Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country's Most Controversial Cover-Ups (44 page)

As horrible as the above fact is, it was nothing compared to what had already been done against Dr. King while he was alive. The United States government, through the FBI, employed a series of covert action programs in an attempt to destroy the Civil Rights Movement and the momentum it was gaining across the country. Those efforts even included blackmail. Dr. King was specifically targeted. The project was known under the acronym COINTELPRO (from “Counter Intelligence Program”). Other political activists were also specifically targeted, including Fred Hampton and Mark Clark (their deaths are detailed in Chapter 8 of this book), Dick Gregory, Stokely Carmichael, H. “Rap” Brown, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, David Hilliard, Geronimo Pratt, and Jeff Fort. For an excellent list of official documents related to COINTEL- PRO, see:
http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/cointel.htmI

The following are
direct quotes
from the Final Report of a United States Senate study of intelligence activities:

• “From December 1963 until his death in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to ‘neutralize’ him as an effective civil rights leader. In the words of the man in charge of the FBI’s ‘war’ against Dr. King:

‘No holds were barred. We have used [similar] techniques against Soviet agents. [The same methods were] brought home against any organization against which we were targeted. We did not differentiate. This is a rough, tough business.’

The FBI collected information about Dr. King’s plans and activities through an extensive surveillance program, employing nearly every intelligence-gathering technique at the Bureau’s disposal.”

•“The FBI’s program to destroy Dr. King as the leader of the civil rights movement entailed attempts to discredit him with churches, universities, and the press. Steps were taken to attempt to convince the National Council of Churches, the Baptist World Alliance, and leading Protestant ministers to halt financial support of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and to persuade them that “Negro leaders should completely isolate King and remove him from the role he is now occupying in civil rights activities.”

•“The FBI responded to Dr. King’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize by attempting to undermine his reception by foreign heads of state and American ambassadors in the countries that he planned to visit.”

•“The FBI offered to play for reporters tape recordings allegedly made from microphone surveillance of Dr. King’s hotel rooms. The FBI mailed Dr. King a tape recording made from its microphone coverage. According to the Chief of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division, the tape was intended to precipitate a separation between Dr. King and his wife in the belief that the separation would reduce Dr. King’s stature. The tape recording was accompanied by a note which Dr. King and his advisers interpreted as a threat to release the tape recording unless Dr. King committed suicide.”
³⁸⁴

It’s thought by many that Martin Luther King became a serious threat to “The Powers That Be” by moving into dangerous territory during the last two years of his life. The Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1964, a preacher and pacifist for much of his life, his reputation had typically been one of seeking the peaceful course of non-violent resistance to oppression. However, that changed dramatically in his last years.

He came to believe that the oppression—not only to Blacks, but to the poor under-classes all around the world—was deeply rooted in an economic system so unjust, that it needed to be corrected.

That change is well-documented in his speeches. King was one of the first U.S. leaders to strongly oppose the Vietnam War. He spoke in an eloquence that inspired and united millions of diverse people around the world in a common cause—to end the ongoing insanity of war:

“Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.”
³⁸⁵

He humanized the “enemy”—which was a direct threat to the military authority of the United States:

“They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.”
³⁸⁶

These changes in his beliefs began to broaden his base: he was no longer a Black preacher rallying families of former slaves—he was a dynamic international leader spearheading an attack against the wealthiest economic powers on the planet on behalf of all who were poor and under-represented in that system. That was why he became perceived as a threat.

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.”
³⁸⁷

And he didn’t stop there, he went further:

“A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
³⁸⁸

In his final year he was busy organizing a Poor People’s March on Washington— it was expected by some to practically close down the nation’s capitol. His words were their rallying cry:

“We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time ...”

“In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
³⁸⁹

“We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.”
³⁹⁰

Therefore, he obviously and increasingly posed a major threat to the strongest business and political powers in the world. It’s thought by some that those powers found it necessary to eliminate that threat.

Dr. King clearly knew that his days were numbered, and that the number was probably a pretty low one, at that:

“He was so preoccupied with his death, so obsessed with its likely occurrence, that in the last years, he could relax only in a room with no windows because he was tortured with worry about who might pull the trigger. His eyes fell on strangers, wondering if they were the messenger of death.”
³⁹¹

And, contrary to the notions that honoring Dr. King in death somehow absolves and cleanses the historical conscience, White America is largely to blame for his murder:

“White Americans have long since forgotten just how much heat and hate the thought of King could whip up. They have absolved themselves of blame for producing, or failing to fight, the murderous passions that finally tracked King down in Memphis, Tenn. If one man held the gun, millions more propped him up and made it seem a good, even valiant idea. In exchange for collective guilt, whites have given King lesser victories, including a national holiday.”
³⁹²

It can be fairly said that—to a large extent—Dr. King knowingly sacrificed a great many years of his life, in a philosophical gamble to advance the civil and human rights movements. The final result of that wager has not yet been determined:

“In the end, King used the inevitability of a premature death to argue for social change and measure our commitment to truth.”
³⁹³

That commitment to truth, from a historical standpoint, is still in the process of being measured. One would think that the moral yardstick used to
take
that measurement should, in fairness, be one of which Dr. King would approve. And it can be fairly said that the social change for which he argued—economic equality in a nation which is striving for the progress of humanity, rather than simply competing for commercial dominance—has not yet been achieved. The man had a lot more in mind than just a national holiday.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

For a quick course in the amazing evidentiary history of the alleged murder weapon,see:

“Who Killed Martin Luther King?”,

“Judge Brown Slams Memphis over the King Case”, Dick Russell,
Probe Magazine,
July- August 1998.
http://ctka.net/pr798-judge.html

“A King-Sized Conspiracy”, Dick Russell,
1999, High Times

American Conspiracies:
Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies that the Government Tells Us, Jesse Ventura & Dick Russell, 2010

“Questions left hanging by James Earl Ray’s death”, BBC News,, April 23, 1998.
http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/82893.stm

The Martin Luther King Assassination:
New Revelations on the Conspiracy and Cover-Up, Philip H. Melanson, 1994

“The Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis”, Jim Douglass, Spring 2000,
Probe Magazine.

Murder in Memphis:
The FBI and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Mark Lane & Dick Gregory, 1993

Who Killed Dr. Martin Luther King?:
The True Story by the Alleged Assassin, James Earl Ray, James Earl Ray, 1997

The Bureau:
My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI, FBI Deputy Director William Sullivan; 1979

“Testimony of William Schaap, King Family vs. Jowers and Other Unknown Co- Conspirators”, 1999, Circuit Court of Tennessee, Division 4, The Honorable James E. Swearingen presiding.
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/MLKv9Schaap.html

“Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, DC”, United States Government Printing Office, 1979

“Overlooked Evidence in the Murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”, Ted Wilburn, Special Correspondent
to WhatReallyHappened.com, 1999.
http://whatreallyhappened. com/WRHARTICLES/ARTICLE1/overlooked.php

“Martin Luther King - The Fatal Shot Came From a Different Direction”, Michael Rivero, 2000,
WhatReallyHappened.com
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/ ARTICLE1/overlooked.php