Killing King

by Stuart Wexler

  3.Ibid.

  4.Nissen, in discussion with the authors, July 25, 2016.

  5.Jesse Sublett, 1960s Austin Gangsters: Organized Crime That Rocked the Capital (Mt. Pleasant, SC: The History Press, 2015).

  6.FBI, “Airtel from St. Louis to Director” (August 12, 1968), FBI Central Headquarters File, section 69.

  7.FBI, “James Venable FBI Headquarters File” (1967). File 1165004-001, 157-HQ-1628, section 2, at 3.

  8.FBI, “Memorandum from SA Richard F. Kilcourse to SAC Los Angeles” (April 23, 1968), 62-5101.

  9.FBI, “James Venable FBI Headquarters File.”

  10.Ibid.

  11.Ibid. In fact, Vernable made a number of trips to California and spoke at several meetings. The file shows he was there at least on February 19, April 1,

  April 20, and April 28–29, 1967.

  12.Comm. On Un-American Activities, Para-Military Organizations in California White Extremist Organizations, Part II: National States’ Rights Party The Present Day Ku Klux Klan Movement, H.R. Rep., 90th Cong. 1st Sess. (December 11, 1967).

  13.Faulkner, “Murdering Civil Rights.” Martin Hay, a critic of our work, implies that Stein and his sister both lied about the nature of the Wallace visit. Hay places his stock in James Earl Ray, who refused to acknowledge the visit and had it stricken from a fifty-six-page stipulation of facts during his trial. The problem here is that unlike Ray, who had a motive to lie—to hide his associations with racists from investigators—neither Charlie Stein nor his sister had an obvious motive to make the story up. What’s more, Ray made documented and repeated calls to the Wallace campaign while in Los Angeles.

  14.FBI, “TO: Director, Atlanta, Birmingham and Miami RE: Atlanta Tel May Two Four Last” (May 5, 1968), MURKIN 44-38861-3959.

  15.Wexler and Hancock, The Awful Grace of God, 208–209.

  16.Louis Lomax, “Call Made to N.O.: Phone Booth Located in King Slayer Search,” New Orleans States-Item, April 30, 1968, available online at the Harold Weisberg Archive at Hood College, accessed March 23, 2017, jfk.hood.edu

  /Collection/White%20Materials/King%20Jr%20Martin%20Luther/MLK%

  20103.pdf. It is worth noting that Kent Courtney, a right-wing media personality in New Orleans, secretly recorded James Earl Ray’s brother Jerry in conversation about an industrialist several months after the assassination and after James Earl Ray had been arrested. Jerry Ray was trying to find out if Courtney knew how to contact this industrialist. But Jerry Ray did not know the person’s name. It is always difficult to evaluate what Jerry Ray has said in reference to the King assassination, as he has blatantly contradicted himself on numerous occasions, claiming at times to have played games with reporters and investigators with his previous comments. In this instance, as in a handful of others, he is saying something in private. But his other claim in his recorded conversation with Courtney, that this industrialist somehow “employed” James Earl Ray since August of 1967, is nonsensical. James Earl Ray’s documented activities render this impossible. What this suggests is that Jerry Ray may have been “fishing” for a way to contact potential bounty sponsors, in hopes of getting help (or possibly money) from the sponsors, but that Jerry did not have a clear idea of what he was looking for. Any direct communication with his brother about potential conspirators in New Orleans would have been monitored, so Jerry may have been investigating the news reports relaying information from Charles Stein on this “industrialist.” In an odd way, it suggests that Jerry Ray, whom others have accused of complicity in the King murder, was not as well-informed about his brother’s conspiratorial activities as his critics suggest. It is also worth noting, however, that Jerry Ray sought out a well-connected right-wing segregationist, Courtney, to try to make contact with this supposed industrialist. In other words, Jerry Ray, who was close to his brother James, on some level believed the King murder was connected to right-wingers. For more, see Jeffrey Caulfield, General Walker and the Murder of President Kennedy (Moreland Hills, OH: Moreland Press, 2015).

