses.”

Mr. Kyles vividly recalled that evening in the documentary film “The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306,” which was nominated for an Oscar in 2009, and in an interview for a publication put out by the Funders’ Network, a group of grant makers.

He remembered emerging from the room with Dr. King at about 5:45. Hoping to keep the 6 p.m. dinner appointment, Mr. Kyles was trying to hurry him to a white Cadillac, borrowed from a local funeral home, that was waiting for them in the courtyard below.

“You’re not dressed for dinner,” Dr. King yelled down to another aide, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson. From the courtyard Mr. Jackson introduced Dr. King to Ben Branch, a local bandleader. (Andrew Young and Hosea Williams were also part of the entourage.)

Dr. King was talking to Mr. Branch over the balcony railing when a single rifle shot — “kuh-PIE-yah!” was how Mr. Kyles described the sound — reverberated from across the street.

“I thought I was having a nightmare, but the nightmare was that I was awake,” Mr. Kyle said. “And then we looked, and there was blood. So much blood.”

Mr. Kyles dashed back into the room to summon an ambulance, but the motel’s telephone operator, alarmed by the shooting, had left her switchboard and run outside. The woman, who was the motel owner’s wife, had a heart attack in the courtyard and died a few days later.

Mr. Kyles covered Dr. King’s body with a bedspread, up to the knot of the necktie he had chosen. He instinctively removed a crushed Salem cigarette, mindful that Dr. King had been self-conscious about smoking and worried that young people might discover his vice.

Dr. King’s murder shocked the world, provoked riots in many of the nation’s cities and devastated Memphis emotionally. It also galvanized the sanitation workers and their supporters. On April 8, tens of thousands of demonstrators silently marched to honor Dr. King’s memory.

A week later, the city agreed to certify the union, safeguard sanitation workers and guarantee higher pay.

That May, caravans of protesters converged on Washington for Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign for economic justice.

“That’s where the witness comes in,” Mr. Kyles said. “Yes, you can kill the dreamer. Absolutely, you can kill the dreamer. But you cannot kill the dream.”

Mr. Kyles was born in Shelby, Miss., a Delta town, on Sept. 26, 1934, to the Rev. Joseph Henry Kyles and the former Ludie Cameron. He was named for the prophet Samuel, but after his mother saw him baptizing neighborhood pets and memorializing dead birds, she began calling him Billy, after the evangelist Billy Sunday.

The family moved to Chicago when he was 6, and he attended Northern Seminary. He started preaching when he was 17 and singing even before that. (Aretha Franklin once said that her version of the gospel song “Never Grow Old” was inspired by Mr. Kyles’s.)

When he decided to return to the South, his brothers scoffed.

“You’re in the promised land,” he recalled them saying.

“Here you are going back to Egypt, to Memphis.”

He settled in Memphis, a segregated city, in 1959 and became the founding pastor of Monumental Baptist Church. In perhaps a foreshadowing of Dr. King’s visit in 1968, he met with the civil rights leader Medgar Evers five years earlier at Evers’s Mississippi home shortly before Evers was murdered in his front yard.

Mr. Kyles became a central figure in Memphis’s struggle for civil rights. In 1961, his daughter Dwania was one of 13 black first graders to integrate Memphis public schools. “We did not want to make the mistake that Little Rock had made and send high schoolers,” he said, referring to the hostile reaction to a similar integration effort in Arkansas in 1957 that compelled President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send in federal troops .

He was later arrested for refusing to sit in the back of a segregated city bus. Faced with the threat of a bus boycott, the city desegregated its buses in 1964.

Mr. Kyles was instrumental in the largely peaceful integration of restaurants and other public places in Memphis and the elimination of a system of runoff elections, which impeded minority candidates. (Eliminating the runoff helped elect the city’s first black mayor, Willie W. Herenton, in 1991.) He also formed a chapter of Mr. Jackson’s civil rights organization Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) and was later a board member of the National Civil Rights Museum, established at the site of Dr. King’s assassination.

“He was a founding father of the New Memphis and the New South,” Mr. Jackson said at a tribute to Mr. Kyles this month at the church he led for 55 years until he retired in 2014.

In addition to his wife, the former Aurelia Kennedy, who confirmed his death, Mr. Kyles is survived by their daughter, Epernay; four children from a previous marriage, to the former Gwendolyn Hart — his daughters Dwania and Drusheena and sons Dwain and Devin — and five grandchildren.

Mr. Kyles recalled that Dr. King, during his final hours in Memphis, had left a deep impression.

The night before his assassination, at a local church, Dr. King delivered his ringing “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech, in which he expressed premonitions of his death.

“I’ve seen the Promised Land,” he said. “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.”

Dr. King had predicted that he would not live past 40. When he died the next evening, he was 39.

“I look at Martin’s picture, and he’s the only one who didn’t get old,” Mr. Kyles said. “But what a price to pay for not getting old.”

So, the CIA has this LNERGO person who reported on Ray's aliases

2015-08-23T21:02:00.002-07:00

This is document #104-10072-10034. Some material, like this document got released with the JFK material. So, my question for now is who or what is an LNERGO official? LNERGO may have been a CIA cryptonym for the FBI. If you click on this image you should be able to see it better. I found a few interesting documents relating to the Dr. King assassination and will post more this week.

Democracy Now segment on the unredacted FBI to MLK "Suicide" letter and the Prof who found it

2014-11-18T09:27:00.001-08:00

CNN has more on the FBI's hatred of Dr. King

2014-11-14T20:49:00.000-08:00

CNN has another article on the FBI's tactics and hatred of Dr. King

The have some links to several very disturbing FBI documents.

I recommend Tavis Smiley's "Death of a King"

2014-11-13T14:32:00.001-08:00

Tavis Smiley examines the last year of Dr. King's life.

The Suicide letter

2014-11-13T14:27:00.001-08:00

The New York Times had a story on the "Suicide Letter" that the FBI sent to him.

What an Uncensored Letter to MLK reveals.

The note is just a single sheet gone yellow with age, typewritten and tightly spaced. It’s rife with typos and misspellings and sprinkled with attempts at emending them. Clearly, some effort went into perfecting the tone, that of a disappointed admirer, appalled by the discovery of “hidious [sic] abnormalities” in someone he once viewed as “a man of character.”

