Viewpoint Ray trial might reveal shameful secrets
By JIM DOUGLASS
Seeds of resurrection.
I am in the Memphis, Tenn., courtroom of Judge Joe Brown on Feb.
20 watching an amazing scene. The judge is peering down from his bench at
Coretta King, as she appeals on behalf of her family for a trial for James Earl
Ray, who has spent 29 years in prison for the murder of her husband.
She says, "This has been a very difficult process, but we feel
that taking this action is absolutely necessary. Indeed, a trial for Mr. Ray is
our last hope to reveal the truth about my husband's assassination and bring
about at least some sense of closure to the pain we have endured as a family
over unanswered questions surrounding this tragedy."
She concludes, looking up at the judge, "For the sake of healing
and reconciliation, I appeal to you on behalf of the King family as well as
millions of Americans concerned about truth and justice in this case to
expeditiously set and conduct a trial for Mr. James Earl Ray."
Coretta King is followed as a witness by her son Dexter, who bears
a strong resemblance to his father. He, too, appeals for a trial for James Earl
Ray -- "for healing, reconciliation and closure."
It is clear the Kings do not believe that James Earl Ray was the
lone killer the government claims he was, nor -- on the issue of this
particular hearing -- that he even fired the rifle. They have been persuaded by
William F. Pepper, Ray's attorney and once an associate of Dr. King, that Ray
was probably a patsy for U.S. intelligence agencies that coordinated the
murder.
Pepper is the author of Orders to Kill: The Truth Behind the
Murder of Martin Luther King (Carroll and Graf, 1995). His 500-page book is
the most complete picture we have of any of the 1960s assassinations, claiming
the involvement in King's murder of Memphis police, organized crime, a U.S.
army sniper team and -- supervising these players -- military and civilian
intelligence agencies.
The Kings have now become allies with Pepper and the Ray family:
both the publicly identified assassin, James, who is dying in his Nashville
prison from liver disease, and his brother, Jerry, a plain-spoken 68-year-old
security guard. In the courtroom Jerry sits right behind Coretta and Dexter
King. Between testimony, Dexter King and Jerry Ray talk quietly.
After hearing three hours of testimony by ballistics experts and
the King family's appeal, Judge Brown rules that new technology could determine
if Ray's rifle killed Dr. King. His ruling must now be reviewed by a state
appeals court before the rifle can be tested. If the rifle is ruled out as the
murder weapon, it will pave the way for a trial.
Dexter King, William Pepper, Jerry Ray and civil rights leaders
James Lawson and Joseph Lowery hold a news conference after the hearing. They
express their satisfaction that James Earl Ray is now farther along the road to
a trial. Jerry says everyone's support has meant much to James in prison.
The fitting end to this remarkable day comes when Dexter King and
Jerry Ray say goodbye, both promising to stay in touch. Jerry says earnestly,
"Tell your mother how much I admire her. ... I want her to teach me how to talk
as good as she does." Dexter smiles and says he will.
Do these new allies -- the black, upper-class son of the martyr,
and the white, working-class brother of the accused assassin -- represent the
beloved community for whom Martin Luther King gave his life? Have the forces
that killed King inadvertently created new life?
Seeds of resurrection.
In the year leading up to his death, Martin Luther King paved the
way for a nonviolent revolution that could restructure our whole society and
world. Now is the time to realize that revolution.
According to Pepper, King, who died April 4, 1968, may have set in
motion the events that led to his assassination when he delivered his famous
speech against the Vietnam War at New York's Riverside Church exactly one year
earlier. In that speech he identified "the greatest purveyor of violence in the
world today" as "my own government." J. Edgar Hoover then wrote to President
Lyndon Johnson that it was clear King was "an instrument in the hands of
subversive forces seeking to undermine our nation."
The perception by government leaders that Martin Luther King was
their worst domestic enemy deepened from mid-1967 on, as King announced plans
for a Poor People's Campaign in Washington. An interracial army of poor people
would have come together in the nation's capital in late April 1968. They would
engage in wave after wave of mass civil disobedience until Congress passed a
comprehensive antipoverty bill. The absolute minimum in legislation, King told
reporters, was a full-employment commitment, a guaranteed annual income, and a
half million units of low-cost housing per year.
