Dr. Martin Luther King Jr - Wrongful Death

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According to a Memphis jury's verdict on December 8, 1999, in the wrongful death lawsuit of the King family versus Loyd Jowers "and other unknown co-conspirators," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government. Almost 32 years after King's murder at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, a court extended the circle of responsibility for the assassination beyond the late scapegoat James Earl Ray to the United States government.

From the King Center Website:  After hearing and reviewing the extensive testimony and evidence, which had never before been tested under oath in a court of law, it took the Memphis jury only 1½ hours to find that a conspiracy to kill Dr. King did exist. Most significantly, this conspiracy involved agents of the governments of the City of Memphis, the state of Tennessee and the United States of America. The overwhelming weight of the evidence also indicated that James Earl Ray was not the triggerman and, in fact, was an unknowing patsy.  We urge all interested Americans to read the transcript of the trial on the King Center website and consider the evidence, so they can form their own unbiased conclusions.

Much of the testimony focused on the extent of operations carried out by the FBI against King and those involved in civil rights struggles. On August 25, 1967, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover approved a major counterintelligence program, Cointelpro, to disrupt and discredit left-wing organizations, civil rights demonstrators and anti-war protesters. Hoover directed operations against King in an effort to discredit his leadership and break up the movement.

Convinced that King was a communist, Hoover described him as “the most dangerous man in America, and a moral degenerate,” and was obsessed with following King's activities. Dozens of internal FBI memoranda document the surveillance and harassment of King. In one incident King's alleged “sexual escapades” were used in an attempt to blackmail him. Shortly before the assassination Hoover distributed an internal memo to the FBI calling for King's “removal from the national scene.”

Here are some of the unknown facts:

• Several sources have revealed that military intelligence and special forces units were on the scene before and during the King assassination. Elite-team army snipers were actually in place to take Dr. King out. This has been corroborated by persons directly involved in these operations.
• The bullet recovered from King’s body has not been adequately tested and has not been proven to match Ray’s alleged murder weapon.
• Lorraine Motel's owner and manager, Walter Bailey told [a police officer} about a strange request that had forced him to change King's room to the location where he was shot.  Bailey explained that the night before King's arrival he had received a call "from a member of Dr. King's group in Atlanta." The caller (whom Bailey said he knew but referred to only by the pronoun "he") wanted the motel owner to change King's room. Bailey said he was adamantly opposed to moving King, as instructed, from an inner court room behind the motel office (which had better security) to an outside balcony room exposed to public view. "If they had listened to me," Bailey said, "this wouldn't have happened."
• 
  Shortly before the killing, King’s police security detail was reduced from eight officers to two officers, in spite of more than fifty death threats against the civil rights leader. Just hours before the shooting, a black officer named Edward Redditt was sent home because of a mysterious threat against his life. This left a single policeman on the immediate scene.
• Earl Caldwell was a New York Times reporter in his room at the Lorraine Motel the evening of April 4. In videotaped testimony, Caldwell said he heard what he thought was a bomb blast at 6:00 p.m. When he ran to the door and looked out, he saw a man crouched in the heavy part of the bushes across the street. The man was looking over at the Lorraine's balcony. Caldwell wrote an article about the figure in the bushes but was never questioned about what he had seen by any authorities. 
• Former SCLC official James Orange said".. [After the shot, when Orange saw Dr. King's leg dangling over the balcony], I looked back and saw the smoke. It couldn't have been more than five to ten seconds. The smoke came out of the brush area on the opposite side of the street from the Lorraine Motel. I saw it rise up from the bushes over there. From that day to this time I have never had any doubt that the fatal shot, the bullet which ended Dr. King's life, was fired by a sniper concealed in the brush area behind the derelict buildings. "I also noticed, quite early the next morning around 8 or 9 o'clock, that all of the bushes and brush on the hill were cut down and cleaned up. It was as though the entire area of the bushes from behind the rooming house had been cleared . . . "I will always remember the puff of white smoke and the cut brush and having never been given a satisfactory explanation.
  

David Morphy, the only juror to grant an interview, said later: "We can look back on it and say that we did change history. But that's not why we did it. It was because there was an overwhelming amount of evidence and just too many odd coincidences. Everything from the police department being pulled back, to the death threat on Redditt, to the two black firefighters being pulled off, to the military people going up on top of the fire station, even to them going back to that point and cutting down the trees. Who in their right mind would go and destroy a crime scene like that the morning after? It was just very, very odd."

Coretta King explained to the jury her family's purpose in pursuing the lawsuit against Jowers: "This is not about money. We're concerned about the truth, having the truth come out in a court of law so that it can be documented for all. I've always felt that somehow the truth would be known, and I hoped that I would live to see it. It is important I think for the sake of healing so many people -- my family, other people, the nation."  The King family received a token $100 award.

Seek out your own truth...and keep the dream alive.