Martin Luther King Essay, Research Paper

At the eye of this hurricane of turmoil was a man named Martin Luther King, Jr., who preached non-violent civil disobedience as a means of opening the way for blacks to obtain the rights and liberties guaranteed to all citizens of the United States. King was an effective communicator and motivator, and by 1968, he was winning the hearts and minds more and more Americans on both sides of the color line. His efforts successfully merged the anti-Vietnam war movement and the civil rights movement, and the awful reality of the black situation in America could no longer be hidden behind the white curtain (ward 2). On March 28, 1968, King led a march through Memphis, Tennessee which, like all his marches, was intended to have been peaceful and non-violent. But thanks to a gang of agents provocateur called “The Invaders,” the march disintegrated into rioting and looting. King barely escaped the March 28 debacle unharmed, and swore to return to Memphis and “conduct this demonstration properly — with no violence.” The date for the new march was set at April 4, 1968. This time, King would not survive his fateful trip to Memphis. Local newspapers mocked King when he announced he was coming back to Memphis for a second round. Among other snipes and barbs, the local press criticized him for staying at a white-owned Holiday Inn, instead of the Motel Lorraine, which was black-owned. According to researcher Michael Newton, the editorials criticizing King quoted directly from an FBI press release, which was distributed to “friendly press contacts” in Memphis under a plan approved by FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. Hoping to avoid further antagonistic press in wake of the disastrous March 28 demonstration, King’s camp switched his accommodations to a room at the Motel Lorraine, where he died on April 4. From a security standpoint, changing King’s lodging to this particular motel was a bad mistake. The Motel Lorraine was located in a fairly seedy part of town. The day before King arrived, someone claiming to be an advance security man dropped by the Lorraine Hotel and changed King’s reservation from a ground-floor room to a second-floor balcony room, saying, “Dr. King always likes to have a room on the second floor overlooking the swimming pool.” (It is worth noting that King’s brother was later drowned under suspicious circumstances in the swimming pool at his home.) Questioned later, none of King’s associates were aware of an “advance man,” and his description didn’t match any of King’s friends or associates.

Switching rooms eliminated any trace of security that the location might have had. The new room was in the rear of the building, the balcony wide open to sniper fire with no cover whatsoever.

At 6:01 p.m., on April 4, 1968, King stepped out of his motel room on his way to get dinner. He leaned over the railing to speak to his chauffeur. A moment later, a single shot from a high-powered rifle blasted out, and King fell to the concrete balcony, where he lay dying.

As soon as King fell, an aide, believed to be Marrell McCullough, pointed to the bathroom window of Bessie Brewer’s boarding house. The fingers of others followed him, as recorded in photographs of the assassination. From that window, or so the official story goes, a man named James Earl Ray allegedly fired the shot that killed King.

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Yet a number of questions and contradictions offer reason to doubt the official explanation. James Earl Ray, not unlike his lone-nut cousin Lee Harvey Oswald, was a poor shot in the Army. Ray was never convicted in a trial by a jury of his peers. At Ray’s evidentiary hearing, a former FBI ballistics expert testified that not even the most skilled gunman could have accurately fired a rifle in the manner claimed by the government prosecution. According to the expert, to effectively line up for such a shot, the butt of the rifle would have had to stick six inches into the wall. The prosecution countered that Ray had contorted himself into position around the bathtub in order to make the kill shot, which seems equally incredulous.

After the assassination, Wayne Chastain, a reporter at the Memphis Press Scimitar, came across an unpublished Associated Press photograph in the newspaper’s files which was taken from the boarding house bathroom window, through which Ray allegedly shot King. The sniper’s view was obscured by branches from trees growing between the boarding house and the Motel Lorraine. The City of Memphis ordered the sanitation department to cut those trees down shortly after the assassination, making it impossible to conclusively determine how the tree branches may have interfered in a shot fired from the boarding house bathroom.

The bullet recovered from King’s body has not been adequately tested and has not been proven to match Ray’s alleged murder weapon. Only one witness claimed to have seen Ray leaving the boarding house bathroom, a man named Charles Stephens. According to two other sources, Stephens was extremely inebriated at the time. The first

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three descriptions Stephens gave didn’t resemble Ray at all — in fact, Stephens’ first two descriptions of the alleged assassin were of a “nigger”. Stephens admitted that he did not get a good look at the alleged assassin. It wasn’t until the FBI paid $30,000 in bar tabs for Stephens that he fingered Ray as the hit man.

Two other witnesses saw someone leaving the boarding house bathroom. One witness, Bessie Brewer, the owner of the boarding house, could not identify the individual and refused to identify Ray as the man she had rented a room to. The other witness, Stephens’ common law wife Grace, said she did get a good look at him, and that it was definitely not James Earl Ray. Grace’s drunken husband became the preferred witness. Grace was committed to a mental institution. According to her lawyer, C.M. Murphy, she was committed illegally, and after she was committed, the Memphis prosecutors removed her records from the hospital. After years of imprisonment under heavy sedation, Grace still refused to recant her story.

In addition to Brewer, two other witnesses at the boarding house insisted that the man who rented Ray’s room looked nothing like James Earl Ray.

Less than two minutes after the fatal shot was fired, a bundle containing the 30.06 Remington rifle allegedly used in the assassination and some of Ray’s belongings was conveniently found in the doorway of the Canipe Amusement Company next door to the boarding house. Ray would have had to fire the shot that killed King from his contorted position in the bathroom, exit the sniper’s nest, go to his room to collect his belongings and wrap and tie it all in a bundle, leave his room, run down the stairs and out of the boarding house, stash the bundle next door, and then get away from the scene unnoticed — all within two minutes!

A service station manager told an investigator for Ray’s defense team that he saw Ray several blocks from the boarding house at the time of the shooting. He was stabbed soon after he started talking to the defense team.If Ray did not shoot King from the boarding house bathroom window, where did the shot come from? One witness sitting in front of the bank of trees the same trees that would have blocked Ray’s view from his alleged sniper’s nest said he heard a rifle fire directly behind him at ground level, not from the boarding house. Other witnesses also reported hearing the shot from ground level. Two people at the fire station nearby reported that a boy ran in and told them a similar story, but he left before police could question him.

King’s chauffeur, as well as some of his aides who were standing on the balcony with King, all testified that King appeared to have been lifted physically off the ground. This is inconsistent with a shot from the boarding house bathroom, but consistent with a shot originating from the ground below the boarding house window.

It is possible that Ray, like his lone-nut cousin Oswald, had a doppelgangers. Ray allegedly escaped in a white Mustang, but several witnesses reported seeing two white Mustangs on the street on April 4.

People in the neighborhood said Ray “stood out” in the seedy area because he wore a suit. The driver of the other Mustang might have been a man in a similar suit seen several times eating at Jim’s Grill near the Motel Lorraine. This mystery man became known as the “eggs and sausages” man, because he started showing up shortly before the assassination and always ordered eggs and sausages.

On April 4, 1968, the “eggs and sausages” man ate his usual fare, paid his tab and left the cafe. A few minutes later, King lay dying. Police picked up the “eggs and sausages” man for questioning after diners at the cafe reported what had happened, but he was never booked on suspicion of being involved with King’s death.