The word “evil” makes six appearances in the text, beginning with an accusation: “You are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that.” In the paragraphs that follow, the recipient’s alleged lovers get the worst of it. They are described as “filthy dirty evil companions” and “evil playmates,” all engaged in “dirt, filth, evil and moronic talk.” The effect is at once grotesque and hypnotic, an obsessive’s account of carnal rage and personal betrayal. “What incredible evilness,” the letter proclaims, listing off “sexual orgies,” “adulterous acts” and “immoral conduct.” Near the end, it circles back to its initial target, denouncing him as an “evil, abnormal beast.”

The unnamed author suggests intimate knowledge of his correspondent’s sex life, identifying one possible lover by name and claiming to have specific evidence about others. Another passage hints of an audiotape accompanying the letter, apparently a recording of “immoral conduct” in action. “Lend your sexually psychotic ear to the enclosure,” the letter demands. It concludes with a deadline of 34 days “before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

“There is only one thing left for you to do,” the author warns vaguely in the final paragraph. “You know what it is.”

When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. received this letter, nearly 50 years ago, he quietly informed friends that someone wanted him to kill himself — and he thought he knew who that someone was. Despite its half-baked prose, self-conscious amateurism and other attempts at misdirection, King was certain the letter had come from the F.B.I. Its infamous director, J. Edgar Hoover, made no secret of his desire to see King discredited. A little more than a decade later, the Senate’s Church Committee on intelligence overreach confirmed King’s suspicion.

Since then, the so-called “suicide letter” has occupied a unique place in the history of American intelligence — the most notorious and embarrassing example of Hoover’s F.B.I. run amok. For several decades, however, only significantly redacted copies of the letter were available for public scrutiny. This summer, while researching a biography of Hoover, I was surprised to find a full, uncensored version of the letter tucked away in a reprocessed set of his official and confidential files at the National Archives. The uncovered passages contain explicit allegations about King’s sex life, rendered in the racially charged language of the Jim Crow era. Looking past the viciousness of the accusations, the letter offers a potent warning for readers today about the danger of domestic surveillance in an age with less reserved mass media.

The F.B.I.'s entanglement with King began not as an inquiry into his sex life but as a “National security” matter, one step removed from King himself. In 1961, the bureau learned that a former Communist Party insider named Stanley Levison had become King’s closest white adviser, serving him as a ghostwriter and fund-raiser. The following year, Attorney General Robert Kennedy approved wiretaps on Levison’s home and office, and the White House advised King to drop his Communist friend. But thanks to their surveillance, the bureau quickly learned that King was still speaking with Levison. Around the same time, King began to criticize bureau practices in the South, accusing Hoover of failing to enforce civil rights law and of indulging the racist practices of Southern policeman.

This combination of events set Hoover and King on a collision course. In the fall of 1963, just after the March on Washington, the F.B.I. extended its surveillance from Levison and other associates to King himself, planting wiretaps in King’s home and offices and bugs in his hotel rooms. Hoover found out very little about any Communist subterfuge, but he did begin to learn about King’s extramarital sex life, already an open secret within the civil rights movement’s leadership.

Hoover and the Feds seem to have been genuinely shocked by King’s behavior. Here was a minister, the leader of a moral movement, acting like “a tom cat with obsessive degenerate sexual urges,” Hoover wrote on one memo. In response, F.B.I. officials began to peddle information about King’s hotel-room activities to friendly members of the press, hoping to discredit the civil rights leader. To their astonishment, the story went nowhere. If anything, as the F.B.I. learned more about his sexual adventures, King only seemed to be gaining in public stature. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act passed Congress, and just a few months later King became the youngest man ever to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

At this point Hoover decided to escalate his campaign. On Nov. 18, 1964 — 50 years ago this week — Hoover denounced King at a Washington news conference, labeling him the “the most notorious liar in the country.” A few days later, one of Hoover’s deputies, William Sullivan, apparently took it upon himself to write the anonymous letter and sent an agent to Miami, to mail the package to Atlanta.

Even now, looking at a full copy of the letter, it’s tough to puzzle out just what the bureau wanted King to do. The largest unredacted section focuses on King’s sex life, recounting in graphic language what the bureau believed it knew. Another uncovered portion of the note praises “older leaders” like the N.A.A.C.P. executive director Roy Wilkins, urging King to step aside and let other men lead the civil rights movement. And some maintain that they simply meant to push King out, not induce suicide.

Whatever it was the F.B.I. hoped King would do, they probably preferred it to happen before the Nobel ceremony, scheduled for mid-December. But King did not even see the package until after his trip to Oslo. According to his biographer David Garrow, it was King’s wife, Coretta, who first opened it, expecting to find a recording of one of her husband’s speeches. She turned the contents over to King, who assembled a group of confidants to sort out a response. As King’s closest friends and associates recalled, everyone immediately agreed the letter could only be the work of one institution: Hoover’s F.B.I.

Today it is almost impossible to imagine the press refusing a juicy story. To a scandal-hungry media, the bedroom practices of our public officials and moral leaders are usually fair game. And a sex scandal is often — though not always — a cheap one-way ticket out of public life. Faced with today’s political environment, perhaps King would have made different decisions in his personal affairs. Perhaps, though, he never would have had the chance to emerge as the public leader he ultimately became.

Luckily, in 1964 the media were far more cautious. One oddity of Hoover’s campaign against King is that it mostly flopped, and the F.B.I. never succeeded in seriously damaging King’s public image. Half a century later, we look upon King as a model of moral courage and human dignity. Hoover, by contrast, has become almost universally reviled. in this context, perhaps the most surprising aspect of their story is not what the F.B.I. attempted, but what it failed to do.

The current F.B.I. director, James Comey, keeps a copy of the King wiretap request on his desk as a reminder of the bureau’s capacity to do wrong. But elsewhere in Washington, the debate over how much the government should know about our private lives has never been more heated: Should intelligence agencies be able to sweep our email, read our texts, track our phone calls, locate us by GPS? Much of the conversation swirls around the possibility that agencies like the N.S.A. or the F.B.I. will use such information not to serve national security but to carry out personal and political vendettas. King’s experience reminds us that these are far from idle fears, conjured in the fevered minds of civil libertarians. They are based in the hard facts of history.

So, what is Gerald Posner up to these days?

2014-05-11T13:33:00.000-07:00

According to this site, he's a lawyer and PR agent for Afghan president Karzai's brother, Mahmood, and he does the same for President Karzai's other two brothers, Ahmed Wali and Qayum.

This article is noteworthy for rebutting Posner's book on the MLK assassination.

