UNLOCKED🔓— The U.S. Government (Probably) Killed MLK
Let's not miss the forest for the trees.
Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a peculiar holiday. On the one hand, the day celebrates the life of a civil rights icon who was one of the few people to change the United States for the better. On the other hand, the U.S. government created the holiday to promote a sanitized version of Dr. King that omits crucial parts of his message. By ignoring King’s class advocacy, anti-imperialist critiques, and socialist economics, the government has sanded the square peg of MLK down to fit the round hole of what I call the A.P. History worldview: the United States is The Best Country Ever, and any problems can be solved by politely working in the established political system.
As I’ve written previously, this whitewashed view of MLK was purposely constructed by the political and media establishment. For example, the quote attributed to MLK in which he said Malcolm X was doing a “disservice to Black people” was entirely false. A Playboy reporter made it up, then repeated it to the point it became fact. In reality, MLK disagreed with X’s advocacy of armed self-defense but shared his critiques that economic injustice and American imperialism could not be separated from the struggle for Black freedom. He also encouraged his followers to keep an open mind and agreed that his path to Black liberation wasn’t the only one.
While there’s no shortage of MLK quotes and speeches highlighting the ocean-sized delta between the real Martin Luther King Jr. and the government’s propagandized version, nothing shatters the state-sponsored image like the King family’s victorious lawsuit alleging their father was the victim of a state-orchestrated criminal conspiracy.
The global network of capital essentially functions
To separate the worker from the means of production.
And the FBI killed Martin Luther King
Private property's inherently theft
And neoliberal fascists are destroying the left
And every politician, every cop on the street
Protects the interests of the pedophilic corporate elite.”
- “That’s How The World Works,” Bo Burham,
King Family v. Jowers and Other Unknown Co-Conspirators
“The government killed Martin Luther King” sounds like something you’d find carved into the door of a shopping mall bathroom stall. I wish this statement could be written off as a tin-foil-hat delusion. But the U.S. justice system says otherwise.
In 1999, after decades of suspicion that the official story of MLK’s murder was bogus, the King family filed a civil lawsuit arguing there was a vast conspiracy to kill their father. The defendant was Lloyd Jowers, the owner of Jim’s Grill, a restaurant across the street from the Lorraine Motel where King was shot. Six years earlier, Jowers had told a reporter he’d paid MLK’s killer on behalf of a mob boss. Most importantly, Jowers said the shooter was not James Earl Ray, who’d been convicted of the crime. Jowers claimed that he coordinated the assassination with a mafioso, Memphis police officers, and a mysterious man who went by “Raoul.”
According to the King family lawyers, the mafia and the federal government conspired to silence King’s criticism of the Vietnam War (something no one doubts the government wanted) and stop King’s upcoming Poor People’s March on Washington. Interestingly, Jowers’ legal team did not deny this. They admitted there was a conspiracy to kill King, but that their client’s involvement was “minor” and not enough to conclude he was at fault.
After three hours of deliberation, the half-White, half-Black jury returned a verdict in favor of the plaintiffs. They concluded there was a conspiracy to kill Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which Lloyd Jowers had participated in. The King family was awarded the damages they sought. A meager $100. Money wasn’t their goal. Only the truth.1
"It's been painful and also has been bittersweet. Bitter because of the tragedy, obviously, but liberating in the sense and sweet that we have been vindicated and ultimately that the significance of this historical verdict that rewrites history is liberating.” — Dexter King, MLK’s son, following the trial.
But the King family isn’t the only one that doubts the official story.
In 1998, FBI agent Donald Wilson came forward and stated he’d found papers in James Earl Ray’s car, which mentioned the “Raul” Jowers spoke of (though he spelled it differently). Wilson claimed the discovered documents also had the phone number of an FBI field office. According to Wilson, the papers were later stolen from him by “someone who worked for the White House.”
While James Earl Ray initially pled guilty to the killing, he spent the rest of his life denying he was the shooter. He claimed he had been framed by someone named “Raul.” Though Ray was a known racist (he supported George Wallace), the King family strongly believed he was a patsy.
