Martin Luther King Jr. was in a good mood when he stepped onto the balcony. It was shortly after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, and the civil rights leader was preparing to leave Memphis’ Lorraine Motel for dinner at the home of a local minister. King had spent much of the day inside Room 306. The weather had cleared after the storms of the previous night, and some of his friends and colleagues were gathering in the courtyard below.
King leaned over the railing and called down to musician Ben Branch, who was scheduled to perform later that evening. He wanted Branch to play his favorite gospel song. Then came the crack of a rifle.
The bullet struck King in the face, tore through his neck and spinal column and drove downward into his shoulder. He collapsed onto the balcony as the men below scrambled for cover and then rushed toward him. Some pointed frantically across the street toward a row of buildings overlooking the motel. Blood spread beneath King’s body. Within minutes, police were searching the neighborhood. Within an hour, Martin Luther King Jr. was dead.
What investigators found nearby appeared to provide the beginning of an extraordinarily strong murder case. A bundle had been abandoned outside a business close to the apparent firing position. Inside and around it were a rifle, binoculars and possessions that could be connected to an escaped convict named James Earl Ray. His fingerprints were on the weapon. Witnesses and records placed him inside the roominghouse overlooking the Lorraine. He disappeared immediately after the shooting and began an international flight that eventually ended at London’s Heathrow Airport.
Less than a year later, Ray admitted killing King and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. It might have ended there. Instead, the assassination became one of the most contested murders in American history.
Ray almost immediately tried to withdraw his guilty plea. King’s own family eventually said they did not believe he had killed him. A congressional investigation concluded that Ray had fired the fatal shot but probably had not acted entirely alone. Decades later, a Memphis civil jury went considerably further, finding that King had died as the result of a conspiracy involving unnamed government agencies.
Behind all of those questions stood one fact that nobody needed a conspiracy theory to establish. For years before King was murdered, the United States government really had been conducting a secret campaign against him.
The FBI had tapped his telephones, bugged his hotel rooms, monitored his associates, distributed damaging material about his private life and tried to undermine his leadership. An anonymous package connected to the Bureau included a letter widely interpreted as attempting to push King toward suicide. J. Edgar Hoover had publicly denounced him while privately directing an intelligence apparatus against him. Congressional investigators would later describe the FBI’s campaign as a gross abuse of its authority.
That history does not prove the FBI murdered Martin Luther King Jr. It does explain why, more than half a century later, simply being told that it did not has never been enough.
