opinion

50 years later, conspiracies still swirl around Martin Luther King's death

The voice over the CB radio needed help right away. He was chasing the most wanted man in the country.

Minutes before, just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, police announced over the scanner that a suspect in the shooting of Martin Luther King Jr. had possibly escaped in a white Ford Mustang. The voice on the CB claimed to be behind that Mustang right now, dashing through the Memphis streets at more than 100 miles per hour.

He couldn’t read the license plate number, though.

“I’m afraid to get that close,” the voice said. “He’s shooting at me.”

A student driving on the other side of town heard the plea and flagged down a nearby policeman. The cop, Lt. R.W. Bradshaw, immediately relayed the information, and law enforcement all over Memphis abandoned what they were doing to hunt the man who, mere minutes before, had fired a bullet through the famed civil rights’ leader’s right cheek.

Police thought they had their man. There was only one problem: such a chase never took place.

The unnamed student who first notified police about what he heard over the CB later provided all the above descriptions in a detailed statement. Police determined it had all been a ruse: a possible ploy to distract police and allow King’s killer to get away.

The above story is just one of several possible King conspiracies mentioned in a lengthy article from The New York Times’ Martin Waldron that was published in the Evansville Courier on June 20, 1968.

Fifty years after King's assassination, the legends have only grown from there. And they’re not just spouted in typo-ridden Internet message boards or parroted in shoddily produced YouTube videos.

Several prominent people who worked closely with King believe there is much more to the official story that a racist prison escapee named James Earl Ray shot and killed King from his squalid vantage point at a boarding house across the street from the Lorraine Hotel.

Those people include King's wife, Coretta Scott King, and all his surviving children. Congressman John L. Lewis believes in some kind of conspiracy, as does former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young, who was standing on the balcony next to King when the historic bullet came screaming in.

“It pains my heart that James Earl Ray had to spend his life in prison paying for things he didn’t do,” Bernice King, MLK's oldest daughter, told the Washington Post last month.

The King conspiracy theories aren’t as prevalent as the ones surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but they’re no less elaborate. Here are a few spouted in the 1968 article, as well as some that have been reported in the mainstream media.

The FBI did it

J. Edgar Hoover was obsessed with King.

He hounded the Civil Rights leader. Recorded his private conversations. Tried his damndest, and failed miserably, to out King as a communist – about the worst thing you could be in the 1960s.

And at least once, Hoover ordered agents to send King a threatening letter.

The letter, unearthed by the New York Times in 2014, alluded to King’s infidelities and accused him of taking part in “orgies.” Called him “evil” and “a filthy abnormal animal.”

Toward the end, it got down to business: King had 34 days to commit suicide or else he would face some shadowy consequence.

“King, like all frauds your end is approaching. You could have been our greatest leader,” the letter reads. “You, even at an early age have turned out to be not a leader but a dissolute, abnormal moral imbecile.”

In 1999, a massive civil trial attempting to litigate a King murder coverup took place in Memphis. More than 70 witnesses were called, including retired policemen. On Dec. 8, the verdict came down – King was the victim of a massive conspiracy powered by the FBI.

Local authorities could have been involved too – especially if they were sympathetic to worthless little fascist / Birmingham, Alabama, Sheriff Bull Connor, who sicced dogs, water hoses and police billy clubs on the Freedom Riders. After MLK won the Nobel prize in 1964, the Courier ran a wire story quoting Connor’s sneering response.

“They’re scraping the bottom of the barrel,” he said.

Authorities of all stripes, and even the Mafia, “were deeply involved in the assassination. … Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame,” Coretta said in a statement after the trial.

The money

Thanks in part to the fictional car chase blared over Memphis CB radios, Ray eluded capture until June 8, 1968, when he was arrested at the London airport.