“The overwhelming evidence that identified someone else, not James Earl Ray, as the shooter, and that Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame.”— Coretta Scott King, MLK’s widow, 19992
“We know it wasn’t James Earl Ray. Whoever shot [MLK], they were precise. James Earl Ray couldn’t be that precise.” — Bernice King, MLK’s daughter, 20213
Naturally, the U.S. government strongly disputes the conspiracy allegations. Following the trial, the Justice Department released a report arguing that it had looked into both Jowers' and Wilson’s allegations and found that there was “no reliable evidence of a government-directed conspiracy.” (Kind of like how they’ve decided there’s no need to investigate the ICE murder of Renee Nicole Good.)
While the DOJ paints Jowers as someone seeking notoriety and wealth (which is possible but doesn’t explain why his legal team admitted to a conspiracy in court), they stop short of saying the same for Wilson. Instead, they praised his commitment to the Bureau and dismissed his claims as “not credible.”4 However, the Justice Department does admit that King was being watched by a Memphis police surveillance team at the time of his killing. According to them, the team was “only watching.” That’s hardly reassuring. The only difference between a surveillance team and a sniper is whether the magnification lens is attached to a camera or a gun.
“The only relevant non-hearsay eyewitness accounts presented at the trial suggest nothing more than the possibility that Dr. King, like other civil rights activists who were the subjects of government surveillance in the 1960s, may have been watched by military personnel around the time of the assassination. However, we found nothing to indicate that surveillance at any time had any connection with the assassination.” — The DOJ’s “Overview of Investigation Of Allegations Regarding The Assassination Of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”
It’s essentially a “trust me, bro” from the U.S. government, which has since admitted it tried to blackmail King into committing suicide.
A Pattern of Violence
Many will doubt the claim that anyone except James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King. And I admit the lack of a smoking gun leaves us without a definitive conclusion. (Hence the “Possibly” in this article’s title.) However, the weird circumstances surrounding King’s killings cannot be viewed in a vacuum. The murder should be understood in the full context of America’s Cold War police state, which viewed leftist movements such as civil rights, anti-Vietnam War protests, and feminist campaigns as secret communist plots to destroy the country. This imagined fear led to harsh repression of anyone to the left of Jimmy Carter. The history of such reactionary actions shows the government was more than willing to surveil, manipulate, and murder figures similar to Martin Luther King Jr.
Most of this domestic surveillance came from the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation, which we know King was a target of. Shorthand for “Counter-Intelligence Program,” COINTELPRO was the FBI’s domestic spying and assassination efforts to discredit and silence the anti-racist left. Officially running from 1956 to 1971, FBI agents targeted Black leaders, socialists, anti-war protesters, and even animal rights groups on vague notions of anti-American activity. While much of COINTELPRO focused on public humiliation to discredit popular leaders, such as a plan to slut-shame actress Jean Seberg after she supported the Black Panthers, outright violence was not uncommon.
