(NYDailyNews.com) Was MLK's assassination part of a conspiracy?
Yes, says the new book "The Awful Grace of God: Religious Terrorism, White Supremacy and the Unsolved Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.," by historians Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock. In it, they argue that James Earl Ray, who felled Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis on April 4, 1968, was driven to murder the civil rights hero because a bounty had been put on his head by the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups.
Given the widespread animosity towards King, this is not hard to believe. But while many have suspected that Ray did not act alone, Wexler and Hancock, who are amateur historians, seem to have gotten further than most in proving a wider intent to silence King, partly by sifting through a treasure trove of FBI documents they were able to obtain through Freedom of Information Law requests.
They argue that Ray first learned about a bounty on King proffered by the White Knights while he was serving time in prison (their research includes testimony from a fellow inmate of Ray at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas). That bounty would grow to $100,000 by the time Ray decided to act.
Of course, he never got the money. A manhunt followed the King assassination (as chronicled most recently by Hampton Sides in his excellent "Hellhound on His Trail") and Ray was finally captured at London's Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968. Sentenced to 99 years in prison, he remained at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Tennessee until his death in 1998 at the age of 70.
And while some may dispute the conspiratorial conclusions reached by Wexler and Hancock, their greater point is inarguable: Plenty of people wanted King dead, and they were willing to pay any price to have someone spill his blood.
Posted By: Siebra Muhammad
Wednesday, April 18th 2012 at 12:15PM
You can also
click
here to view all posts by this author...