He was used to surviving on the lam. On April 23, 1967, Ray hid in a bakery truck and rode out of the gates of Jefferson City State Prison in Missouri. According to his fellow inmates, he had a good reason for getting out. The Independent reported that Ray used to catch King speeches on TV and wail promises to kill him. They also said he nursed dreams of killing John Kennedy, too, before someone else did the job for him.

But he wouldn’t allegedly follow through on that supposed promise for another year. Where did he get the money to live – let alone buy a gun, obtain a white Mustang and secure the cash needed to flee the country post-assassination on a circuitous route that took him to Mexico, Canada and eventually Europe?

For years, conspiracy theorists have used Ray’s mysterious influx of cash as proof that some monied conglomerate was taking good care of their patsy. But according to a 1976 book, the answer isn’t that exciting.

George McMillan published “The Making of an Assassin: The Life of James Earl Ray” in 1976. His widowed wife, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, relayed his findings in a 1997 Washington Post article.

Ray was reportedly quite the prison entrepreneur. He rented out books in exchange for money and smokes. He sold eggs and somehow brewed beer in his mattress cover.

In 1963, a friendship with a prison guard helped bring in the big money. The guard helped smuggle in speed and after he took his cut, he mailed wads of cash to Ray’s disreputable siblings.

After Ray escaped in ’67, he reportedly met up with his brothers at a Chicago hotel to collect the cash. From there he fled west.

The Los Angeles’ Times Matt Pearce chronicled Ray’s time there in a fantastic column published this week. Out west, the virulent white supremacist spoke with enlightenment gurus; mulled plastic surgery so he could pursue a career in commercials; took dance lessons and learned how to bar tend.

He also wanted to learn how to hypnotize people simply by looking them in the eye. But that's a whole other tome.

McMillan claimed Ray funded his carefree lifestyle with his prison businesses. By the time he was arrested, he had $123 stuffed in his pocket: the leftovers from robbing a London bank.

Eric S. Galt

The Alabama Highway Patrol received a call on March 1, 1967. A man named Eric S. Galt wanted to replace his lost driver’s license. Could they mail a duplicate to the Economy Grill and Hotel in Birmingham?

They did, and sent Galt a bill for 25 cents. Galt received the paperwork and paid up by March 6.

Strangely, just as Alabama officials were receiving the license request, another man named Eric S. Galt was in California, graduating from bartending school.

Galt was one of the many pseudonyms Ray used after his escape from prison. And according to Martin Waldron’s 1968 article published in the Courier, he didn’t leave California until mid-March – meaning it’s impossible he’s the same Galt who paid for the license.

Waldron seemed to believe Ray had the help of a network that supplied him with phony names. He reported that a lot of Ray’s pseudonyms – Galt, John Willard, Paul Bridgman and George Sneyd – were the names of actual residents of Toronto, all of whom bore a “close resemblance” to Ray himself.

Guilty

Ray’s fingerprints, matched to his file in an FBI database, were found on a rifle stashed near the boarding house across from the Lorraine. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

Within days, he attempted to renege, swearing he didn’t act alone. Eventually, he claimed innocence. But he went to jail anyway, where he spent the rest of his life.

Whispers about a larger plot persisted. By 1979, no less than the House Select Committee on Assassination were concocting salacious theories: that Ray acted as a hitman for George Wallace supporters who had pledged to pay him $50,000 for the assassination.

No concrete proof of anything has ever surfaced.

Psychologists, professional and otherwise, will tell you the fervent beliefs of King’s family and friends stem from our inability to believe that some backward bigot like Ray could erase such a great man from the Earth.

But glorious men don’t always get glorious deaths. We all go out on a low note – no matter who we are.

Even if King was killed by the FBI or Wallace supporters or the Mafia or some shadowy combination of government overlords who control our world like menacing puppeteers, the result is the same: a flawed but still wonderful man is gone – killed for the sin of asking us to be the best versions of ourselves.

There was no car chase. No excitement. Just grim, sad reality.

Contact columnist Jon Webb at jon.webb@courierpress.com