Martin Luther King: the Assassination and the FBI
As King’s body fell to the ground, an estimated 150 police officers seemed to materialize from out of nowhere. King had been standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, joking with his friends below as they were getting in their cars to go to dinner. Now, as police descended upon the scene, King’s friends pointed to the building where they thought the shot had come from, and yelled for the police to run that way. But it was too late. Despite the fact that the Memphis Police Department had been intensely surveiling Martin Luther King’s time in Memphis — as had the FBI and the Military Intelligence Division — the assassin had quickly slipped away. Despite the fact that Memphis lies along Tennessee’s border with Mississippi and Arkansas, none of these agencies thought to create checkpoints on the roads leading across the borders.
Although the assassin’s rifle was soon discovered, wrapped in a bundle by a nearby building, federal laws at the time did not require identification to be shown to purchase such weapons. King had been killed on April 4, and members of Congress started pushing for gun registration laws that would help to identify future murderers on April 5. The NRA responded with emergency meetings with congressmen from April 6 through 11, and the proposed bills were defeated.
Martin Luther King’s assassination led to one of the largest manhunts in American history. The manhunt was, disturbingly, led by J. Edgar Hoover’s second-in-command, Cartha DeLoach, who had engineered years of surveillance, intimidation, and disinformation campaigns designed to destroy King. Authorities did, however, finally catch up with King’s assassin 65 days later at a London airport, as he was preparing to escape forever to the ultra White supremacist nation of Rhodesia.
The assassin was a man named James Earl Ray. Ray had been raised in dire poverty, with an incarcerated father and an alcoholic mother who drank herself to death. The family was so poor they sometimes had only potatoes to eat. Unable to afford firewood, they tore parts off of their own home to put in the fireplace and stay warm. Some of Ray’s eight brothers and sisters became hardened criminals; others were judged insane and placed in mental institutions. Unable to hold down a job for more than a few months without getting fired, Ray joined the military, but was dismissed for “ineptness and lack of adaptability to military service.” He did, however, win a medal for marksmanship. After leaving the service he fell into a life of crime, but made ludicrous mistakes: once after stealing $1000, he forgot to shut the door of the getaway car and almost fell out. After multiple arrests, James Earl Ray was eventually sentenced to 20 years. He escaped after serving seven years, by contorting his body into a breadbox in the prison bakery where he worked, and then getting loaded onto a truck.
Rays brother ran a tavern in St. Louis, where there was a $50,000 reward — put up by several local businessmen — for anyone who killed King. Ray started tracking King from city to city as he travelled the nation organizing for the upcoming Poor People’s Campaign. It was fairly easy work, given that King was constantly in the news and that his destinations were openly discussed. In Memphis, the local television news even carried an image of King walking into room 306 at the Lorraine Motel. All Ray had to do locate a spot to fire from and then wait.
Ray’s capture, however, did not ease the doubts and misgivings about the true nature of King’s death. Many wondered how this poor, uneducated and untrained convict with a history of bungling his work had evaded one of the largest manhunts in American history for over two months. Some also wondered how an escaped convict gained access to a passport. Many Americans worried that there was more to King’s death than just James Earl Ray.
Doubts about the true nature of King’s death were especially widespread amongst Black Americans, given that the FBI had long been an enemy of the Black freedom struggle. While it was true that the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, had cracked down on the Klan’s most violent practices, it was also true that Hoover was a notorious racist. In private, he referred to Black people using racial slurs. Hoover even viewed King’s organization — the Southern Christian Leadership Conference — as a hate group. He thought of the struggle for civil rights as a Communistic undermining of the appropriate, White supremacist order of society. The FBI was overflowing with White Southern agents who agreed: indeed, in the 1930s, Hoover had let go of a full third of his agents and replaced them exclusively with White Southern men. Hoover had illegally wiretapped King everywhere he went for years. He had led demonization and disinformation campaigns against King, which included providing the very President of the United States with misleading or even outright false information. The head of the FBI was so infuriated by the success of the 1963 March on Washington that he ordered his agents to no longer warn Martin Luther King of threats against his life. Although the FBI didn’t publicly acknowledge any of this, anyone involved in the Black freedom struggle was well aware of how the FBI operated and where it stood.
In Memphis, Martin Luther King had originally been staying in a White-owned hotel, because after previously staying at the Black-owned Lorraine Motel it had been decided that the windows were too exposed to the streets. King had been urging Black Memphians to boycott White-owned businesses to create pressure on the city to agree to dignified working conditions for Black workers, and the FBI used the fact that he was staying in a White-owned hotel to smear King as a hypocrite. King was well aware that the FBI was often behind such smear campaigns, but in order to preserve his credibility, he returned to the Lorraine Motel… a motel both he and the FBI knew was unsafe.
However, even though the FBI knowingly pressured King into an unsafe position, there is no evidence that the FBI was aware of James Earl Ray and his plan. FBI agents could have simply been trying to smear King’s reputation, as they often did. Although some of the committees that later investigated the assassination concluded that James Earl Ray couldn’t have killed Martin Luther King and evaded the manhunt alone, whatever support he did receive could have come from any number of racist organizations or criminal networks. Given that the FBI was an enemy of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, it has been understandably tempting to jump to the conclusion that the FBI was involved in King’s death. However, although scholars of Martin Luther King paint a damning portrait of the FBI, they all agree that there is no concrete evidence that the FBI was involved in King’s assassination.
That said, there are other disturbing concerns. A decade after King’s death, the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations engaged in an exhaustive study of King’s assassination. They revealed that the Memphis Police Department — which had been conducting surveillance on King at the time of his assassination — had purposefully destroyed their surveillance files. The Military Intelligence Division had been surveilling King for over a decade — starting in 1957 — and it appears that they destroyed their surveillance files on King’s time in Memphis as well. Such revelations contributed to a flourishing of conspiracy theories, some of which were embraced by members of Martin Luther King’s own family.
One final element remains to be added to this story. During his eulogy, King’s mentor Benjamin Mays exclaimed: “The American people are in part responsible for Martin Luther King Jr.’s death. The assassin heard enough condemnation of King and of Negroes to feel that he had public support.” Mays emphasized that the assassin “knew that millions hated King.” And indeed they did. For White Southerners, King was a mortal enemy. He upended the society they believed in and — in their experience — brought chaos in his wake. Many celebrated his death. An average response was the feeling that it should have happened sooner, or perhaps just a sense of relief that King was gone. When President Johnson ordered federal buildings across the nation to lower their flags to half-mast, many officials in the South refused. When King’s massive funeral march was held, White Southerners were nowhere to be seen. But we can’t only blame the South, for as soon as King had turned his attention to the segregated ghettos of the North, he had become an enemy there as well. And he became an enemy to even more Americans when he stood up against the Vietnam War. Politicians leveled vicious criticisms of him; the media painted damning portraits of him. In the words of Chicago based journalist Mike Royko: “Martin Luther King was executed by a firing squad that numbered in the millions.”
Martin Luther King’s friend Andrew Young — a future congressman and ambassador to the United Nations — recognized that he would never truly know who killed his friend. Young also said that knowing exactly who killed King wasn’t the most important point to consider: “I wasn’t concerned, then or now, with who killed Martin Luther King, but rather focused my concern on what killed Martin Luther King.” For Young, what killed King was a larger culture of violence. Coretta Scott King agreed. She saw her husband’s assassination not as the act of one man, but as the kind of action that we can expect to occur when societies engage in rampant vilification and demonization.
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