  17.Harold Weisberg, letter to Jim Lesar (December 15, 1976), available online at the Harold Weisberg Archive at Hood College, accessed March 29, 2017, jfk

  .hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/L%20Disk

  /Leads%20Louisana/Item%2015.pdf.

  18.Harold Weisberg, letter to Mark Lynch (August 26, 1985), available online at the Harold Weisberg Archive at Hood College, accessed March 30, 2017, jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/A%20Disk

  /ACLU/ACLU%2008.pdf.

  19.FBI, “Joe Daniel Hawkins” (July 28, 1970), report of Special Agent Samuel Jennings.

  20.Harold Weisberg, “Chapter 26: Lingering Questions That Should X Must X Linger” from an unpublished manuscript available online at the Harold Weisberg Archive at Hood College, accessed May 18, 2017, at 426–28. jfk.hood.edu

  /Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/HW%20Manuscripts

  /Posner%20(MLK)/Posner26.doc. Weisberg was not one to speculate, but he came to strongly consider the possibility that James Earl Ray had criminal, conspiratorial connections to Edward G. Partin, a union leader out of Baton Rouge who eventually turned against Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa. Particularly suspicious, to Weisberg and others, was a Baton Rouge number Ray provided to his King assassination defense team. Ray claimed this number belonged to someone in Baton Rouge, whom he did not know, but whom “Raul” claimed was some sort of go-between to relay information about where they could meet. Ray said he called that number on his way out of Birmingham in October of 1967, and the unidentified individual who picked up told Ray to go to Mexico. Ray told federal investigators that he found the name for the number after laboriously going through Louisiana phone books: Herman Thompson. Thompson was an East Baton Rouge law enforcement officer with purported ties to Partin. But authors uncovered material in which Ray attributes the finding to help from Z. T. Osborne, a Nashville attorney. Z. T. Osborne was one of Jimmy Hoffa’s main attorneys. It seems likely that Ray was convinced, for whatever reason, to plant damning information about Hoffa’s nemesis, Partin, in the media. One should therefore be suspicious of a number of supposed leads that point toward Partin.

  21.Marsh, God’s Long Hot Summer, 138.

  22.Newton, Encyclopedia of Unsolved Crimes, 176, 178.

  23.McWhorter, Carry Me Home, 572.

  chapter 9: in waiting

  1.FBI. “Report of Joseph T. Boston Subj: Thomas Albert Tarrants, III” (August 26, 1968), Bureau file 157-519 at 4-5.

  2.Tarrants, The Conversion of a Klansman, 59.

  3.Newton, Encyclopedia of Unsolved Crimes, 180.

  4.FBI, “Memo to SAC Jackson; Subj: J.B. Stoner,” 157-3082-19.

  5.Marsh, God’s Long Hot Summer, 64–66.

  6.Newton, Encyclopedia of Unsolved Crimes, 179–80.

  7.W. O. Dillard, The Final Curtain: Burning Mississippi by the FBI (Denver, CO: Outskirts Press, 2007).

  8.Nelson, Terror in the Night, 53–54, 103–104, 123.

  9.FBI, “Samuel Holloway Bowers Jr.” (August 9, 1968), bureau file 157-1654, section 23, at 15.

  10.Newton, Encyclopedia of Unsolved Crimes, 180.

  11.Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 486.

  12.Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 44, 46–47, 50–55.

  13.McKnight, The Last Crusade, 144.

  14.Martin Luther King Jr., “The Drum Major Instinct” (speech), February 4, 1968, Atlanta, Georgia, transcript and audio, 39:11, mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index

  .php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_the_drum_major_instinct.

  15.“James Earl Ray: Selected Chronology.”

  16.Posner, Killing the Dream, 213.

  1
7.Wexler and Hancock, 213–15.

  18.Wexler and Hancock, The Awful Grace of God, 213–15.

  19.Department of Justice, FOIA Response to files on James Wilborn Ashmore/J.C. Hardin, 2011.

  chapter 10: stalking

  1.King Encyclopedia, s.v. “Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike (1968),” accessed March 30, 2013. mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia

  /encyclopedia/enc_memphis_sanitation_workers_strike_1968.

  2.Wesley Swift, “Children of the Spirit” (sermon), March 17, 1968, Dr. Wesley Swift Library, transcript, swift.christogenea.org/book/export/html/792.