It provides a photo of the heavy brush in the backyard of Bessie Brewer's boarding house. This wild growth of brush was cut down very early in the morning of the day after Dr. King was assassinated.

This photo was taken immediately after the assassination and shows a surprising number of people, two of whom see to be running away from the scene. Unfortunately, the link to the Department of Justice website where this photo came from is no longer working.

Judge Joe Brown is running for District Attorney General for Shelby County

2014-04-27T07:38:00.002-07:00

Donate - https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/page/joebrownda

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/ElectJudgeJoeBrown

Memphis is in Shelby County

Judge Joe Brown arrested in Tennessee

2014-03-24T23:32:00.001-07:00

TV personality Joe Brown is currently behind bars.

The former host of "Judge Joe Brown," 66, is in jail in Memphis after being held in contempt in Shelby County Juvenile Court, ABC News has confirmed with the jail.

"Right now, he's being processed at our facility," said Chip Washington, a spokesman for the Shelby County Sheriff's Office. "That's about it for right now."

Washington added that Brown's sentence was five days in jail.

According to the Commercial Appeal, Brown, 66, allegedly yelled at Juvenile Court Magistrate Harold "Hal" Horne during a child support hearing.

"He all but had that courtroom in a riot,'' Juvenile Court Chief Magistrate Dan Michael told the newspaper.

Michael said that Brown, who is running for Shelby County District Attorney, arrived at the courthouse and began shaking hands and asking people for votes. He then sat in a courtroom for 20 minutes before approaching the bench and complaining about delays.

"He then began a diatribe against Mr. Horne and the authority of the court," Michael told the paper, adding that the judge asked him to "desist."

It wasn't immediately clear what business, if any, Brown had in the courtroom.

Horne had Brown arrested. He continued to protest, so Horne added four additional counts, making Brown's sentence five days in jail.

Brown is a former Shelby County, Tenn., Criminal Court judge. His reality TV show aired from 1998 to 2013.

Newly discovered audio recording of MLK speech from 1962 found in New York State archives

2014-01-20T09:09:00.002-08:00

Discovery of unknown Martin Luther King recording thrills historians

Sr. historian Jennifer Lemak holds a reel-to-reel audio tape of Martin Luther King Jr. speaking in 1962 at a New York City hotel on the 100th anniversary of Emancipation Proclamation, with other artifacts of the event at the NYS Museum Wednesday Jan. 15, 2014, in Albany, NY. (John Carl D'Annibale / Times Union)

A reel-to-reel audio tape of Martin Luther King Jr. speaking in 1962 at a New York City hotel on the 100th anniversary of Emancipation Proclamation is among artifacts at the NYS Museum Wednesday Jan. 15, 2014, in Albany, NY. (John Carl D'Annibale / Times Union)

Photo courtesy of the NYS Museum: Dignitaries, including Martin Luther King Jr. , third from left, during the Emancipation Proclamation Dinner on Sept. 12, 1962 at a New York City hotel. (JOHN CARL D'ANNIBALE)

Photo courtesy of the NYS Museum: Martin Luther King Jr. speaking on Sept. 12, 1962 at a New York City hotel on the 100th anniversary of Emancipation Proclamation. (JOHN CARL D'ANNIBALE)

Albany

An unknown 1962 audio recording of slain civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 26-minute speech in New York City to celebrate the centennial of President Abraham Lincoln's preliminary Emancipation Proclamation — a tape that was undetected for 35 years in a box at the State Museum following a 1979 donation — thrilled historians and reinforced the vital role played by an unpaid college intern.

A typed transcript of the speech and copy of the program for the event were widely known and stored in the State Archives, but nobody knew that a recording existed.

The dramatically sonorous voice and measured cadence on the tape caused a jolt of recognition for intern Daniel Barker, who had spent hundreds of hours digitizing dozens of mundane recordings of agricultural activities and weather news from the same collection.

"His voice is so unmistakable," Barker said of the Eureka moment on Nov. 12, 2013. "There was no way it wasn't Dr. Martin Luther King on the tape. I said, 'Craig, you better listen to this.' "

HEAR THE RECORDING

Craig Williams, curator of history at the State Museum, heard King's voice and a ripple of excitement ran through the room. After Williams and others researched King's speech on Sept. 12, 1962 at the Park-Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan and learned that this was the only known recording of the event, they knew they had captured lightning in a bottle.

"It's incredible to be able to put King's voice to the speech," said Mark Schaming, State Museum director. "His delivery is very moving and builds to a powerful conclusion."

King's speech, which covers 14 typewritten pages, equates Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation — which promised to free all the slaves within the Confederate states on Jan. 1, 1863 if those states remained in rebellion against the United States for more than 100 days — with the Declaration of Independence in its importance to the history of the republic.

In the speech, King was critical of racial inequality and he cited an average annual family income for African-Americans in 1962 of $3,300, compared with $5,800 for white families. He said the country would remain "weakened in its integrity, confused and confounded in its direction, by the unresolved race question."

As he built to a soaring peroration, King said, "I know that dark days still lie ahead. Gigantic mountains of opposition will still stand before us." King concluded by quoting "an old Negro slave preacher," and added a disclaimer for the poor grammar: "Lord, we ain't what we oughta be. We ain't what we want to be. We ain't what we goin' to be. But, thank God, we ain't what we wuz."

With a preacher's passion and a singsong delivery that turned up slightly at the end of each sentence, King's 1962 speech in New York City was given at the invitation of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. It foreshadowed some of the images and phrasing of King's famous "I Have A Dream" speech delivered at a historic civil rights march and rally on Aug. 28, 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The 1962 dinner was sponsored by the New York State Civil War Centennial Commission and the audience included Rockefeller, Cardinal Francis Spellman and other dignitaries.

The sound quality of the recording is quite good, except for a one-minute gap in the middle of King's address, when Enoch Squires flipped over a Scotch recording tape after one side was filled up and he rethreaded the other side into an empty takeup reel on a boxy reel-to-reel tape recorder he held in his lap.

Squires was a longtime radio reporter at WGY in Schenectady. He logged 3,000 miles a month to tape his "Schenectady Traveler" show, a folksy interview program that focused on farming and rural life. He left WGY in 1961 for a job as a research associate with the state Civil War Commission. Following his death in 1979, his widow that year turned over dozens of boxes of material, including 400 reel-to-reel tapes from Squires' WGY shows, both raw footage and edited programs.