The intelligence community also knew, from listening
electronically to King's every word, that he had an even broader vision of the
Poor People's Campaign. With the Vietnam War at its peak in the spring of 1968,
King told his staff, "After we get [to Washington] and stay a few days, [we'll]
call the peace movement in, and let them go on the other side of the Potomac
and try to close down the Pentagon."
Policymakers feared King would succeed in bringing the nation's
capital to a crunching halt until they made a commitment to eliminate poverty
in the United States and stop the Vietnam War. The dreamer of 1963 had become
the nightmare of 1968 to the White House and the Pentagon.
In January 1968, according to William Pepper and my own research,
CIA and FBI agents offered $1 million to mob leader Carlo Gambino in Apalachin,
N.Y., for the killing of Martin Luther King.
When Gambino refused the offer, the agents indicated it would be
placed elsewhere. This remarkable information was revealed in a written
statement and on a 1989 BBC documentary by Myron Billett, a Chicago mob member
who attended the meeting.
Myron Billett's best friend during the last decade of his life was
the Rev. Maurice McCracken, a revered peace activist in Cincinnati. McCracken
told me he met Billett on a pastoral visit while Billett was serving a term in
Ohio State Penitentiary. McCracken baptized Billett after he was released from
prison for health reasons. Billett lived his final years, dying of emphysema,
deepening in his faith and repenting his mob past by speaking out about it.
McCracken says Myron Billett was unburdening his conscience before God by
revealing the CIA-FBI offer to kill King.
Pepper writes that on the weekend of March 15, 1968, Frank
Liberto, a Memphis produce man and gangster, hired Loyd Jowers, owner of Jim's
Grill, to assist in King's assassination. Jowers confessed his involvement in
the plot on "Prime Time Live" in December 1993 after he learned that Pepper's
witnesses for James Earl Ray were ready to implicate Jowers before a Tennessee
grand jury. The witnesses were never called to testify.
Jowers said he was told that the sniper's lair was to be in the
brush area behind Jim's Grill, directly opposite the Lorraine Motel. He was
assured that the police would not be there, that a patsy (Ray) would be
provided and that Jowers would be rewarded handsomely with money out of New
Orleans.
In his Canadian Broadcasting Corporation lectures at the end of
1967, Martin Luther King had expressed a vision that went beyond even the Poor
People's Campaign and the Vietnam War. He saw the next step as a global
nonviolent movement using escalating acts of massive civil disobedience to
disrupt the entire international order and block economic and political
exploitation across borders. The Poor People's Campaign was to be only the
beginning.
The power structure knew -- more clearly than most Americans --
the breadth of King's vision. As William Pepper shows in Orders to Kill,
they had reason to want Martin Luther King dead.
When Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot down in El Salvador, his
people didn't say, "Oh, there goes another lone nut killing a prophet."
They recognized immediately the covert forces behind their
prophet's murder, which equally threatened them. Because the Salvadoran people
identified and resisted those forces of death, the nonviolent spirit of Oscar
Romero was able to be reborn in them.
Dexter King has repeated over the past three months that he and
his family are prepared to forgive whoever murdered his father. In explanation
of why they have waited so long to appeal for a trial and demand that the truth
be revealed, he said: "For many years we've felt that there was more to this
case than had been presented to the public. And I think we were somewhat in
denial."
Forgiveness and a call for the truth are the gifts of a family
with the living faith to overcome 29 years of denial.
Here is the spiritual link between a stunning new knowledge of
King's assassination and our finally realizing the nonviolent revolution that
prophet envisioned.
But the King family is our family, an extended family that
stretches right across the USA in its 29 years of denial. Are the rest of us
prepared to take the steps these closest family members have now taken? Will we
respond nonviolently to the covert intelligence killers of Martin Luther King
while facing the stark truth of what they did to us all, what we have allowed
them to do to us and to our country during those 29 years of denial?
I can see again Coretta Scott King in that Memphis courtroom
appealing for a trial for James Earl Ray.
Seeds of resurrection.
Yes, a people can be reborn.
Peace activist Jim Douglass lives in Birmingham, Ala.
National Catholic Reporter, April 4,
1997
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