  3.Nelson, Terror in the Night, 140.

  4.Jerry Mitchell, “Book Probes MLK Killing,” Clarion-Ledger, January 3, 2008, www3.nd.edu/~newsinfo/pdf/2008_01_03_pdf/Book%20probes%20MLK%20killing.pdf.

  5.Ibid.

  6.Jack Nelson. Transcript of interview with Thomas Albert Tarrants, III, June 20, 1991. Jack Nelson Collection, Manuscript Archive and Rare Book Library, Emory University. MSS 1237 Box 3. The authors have edited the written transcript to reflect what was said, verbatim, in the audio tapes. Thanks to Charles Faulkner for his help in obtaining this material.

  7.U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations, Investigation of the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.: Final Report, 297.

  8.“James Earl Ray: Selected Chronology.”

  9.Waldron and Hartmann, Legacy of Secrecy, 444.

  10.U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations, Investigation of the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.: Appendix to the Hearings Before the Select Comm. On Assassinations, 95th Cong., 2nd Sess., vol. xiii, 214, available online at the Mary Ferrell Foundation www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/show

  Doc.do?mode=searchResult&absPageId=999305.

  11.FBI, “Alleged Offer of $100,000 by White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Jackson, Mississippi, to Anyone Who Kills Martin Luther King.” Main King File, file 100-1006671, section 73, at 207–10.

  12.Tarrants, The Conversion of a Klansman, 59–60.

  13.U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations, Investigation of the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Final Report, 375–76, available online at the Mary Ferrell Foundation, maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=800&search=

  depalma#relPageId=405&tab=page. The HSCA found reports from two Minutemen, Vincent DePalma and Earle Baumgartner, independently corroborating the potential assassination of King. They also said that the Minutemen hoped to start a civil war in the United States. Given the close connections between the Minutemen and Swift, this is noteworthy, as is the fact that Tarrants, who identified closely with the Minutemen, met with Dennis Mower, a senior figure in the group, when visiting Swift in California. Mower was one of Swift’s closest aides, and if former Minuteman Keith Gilbert is correct, Mower was a key figure behind the 1965 attempt to kill King with dynamite at the Palladium. Several other Minutemen insisted that the accounts of strike teams were propaganda and meant to smoke out informants like DePalma and Baumgartner. DePugh and Payson testified to this effect to the HSCA. Interestingly, documents the authors obtained reveal another Minutemen source federal investigators contacted in 1968 in the wake of King’s shooting. This source also dismissed the possibility that the Minutemen killed King but for a different reason: he believed the shooting would have been more professional if they were involved. But the source pointed to another right-wing group he once belonged to as strong candidates for King’s murder. This group, he insisted, was determined to kill King. Who were they? The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. For this second account see FBI, “Re: Vincent DePalma at Asheville, North Carolina” MURKIN File 44-1987-Sub 39-A (April 18, 1968).

  14.FBI, “Teletype To: New Orleans From: Jackson (157-9586) re: My Call This Date Re: Eugene Smith Mansfield AKA Sunset” (April 10, 1968), MURKIN File 44-1987-Sub E-196.

  15.Nelson, Terror in the Night, 140.

  16.Department of Justice, Report of the Department of Justice Task Force to Review The FBI Martin Luther King Jr., Security and Assassination Investigations, January 11, 1977, available online at the Harold Weisberg Archive at Hood College, accessed March 30, 2013, at 17–20. jfk.hood.edu/Collection

  /Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/O%20Disk/Office%20of%20

  Professional%20Responsibility%20Report%20Appendix%20C/Item%2003A

  .pdf. This is an internal FBI assessment of their original MLK assassination investigation.

  17.“James Earl Ray: Selected Chronology.”

  18.Jeffrey Cohen and David Lifton, “A Man He Calls Raoul.” New Times (April 1, 1977), at 21-37, available online at the Harold Weisberg Archive at Hood College, jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/C%20Disk/Cohen%20Jeff/Item%2006.pdf.