Most of Squires' interviews were recorded on an earlier iteration of Scotch recording tape, which could only record on one side. Double-sided recording tape came in around 1962, when Squires made the King recording.

"If he didn't use the new kind of tape, we might have only had the start of King's speech," Barker said. "Some of the earlier reels are in horrible shape and some are covered in mold. We're just lucky this one was in great shape."

As it was, in order to conserve tape, Squires hit the stop button just as baseball great Jackie Robinson walked to the podium to deliver remarks that Squires did not record. Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball and was a first ballot inductee into the Hall of Fame two months before the dinner.

Barker, of Guilderland, who graduated in December with a master's degree in information studies from the University at Albany, has digitized 207 of Squires' tapes, slightly more than half of those donated. It's a labor-intensive process that involved transferring each from reel-to-reel to audiocassette to CD, and then burning a digital file.

He finished digitizing about 15 reels each week during his 12-hour internship that ended in December. He continues to work one day a week on the Squires project as a volunteer.

The King speech almost didn't take place, according to Jennifer Lemak, a curator of history who wrote about the speech in a 2012 State Archives magazine article.

King was ready to cancel after his advisers worried the dinner was "too Republican" and they feared that Rockefeller's presidential ambitions were anathema to President John F. Kennedy, with whom King was trying to curry favor as he pressed for civil rights legislation.

When King tried to beg off, Rockefeller opened his checkbook and promised to make a substantial donation to rebuild torched African-American churches in Georgia. It was a deal sweetener King couldn't refuse.

A black-and-white photograph showed King delivering the speech from behind a lectern perched on the head table, in front of which the draft preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, written in Lincoln's hand, were arrayed in simple plastic sleeves. Today, the document is considered priceless and is encased in a heavy, metal-edged glass display case filled with inert gas to preserve it. It is put on public display occasionally, but only under the watch of security guards.

Rockefeller used to carry the priceless, one-of-a-kind document around the state in 1962 in his briefcase, Lemak said.

Rockefeller was disappointed after his overtures to black leaders were rebuffed and they declined to support the work of the governor's Civil War Commission. He was further dismayed when his proposal and architect's rendering of an Emancipation Proclamation shrine to display the historic document in the state Capitol did not gain traction and was never built.

Meanwhile, Barker, the former intern, is enjoying his 15 minutes of fame. "Strangers have come up to me in the State Museum and said, 'Hey, you're the guy who found the tape,' " he said. "Everybody's made me feel really good about the whole thing."

There is one more item that would make him feel even better.

Barker, 32, a rock drummer who plays in the bands Male Patterns and Serriday, is engaged to be married in June to an elementary school teacher. He's currently unemployed.

"I'm looking for a job in my field," he said, hopeful that the State Museum might eventually have an opening.

pgrondahl@timesunion.com • 518-454-5623 • @PaulGrondahl

Listen up

To listen to King's 1962 speech and to learn about how the audio recording was discovered, go to:

http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/virtual/exhibits/mlk/

New video, well, an old film of Ray released

2013-04-05T04:00:00.000-07:00

Once again the anniversary of Dr. King's death has come and gone with little notice paid to it at all.

And I must admit I've been too busy with JFK's murder to find the time to devote to Dr. King's death as well. However, I noticed one item that the Huffington Post had. New Footage of Martin Luther King Jr. Assassin Released.

Why the Huffington Post did not call Dr. King, "Dr." King I don't know. Why leave off the "Dr." part?

And, of course, it's not Dr. King's real assassin. It's a film of James Earl Ray. The video links below are slow to load.

Almost exactly 45 years to the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, (NBC video link) new video footage has surfaced of his killer, James Earl Ray.

The Shelby County, Tenn., Register's office released the newly restored footage this week, posting several videos to its website chronicling certain aspects of the assassin's arrest and trial. The most dramatic of the videos shows (AOL video link) Ray receiving his Miranda rights on an airplane shortly after his arrest in London in June, 1968.

"You have the right to remain silent," an officer can be heard dictating to Ray above the loud hum of the airplane's engines.

Ray (ABC News blog with some good photos) shot King in the head on April 4, 1968, while the civil rights leader was standing on the second floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn. Ray then fled north from Memphis, ( CBC news blog, an excellent site, A+ ) across the Canadian border to Toronto, where he assumed a false identity and evaded detection for several weeks. He was ultimately arrested across the Atlantic, in London's Heathrow Airport, two months after the assassination. It was on the flight back to the United States, following his extradition, that the footage of Ray hearing his rights was recorded.

Shelby County has uploaded a number of ( This is interesting stuff ) additional videos from the Ray trial to its website, totaling several hours of previously unseen court procedure. The footage was the first of its kind for the county. ( I'll be watching this stuff this weekend. )

According to a statement released by Shelby County:

In 1968, the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office purchased a Sony Videocorder and Video Camera for the purposes of documenting the extradition, incarceration, and proceedings as related to James Earl Ray for the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It is believed that the personnel using the equipment were learning how to operate this technology as they recorded. As a result, the footage is not always as clear as we are accustomed to seeing today. Additional lighting is not used on most of the recordings. Audio portions are not always clear. There are inconsistencies in the video and audio tracks throughout the converted footage.

Ray pleaded guilty to the murder of Dr. King in 1969, receiving a 99-year sentence in a Tennessee prison. He ( CNN obit link ) died in 1997 at the age of 70, a decade before he was (BBC on this date something happened site ) eligible for parole.

Commercial Appeal reaches settlement with DOJ and FBI over Wither records

2013-02-27T05:20:00.001-08:00

Settlement to unveil photos, records documenting Ernest Withers' work as FBI informant

A legal settlement finalized Monday is expected to unearth photographs and records documenting the late Ernest Withers’ secret work as an FBI informant in Memphis during the civil rights era.

The agreement between the FBI and The Commercial Appeal allows the newspaper to access portions of 70 investigative files in which Withers participated as an informant.

Those 70 cases, ranging from the FBI’s investigation of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. while in Memphis in 1968 as well as examinations of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP and the black power and peace movements here, represent a fraction of the celebrated photographer’s work for the FBI between 1958 and 1976.

As part of the settlement, the FBI released a statement reporting that agents were authorized to pay Withers $20,088 between 1958 and 1976 but could not confirm how much he actually received.