The most infamous COINTELPRO operation was the assassination of Fred Hampton, a young Marxist-Leninist leader of the Chicago Black Panthers. In 1969, a Chicago Police and FBI informant named William O’Neal drugged Hampton before an early morning police raid on a Black Panther safe house. (O’Neal later confirmed his treachery, which was adapted into the 2021 movie Judas and the Black Messiah.) During the raid, the police killed Hampton and claimed it was a “shoot out,” though evidence points to a targeted assassination. The cops fired over ninety bullets at the Panthers. The Panthers only shot once, which is believed to have come from a shotgun dropped after a sentry was killed. Autopsies confirmed the drugs had kept Hampton unconscious during the ordeal and that he was killed by two close-range shots to his head, execution style.5 Former congressman Bobby Rush, himself a founder of the Illinois Black Panther Party, introduced an act to reveal the FBI’s involvement in this killing, but the effort was stalled in Congress.6
Then there’s the assassination of MLK’s counterpart, Malcolm X. On February 21, 1965, three members of the Nation of Islam allegedly shot X before his address to the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Malcolm had publicly broken with the Nation and was on record saying he believed they would try to kill him. But much like the assassination of King, the case is surrounded by clues of government involvement. Two of the alleged killers, Muhammad Aziz and Kalil Islam, were released from prison in the eighties and fully exonerated in 2021. They brought a lawsuit alleging the FBI framed them, won, and received $36 million in damages.7 The third man confessed to killing X but claimed he was part of a different four-man team. The other three men he named were never prosecuted. In 2024, X’s daughters filed a lawsuit alleging the CIA, NYPD, and FBI played a role in the assassination.8
When taken in conjunction with the American government’s violent domestic practices during the civil rights period, I find the circumstantial evidence of a government plot to assassinate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. more plausible than not. While I understand why some readers might still lean towards the official story, I believe it is impossible to nail down indisputable evidence of government involvement in illegal acts such as this. Intelligence and police agencies routinely use “cutouts,” non-state actors who they can deny any connection with, to do their dirty work — the mob, Black Panther informants, movie producers, Cuban exiles, “Raul or “Rauol” etc., etc. There’s rarely any paperwork, just a few orders passed between connections in bar booths and unremarkable cars. Cutouts are used because they’re easy to dispose of, such as the Cuban exiles used during the Bay of Pigs invasion or the informant who killed Fred Hampton. The mob, which had a close relationship with American intelligence and federal law enforcement since serving as spies during World War II, opposed populist movements and was willing to help agencies navigate the unspoken rules of the criminal underworld. They were also fierce anti-communists. Fidel Castro’s Revolution had kicked them out of Cuba, which had previously been their base of operations for smuggling drugs and guns into the U.S. After all, Jack Ruby, who shot and silenced alleged JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, was known for his mob connections. But that’s a story for another time.
This is why I believe that if you’re trying to understand the complete actions of the U.S. government in clandestine operations and political assassinations, only prescribing to what is 100% established fact is likely to leave you uninformed. While there’s no presidential confession admitting to MLK’s murder, what has been confirmed paints a picture: The FBI and the American government wanted MLK dead, Loyd Jowers admitted to partaking in a mob-led assassination, the mob was close with intelligence agencies during this time, Memphis police admitted to having high-powered scopes on MLK when he was shot, and America’s federal, state, and local police forces have shown no qualms about using murder as a way to suppress Black liberation voices. Throw in the surrounding weirdness, such as an FBI agent’s claim he found a connection between James Earl Ray and the Bureau, the mysterious “Raul” named by multiple people involved, and the continued insistence by those closest to Dr. King that he was the victim of the government plot, and we get a clear view of the forest, even if we’re missing a few trees.
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In Solidarity — Joe
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mlks-family-feels-vindicated/
https://www.history.com/news/who-killed-martin-luther-king-james-earl-ray-mlk-assassination
https://www.yahoo.com/news/bernice-king-maintains-father-assassination-170000027.html
https://www.justice.gov/crt/overview-investigation-allegations-regarding-assassination-dr-martin-luther-king-jr
https://digitalchicagohistory.org/exhibits/show/fred-hampton-50th/the-assassination#_ftn9
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/fred-hampton-black-panthers-fbi-surveillance/2021/05/04/2b12f826-acd7-11eb-b476-c3b287e52a01_story.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/muhammad-aziz-khalil-islam-to-receive-36-million-for-wrongful-convictions-in-malcolm-x-killing/
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/15/nx-s1-5193329/malcolm-x-assassination-lawsuit#:~:text=NEW%20YORK%20%E2%80%94%20Three%20daughters%20of,of%20the%20civil%20rights%20leader.
Good to keep in mind now that it seems we're entering yet another time of progressive voices being framed as "domestic terrorists" with state agencies granted the power to surveil and arrest with impunity.
Great read. Your thoughts on RFK???