  19.Faulkner. “Murdering Civil Rights.” Larson, who was Bowers’s business partner at Sambo, was a senior officer in the military reserve. But we do not know if he made the call or if he had a connection to Alabama. The timing of the call still cries out for an explanation.

  20.U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations, Investigation of the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.: Final Report, 95th Cong., 2nd Sess., 297–99, available online at the Mary Ferrell Foundation, www.maryferrell.org/mffweb

  /archive/viewer/showDoc.do?mode=searchResult&absPageId=69366.

  21.Weisberg letter to Mark Lynch (August 26, 1985).

  22.Faulkner, “Murdering Civil Rights.”

  23.Martin Luther King Jr., “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” available online at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/kingpapers

  /article/remaining_awake_through_a_great_revolution.

  24.Ibid.

  25.Wesley Swift, “Power in the Word” (sermon), March 31, 1968, Dr. Wesley Swift Library, transcript, swift.christogenea.org/book/export/html/794.

  26.FBI, “Urgent Teletype from Dallas Field Office to Director, Memphis and Jackson” (April 23, 1968), MURKIN 44-38861-1836.

  27.Department of Justice, Report of the Department of Justice Task Force to Review The FBI Martin Luther King Jr., Security and Assassination Investigations.

  28.Martin Luther King Jr., “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” (speech), April 3, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee, transcript, available online at mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu

  /index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/ive_been_to_the_mountaintop.

  chapter 11: zero hour

  1.U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations, Investigation of the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.: Final Report, 95th Cong. 2nd, Sess., available online at the Mary Ferrell Foundation, accessed April 16, 2015, www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?mode=searchResult&absPageId=69366.

  2.Melanson, The Martin Luther King Assassination, 87–90.

  3.Ibid., 137.

  4.Michael Honey, “King’s Last Crusade,” History News Network, George Mason University, accessed April 16, 2015, historynewsnetwork.org/article/37087.

  5.McKnight, The Last Crusade, 79–81.

  6.Ibid., 67.

  7.Melanson, The Martin Luther King Assassination, 69–70.

  8.McKnight, The Last Crusade, 77–78. Sen. McClellan continued the dirty tricks even after Dr. King’s murder. A mere month after Dr. King’s death, McClellan himself went to Director Hoover with an explosive story that black militants were planning to hijack the Poor People’s March in Washington from the SCLC and unleash a “rein of rioting, looting, and armed insurrection.” Hoover ordered a full-court FBI press on the intelligence from the senator’s investigators (which McClellan claimed to be airtight). The massive FBI follow-up with its own sources produced not the slightest corroboration, and after several weeks (during which McClellan “moved” the location of his key informant from Tennessee to Alabama and finally to Atlanta),
the bureau finally managed to locate the source based on contacts within McClellan’s committee. It turned out the source was in Mobile, Alabama, and the bureau determined that not only did he want money for his information, but also that he was “completely unreliable.”

  9.Mary Elizabeth Cronin, “Andrew Young Reflects on His Struggle in the Civil Rights Movement,” Seattle Times, November 13, 1996, seattletimes.com/special

  /mlk/perspectives/reflections/pillow.html.

  10.U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations, Investigation of the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.: Final Report, 95th Cong. 2nd, Sess., available online at the Mary Ferrell Foundation, accessed April 16, 2015, hmaryferrell

  .org/showDoc.html?docId=800&search=%22spinal_column%22+%22

  fractured+the+spine%22#relPageId=320&tab=page at 290.

  11.FBI, “Report by SA Joe Hester, Memphis, 10 June 1968,” available online at the Harold Weisberg Archive at Hood College, accessed March 29, 2013, jfk.hood

  .edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/I%20Disk/Investigation%20King%20Martin%20Luther%20Jr%20Dr/Item%20080.pdf. Each of the two witnesses to the escaping man, Charles Stephens and William Anschutz, presents his own problems. Stephens was likely drunk at the time of the shooting and Anschutz said he did not get a good look at the man fleeing the building, even though he had a very brief verbal exchange with the man about whether the man had heard a nearby shot—the man had heard it. One should probably place weight only on the broad particulars: a man left Bessie Brewer’s in a hurried state carrying a long package wrapped in a blanket.