That’s a signficant sum for the notoriously tightfisted FBI which paid its informants sparingly — the vast majority got nothing. Though the FBI’s Memphis field office had scores of informants reporting on “racial” matters and civil unrest here in 1968, records show only five of those informants were paid. Much of Withers’ pay is believed to have come after 1967.

The settlement also requires the FBI to pay $186,000 in attorney fees and legal costs the newspaper accumulated since filing suit in 2010. In turn, the newspaper agreed to drop its lawsuit, which it did Monday in U.S. District Court in Washington.

The settlement, believed to be the first of its kind involving a civil rights era informant, is expected to provide a rare look inside the FBI’s domestic intelligence operation that kept a close eye on black America in search of Communist and militant influences.

“This is a big win for the cause of open records and for civil rights in America for that matter,” said Chris Peck, editor of The Commercial Appeal. “After two years, hundreds of thousands of dollars in court costs, and many hours of reporting The Commercial Appeal has prevailed in its effort to get a more detailed picture of the extent of the spying and informing done in Memphis during Dr. King’s life and up until the time of his death.

“This settlement and the documents and records that will be released as a result of it, clearly will help Americans better understand the complicated role the FBI played in the Civil Rights era.”

Attorneys representing the Department of Justice did not respond Monday to an email seeking comment.

The compromise allows the FBI to protect the integrity of its informant program by not opening sensitive portions of Withers’ informant file. Under the agreement, the National Archives and Records Administration will release Withers-related records from investigative case files and not from Withers’ informant file, which the FBI retains. The FBI maintains that releasing details on an informant, even a dead one, can chill its ability to recruit new informants who enter confidentiality agreements and expect their work to remain secret.

Withers died in 2007 at age 85.

“The agreement between The Commercial Appeal and the FBI is unprecedented and creative,” said Charles D. Tobin, the First Amendment lawyer with the Holland & Knight law firm in Washington, who represented the CA. “While the FBI will keep the confidential informant documents to itself as a distinct file, the release of the same documents through NARA will give the public wide swaths of information about what the government was up to with Withers.”

The arrangement means sensitive documents such as specific pay records and any instructions Withers received from agents to spy on activists will remain sealed.

The newspaper sued the FBI in November 2010 seeking Withers’ informant file following a series of investigative reports it published revealing elements of his work with the agency. The newspaper found that Withers had operated under a code number, ME 338-R, to help the FBI monitor the 1968 sanitation workers strike as well as the Invaders, a militant, black power group.

The FBI initially refused to confirm or deny that Withers had been an informant, but federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the District of Columbia ruled in 2012 that the bureau inadvertently identified Withers as an informant in records and ordered officials to release non-exempt materials from Withers’ file.

The FBI responded by releasing hundreds of pages from Withers’ so-called “170 file,” an archaic designation for an “extremist informant,” or one reporting on groups and individuals with extremist views. Many of those records involved newspaper clippings the FBI kept on Withers and his family through the 1960s.

The records released last summer include some recruitment papers, too. They indicate agents first attempted to recruit Withers in 1958. Those papers indicate Withers operated as a “confidential source” through much of the 60s and that he began operating under a code number, ME 338-R, around 1968 as the sanitation strike broke out and the local civil rights movement took on a previously unseen militant tone. A designation such as ME 338-R is typically assigned to informants who are paid, work frequently and are controlled by agents with assignments.

Despite the release, the FBI signaled last fall that it would continue to fight the newspaper’s efforts to open Withers’ full file. Then in September, at Jackson’s urging, the parties agreed to enter mediation to attempt to settle the suit. That resulted in Monday’s deal.

Under the deal, the newspaper will select 70 case files from a confidential list. NARA will release portions of those files relating to Withers on a rolling basis over the next two years.

2012-06-27T20:18:00.004-07:00

The Harold Weisberg Archive has many items on the MLK case. One of which is his unpublished manuscript "Whoring for History." However, it's difficult to find as it's not really listed under that title.
If you look under the folder "Weisberg Manuscript and Books," you will see Posner (MLK). That is the book, "Whoring for History," a response to Gerald Posner's BS book.

Martin Hay's review of Wexler - Hancock book

2012-06-27T20:11:00.000-07:00

My friend Martin Hay has written an excellent review of the God awful [deleted] that is the Wexler - Hancock book. It's here.

Update on the bathtub

2012-06-25T00:47:00.001-07:00

A reader sent me some info on the original bathtub that according to the official story James Earl Ray stood in when he fired the fatal shot that killed Dr. King. It was bought by a judge, D'Army Bailey. Bailey is the founder of The National Civil Rights Museum. Bailey bought it in 1983 when the former rooming house was being renovated. Bailey then sold it on Ebay in 2006. The winning bid came from an online casino, "Golden Palace." (They sound like a Chinese restaurant.) There is a short article about that here. They have a photo of the tub which shows the sloping angle at the rear of the tub.

Residents of New York state are not even allowed to access the Goldenpalace.com's website. So, that's a BIG CLUE as to how reputable they are.

MSNBC had an article on this. However, the photo accompanying their story shows a bathtub which is clearly NOT the original tub. This bathtub was photographed in 2002, after the Civil Rights Museum bought the rooming house property and turned that room into an exhibit. This bathtub is still there.

The caption for this photo reads:

The bathtub from which James Earl Ray shot the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,

seen in its location in September 2002, as part of the expansion of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tenn.

This tub cannot be in Judge D'Army Bailey's private hands and in the museum exhibit at the same time.

The Wexler - Hancock book, It gets worse

2012-04-18T00:01:00.000-07:00

Well, we already know this book is total BS based on a totally false premise. Wexler finds the notion of a conspiracy in the MLK assassination personally distasteful to him so he serves up something more palatable, to him. It's a valentine to G. Robert Blakey's back-up story to still have a lone assassin, James Earl Ray, do it, but, if you need more, we'll introduce you to a KKK group, The White Knights of Mississippi and say they were really behind it. Wexler's false premise is that The White Knights of Mississippi are behind nearly every racial incident and killing throughout the South, throughout the entire Civil Rights era in hopes that their target Dr. King will come to town in response and lead a march or something, and then they can blow his head off. This is THE FALSE PREMISE of the book and Wexler and Hancock try to feed it, and support it, and nurture it on every page in hopes that you'll swallow this shit.

How bad is this book? Chapter 1, in a subsection; all these chapters have several subsections, big bold type setting off a section; there is one ironically called, "Manufacturing a Pretext."

I couldn’t make that up if I tried.

In this subsection there is some basic information telling you that Dr. King went to Missisippi after the attempted murder of James Meredith in 1966, and then it tells you who James Meredith is. "...the man who had desegregated the University of Mississippi by being the first black student to apply to and attend the school on 1962 and who in 1966 was leading his March Against Fear to encourage Blacks to register to vote despite racial intimidation."

Okay, so this information on Meredith is basic historical information that could come from many various sources, school textbooks, encyclopedias, newspapers, magazines, even Google.

What's the source they choose? What is the one, and only source they use to back that up?

Michelle Malkin! Michelle - RIGHT-WING-NUTCASE Malkin!

Michelle Malkin, "Remembering an American Insurrection" Townhall, September 27, 2002.

Why do they choose her? Well, let’s read it and see.

Forty years ago this month, a lone black man named James Meredith faced off against an angry mob of thousands of white segregationists on the campus of the University of Mississippi. After a violent clash that left two people dead, 48 American soldiers injured, and 30 U.S. Marshals with gunshot wounds, a dignified Meredith sat in the registrar's office with stunned college officials and signed the forms that led to the historic integration of a fiercely resistant Ole Miss. The incident, dubbed the Battle of Oxford, is mostly ignored in public school history texts. But as author and documentarian William Doyle describes it, the showdown was "the biggest domestic military crisis of the twentieth century" and a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement. Doyle's gripping and meticulously researched book, "An American Insurrection: The Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962," recounts Meredith's brave stand against Mississippi's Democrat governor Ross Barnett, the state police, the Ku Klux Klan, students and bloodthirsty rabble-rousers who took up guns, clubs, bricks and bottles in their bid to prevent a fellow American citizen from getting a college education. On Meredith's first day of class, the stinging smell of tear gas filled the air. Some 30,000 federal troops had been sent to quell the uprising against Meredith's presence. "I was more frightened at Mississippi than I was at Pearl Harbor or any other time during the war," one U.S. Marshal told Doyle. Meredith himself never showed fear. He walked past blood-stained hallways, endured hate-filled taunts from his fellow students and sat down unflappably for his first lecture: "The Beginnings of English Colonization." On August 18, 1963, at a graduation ceremony with 16 federal marshals monitoring the crowd, Meredith received a bachelor of arts degree in political science. Three years later, while on a one-man march from Memphis to Jackson to promote voting rights, a sniper opened fire on Meredith with an automatic 16-gauge shotgun. He sustained wounds to his head, back, shoulders and legs; at least 80 pellets remain lodged in his body. Later, he outraged many of his former colleagues by opposing government-imposed affirmative action, welfare and busing and joining the staff of conservative Republican senator Jesse Helms. Meredith, now 69 and a resident of Jackson, Miss., is a fascinating, renegade hero. Grandson of a slave and son of a property-owning farmer, he was among the first black soldiers to join the racially integrated U.S. armed forces. After serving in Japan, he enrolled at all-black Jackson State College against a backdrop of horrific lynchings across the Deep South. Meredith resolved to do what he could to break the reign of white supremacy: Confront the beast head on by enrolling at the segregated university that he had dreamed of attending since he was a little boy. To the chagrin of those who romanticize the Kennedys and the Democrats as the unassailable and stalwart champions of civil rights, author Doyle reveals how brothers John and Bobby botched the handling of the crisis at Ole Miss. JFK preferred to wash his hands of the whole "God-damn mess" that the civil rights issue had become to his White House. RFK, then his brother's attorney general, led negotiations with Gov. Barnett that collapsed at the last minute and led to what he later called the worst night of his life. Doyle reports that the Kennedys, more concerned with public relations than sacred principles of equality, secretly ordered black soldiers pulled from the front lines of the battle and forcibly resegregated. Some 4,000 black troops were assigned to garbage details and kitchen patrol in order not to offend white rioters. It was a disgraceful maneuver, made all the more so, one black military policeman told Doyle, "when you consider what the hell we were sent down there for -- the integration of a racially discriminatory institution. Based on more than 500 eyewitness interviews, hours of White House tapes, and some 9,000 pages of files from the Federal Bureau of Investigations, Doyle's "American Resurrection" is an invaluable retelling of forgotten history -- a passionate tribute to one man who walked the talk of equality, and a shameful indictment of the cowards and villains who stood in the way.

Well, Malkin wants to plug a book on Meredith. Why does she give a damn about Meredith? Because he later becomes a Conservative, even worked for Senator Jesse Helms.. The book “An American Insurrection: The Battle of Oxford Mississippi 1962,” is supposed to be about Meredith’s struggle to get into Ol' Miss. But it’s not. It’s a right-wing hatchet job on the Kennedys. The book's author, William Doyle, thinks the Kennedys “botched,” this crises and wanted nothing to do with the whole “God damn mess,” of Civil Rights. Doyle blames RFK for the breakdown in negotiations with Mississippi’s Governor Bartlett. Doyle also criticizes JFK for removing Blacks from being in the National Guard troop sent in response to the crisis.

Well, that was actually rather a smart thing to do becasue it would only have escalated a situation he’s trying to diffuse. To send in an a National Guard troop with Blacks on that front line would be like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.

Malkin gets so happy that Doyle is using this episode of the Civil Rights movement to attack the Kennedys that she gets the title wrong, “American Ressurection.” This piece of crap book which now sells on amazon for less than a dollar was reviewed by Publisher's Weekley, and I quote:

[Doyle's] indiscriminate accumulation of detail (the governor's wife wore pearl-frame glasses; the average height of the 503rd Military Police Battalion is 5'10") mars the book. The sketches of Civil War battles (provided by way of analogy to the Mississippi crisis) and of assorted local, state and federal troop movements fail to cohere. Some of Doyle's facts that World War II paratroopers served in "Normandy, Holland, Belgium, Sicily, Italy and North Africa"; references to JFK's "overlapping extramarital affairs and fleeting sexual experiences"; the price tag on Meredith's graduation suit ($85) bring neither depth nor diversion to this unimaginative text.

So, why do Wexler and Hancock use this Malkin article? Good question. Do they share Malkin’s views? Malkin does not mention The White Knights of Mississippi but the KKK does appear in her article. That's apparently good enough.

The Paris Match Photo!

2012-04-14T12:21:00.000-07:00

I listened to Jim DiEugenio on Black Op Radio talking about the MLK assassination. This was show #573 which aired on April 5th, 2012. He is as well versed in that assassination as the JFK assassination. CTKA, Jim's website has a section on the King case. Jim brought up the Paris Match photo. Paris Match is a weekly magazine published in France that is akin to our LIFE magazine. Jim mentioned a photo in the magazine that proved the impossibility of an assassin shooting from that window. Harold Weisberg mentions this photo on page 168 of his book on the MLK case "Frame-Up."

Well, here it is.

This is from the 20th of April 1968 edition of Paris Match. The cover is devoted to a Boeing airplane with BOAC airlines that crash landed. There are photos of the plane in flight with its wing engine on fire. There were survivors. It managed to land at some airport intact. People got lucky.

I recently acquired this magazine. I have never seen this photo before. I have never seen it reprinted in any American magazine, newspaper, or book.

According to Jim, Paris Match did a reconstruction of the shooting. "From the window from which James Earl Ray would have had to shoot King there was a bathtub. It was positioned in such a way that when that magazine sent a team over to do a reconstruction the guy had to contort himself into such a position in which there is no possible way you could have aimed the rifle to shoot King because he would have had to have been standing on the rim of the bathtub. Eventually, the state understood that this was a serious problem. So, in the museum they have now [ the former Bessie Brewer boarding house property was purchased by the National Civil Rights museum.] THEY MOVED THE BATHUB into a position where you don't have to do that anymore."

It's hard to get the whole page. I have a scanner that can accommodate a legal sized piece of paper 8.5 x 14 but this magazine page is larger than that.

Paris Match 20 Avril 1968 p. 52

I believe that what he's using as a rifle substitute is a bit of brush

or some small tree with its roots hanging down.

The accompanying text

This is the French text as well as I could duplicate it:

Une fenetre de salle de bains, au premier etage d'une maison meublee dans les faubourgs de Memphis c' est de la qu' est partie la balle qui a tue Martin Luther U jeun e Blanc tres grand qui se faisait appeler John Willard est venu me demander une chambre dit Mrs. Frank Brewer la gerante du petit hotel du 422 South Main Street Il insista pour avoir le numero 5 cote sud Moins d’une heure apres l’attentat, la police avait reconstitue les faits Willard s’etait absente entre 4 h 30 et 5 h 30 Son voisin de palier Willy Anchutz l’avait vu revenir avec un objet enveloppe dans du papier journal. Il etait 18 h 5 quand le coup de feu fut tire Quelques secondes plus tard. Anchutz croisait a nouveau Willard Il sortait de la salle de bains commune et portait toujours sous le bras son long paquet Le soir meme Ronsey Clark, ministre de la Justice annoncait Le colis etait l arme du crime une Remington 30 a lunette Nous connaissons le vrai nom de Willard L arrestation est une questions d heures.

This is the English translation as best as my typing skills and Google translate can come up with:

A bathroom window at first floor of a furnished house in the suburbs of Memphis that is of that part is the bullet that killed Martin Luther fasting U every large White who called himself John Willard came I request a room said Mrs.. Frank Brewer manageress of the small hotel of 422 South Main Street, he insisted to have the number 5 south coast less than an hour after the attack, police had reconstructed the facts Willard was absent between 4 and 5 h 30 h 30 his next door neighbor had seen Willy Anchutz back with an object wrapped in newspaper. He was 18 5h when the shot was fired a few seconds. Anchutz crossed again Willard He came out of the shared bathroom and always wore under his arm along the same night package Ronsey Clark, Minister of Justice announced the package was the murder weapon was a Remington 30 bezel We know the real name the arrest of Willard is a question of hours.

If you can improve the translation for me I'd appreciate it.

Page 168 from Weisberg's "Frame-Up"

The bathtub that they show you today, which is not in its original position. And to me this looks like an entirely different bathtub. This tub does not appear to have the reclined, angled back like the one the Paris Match man is perched on. As with the alleged assassin's window at the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas this area is glassed off to the public.

Smithsonian Channel to air Original MLK Assassination Footage

2011-12-17T07:02:00.000-08:00

NEW YORK (AP) — Some forward-looking college professors enabled television’s Smithsonian Channel to offer a look at the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. from the time in which it occurred.

The network said Wednesday it will air a documentary in February culled primarily from local news footage in Memphis, Tennessee, where the civil rights leader was murdered on April 4, 1968. Most of the footage hasn’t been seen on television since it originally aired.

Many such moments are lost since local television stations usually taped over old broadcasts or threw away film reels, said David Royle, executive producer at the Smithsonian Channel. But some University of Memphis professors sensed in March 1968 that civil rights history was happening with a strike of local sanitation workers, the event that drew King to Memphis, and they collected footage of the events through King’s murder and its aftermath.

“What they were doing was absolutely visionary — and very unusual,” Royle said.

It enabled the production of a documentary with a vivid, “you-are-there” feel and the uncovering of some fascinating moments.

Royle said he was drawn, for instance, to coverage of King’s famed “mountaintop” speech at the Mason Temple the night before the assassination. Cameras followed King after the speech to where he slumped in a chair, and viewers could sense the man’s fragility.

The producer said he recognized how the existence of such film was unusual when he researched an older documentary on Sam Ervin, the North Carolina senator who chaired the Watergate investigative committee in the 1970s. Royle said he traveled across North Carolina and could find only a minute and a half of tape of Ervin in his home state.

Another stroke of luck for Tom Jennings, who produced “MLK: The Assassination Tapes,” was finding Vince Hughes, who was a 20-year-old Memphis police dispatcher on his second day of work when King was killed. Hughes kept audiotapes of police calls on that day and crime scene photos from where King was shot, and the material was made available for the film.

Jennings also went to radio station WDIA to collect interviews from black Memphis residents at the time. The white-owned and operated TV stations at the time had little such material, Royle said.

“This (documentary) plunges you into the immediacy of the period and allows you to absorb it the way people at the time absorbed it,” Royle said. “There’s something that’s electric about that. It gets you to sit up and pay attention.”

MLK TV Special - The MLK Assassination Tapes

2011-12-17T06:39:00.000-08:00

MLK: The Assassination Tapes premiers on February 12, 2012 at 9:00 o'clock on The Smithsonian Channel.

The Raw, Real-Time Story of an American Tragedy

MLK: THE ASSASSINATION TAPES

PREMIERES SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2012 AT 9PM ET/PT

On Smithsonian Channel

Story of Last Days of Dr. Martin Luther King Told Through Rare Television and Radio News Accounts, Many

Not Seen or Heard Since 1968

New York, NY – December 7, 2011 – The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968, on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, is one of the defining moments in American history. The new Smithsonian Channel one-hour documentary, MLK: THE ASSASSINATION TAPES, premiering during Black History Month on Sunday, February 12 at 9 p.m. ET/PT, is a chilling, immersive experience of those historic events, created almost entirely through the use of television and radio news footage from the weeks leading up to Dr. King’s visits to Memphis through the aftermath of his murder.

It is a rare accomplishment when a filmmaker can recreate the past from contemporary news reports. It was standard practice for most local stations to re-use their tapes and wipe out history, and very few local television and radio stations in Memphis preserved their footage.

But MLK: THE ASSASSINATION TAPES draws extensively from the unique materials at the Special Collections Division at The University of Memphis. When Memphis’s mostly black sanitation workers went on strike on February 11, 1968, several University faculty members, believing this was a seminal moment in the civil rights movement, began collecting every piece of media they could find – television, radio and print. When Dr. King arrived in town to lend his voice to their cause, the team from the University was already gathering material in full-force. The process continued throughout both of Dr. King’s visits – and after his killing. Much of the footage has never been seen by the public since it was first gathered in 1968…until now.

Compiling the events from authentic accounts was a difficult and painstaking task. With no narrator and with no interviews - other than those conducted by journalists at the time - producer Tom Jennings (“The Lost JFK Tapes: The Assassination”) weaves a powerful account of the events leading up to Dr. King’s murder, the shocking moment itself, and the aftermath. MLK: THE ASSASSINATION TAPES captures the roiling emotions of the Civil Rights era, when long-simmering anger on both sides of the racial divide reached a boiling point.

What led Dr. King to Memphis began when the cities’ sanitation workers went on strike to protest their poverty level wages and dangerous working conditions that led to two workers being crushed to death by a garbage compacter. From the start, Memphis city officials refused to negotiate, insisting the workers had no right to go on strike.

In March, Dr. King decided to take time off from planning his “Poverty March on Washington” to travel to Memphis to lend his voice to the sanitation workers. Unfortunately, a second visit turned into a disaster when a march through the city turned violent, with businesses being burned and looted. Dr. King was whisked out of the city over fears for his safety. The march was one of the most humiliating moments in his career. A week later, against the strong advice from his closest aides and confidantes, Dr. King returned, arguing that that if his message of non-violence didn’t work in Memphis, it would not work anywhere.

On April 3, at Mason Temple in Memphis, he gave his famous “Mountaintop” speech that cited the threats and foreshadowed his death: “I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.” The next day he was shot.

MLK: THE ASSASSINATION TAPES captures the frantic manhunt for MLK’s assassin, the riots that erupted across the country, and the desperate pleas for peace from President Lyndon Johnson and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. It includes poignant footage of Coretta Scott King and her children marching in Memphis just days after King’s death, in support of the striking workers.

MLK: THE ASSASSINATION TAPES is produced by Tom Jennings of Tom Jennings Productions. Executive producers for Smithsonian Channel are David Royle and Charles Poe.

Quote of the Day

2011-10-19T19:15:00.001-07:00

I'm re-reading Harold Weisberg's book on the MLK case "Frame-Up." and came across a passage that could apply to so many other things that have happened since the assassinations of the 1960's.

“Behind the pretense of strict adherence to the proprieties, by what it did and said and what it leaked and inspired, the government was successful in capturing the public mind with endless newstories the other side could neither answer nor refute. This did amount to propaganda.” Frame-Up p. 22

Stuart Wexler and the MLK assassination

2011-10-15T12:32:00.000-07:00

FYI, about Stuart Wexler and the MLK assassination. Stu is working on a book with Larry Hancock which is going to say that yes, James Earl Ray shot Dr. King all on his own because he heard about some scheme the KKK had. The KKK was offering a big sum of money, $100,000, if only someone would kill Dr. King for them. Ray heard this in prison and that's why he broke out, to kill King, and to collect the bounty. The book was previously going to be called "Seeking Armageddon: The Effort to Kill Martin Luther King Jr." Now it's got a new title "The Awful Grace of God: Racial Terrorism and the Unsolved Murder of Martin Luther King Jr."

It should be called, "Aw For [ Deleted] Sake: Two Buffoons

Promote a Lone Nut Story That Even Posner Wouldn't Peddle."

Don't believe me? Check these out:

Could James Earl Ray, who pleaded guilty to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., have made contact with the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi?

Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock, co-authors of the upcoming book, Seeking Armageddon: The Effort to Kill Martin Luther King Jr, are investigating that possibility.

Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock, authors of an upcoming book, "Seeking Armageddon: The Effort to Kill Martin Luther King Jr.," are exploring evidence that members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi were involved.

FBI records show fingerprints found after King’s killing were checked against thousands of people, but Wexler said he has yet to find documents that show the FBI checked to see if these fingerprints matched any members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, which reportedly had a $100,000 bounty on King.

Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock, authors of an upcoming book,Seeking Armageddon: The Effort to Kill Martin Luther King Jr., are exploring evidence related to the White Knights.

An interesting site

2011-10-15T10:08:00.000-07:00

I came across an interesting site with thought provoking analysis of exactly where witnesses may actually be pointing to in the immediate aftermath of Dr. King's assassination.

It's called Martin Luther King - The Fatal Shot Came from a Different Direction

Now there are rather a lot of annoying animated and blinking ads at the top. Scroll down. It gets better.

This iconic and haunting photo taken moments after Dr, King was shot shows Andrew Young and others pointing in the direction they believe the shot came from. But, what exactly are they pointing at? The federal government believes they are pointing at the back of Bessie Brewer's rooming house, from a window they say James Earl Ray shot from. Researcher Ted Wilburn believes they are pointing towards the Gattis building.

A petition to release files on Dr. King

2011-10-14T06:31:00.000-07:00

The White House has a website where you can create a petition and if there are enough people who sign onto it it will be brought to the attention of President Obama. The petition has been created to release all governmental files relating to the surveillance on Dr. King, his assassination, and the investigation into his assassination. It needs 25,000 people to sign it. I am supporting this.

The petition can be found here - http://wh.gov/2fh

You do need to create an account. The White House site will send you an email back, and then you do what it says. Then you have an account. Then you can sign the petition.

I was the 15th person to sign it. We need you to sign this and please ask your friends to sign it too.

Thank you.