Socialist Action /January 2002
Why was M.L. King Murdered?
By ROLAND SHEPPARD
From the time of Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968, the many
inconsistencies in the government's assertion that James Earl Ray was the
sole assassin have been well publicized.
In 1979, after the FBI's "Cointelpro" disruption operations
were exposed, the House of Representatives' Select Committee on Assassinations,
under pressure from these exposures and the civil rights movement, convened
an "investigation" with the purpose of reconfirming the government's
version of the murder.
Immediately after it released the report, affirming that Ray was the
lone assassin, this committee sealed all of the evidence it had in its possession
for 50 years (until 2029). Thus, we were left with nothing but the "integrity"
of the members of Congress to justify their conclusions rather than the
facts.
More recently, however, new facts on King's assassination came to light.
On Dec. 8, 1999, a jury awarded Coretta Scott King and her family $100
in damages resulting from a conspiracy to murder her late husband. The trial
was initiated by the admission of Lloyd Jowers on national TV in 1993 that
he had hired King's assassin as a favor to an underworld figure who was
a friend.
At the conclusion of the trial, Dexter King, Dr. King's son, said, "After
today, we don't want questions like, 'Do you believe James Earl Ray killed
your father?' I've been hearing that all my life. No, I don't, and this
is the end of it. This was the most incredible cover-up of the century,
and now it has been exposed. Now we can finally move on with our lives."
The King family, along with their attorney, William Pepper, plan to lobby
historians and elected officials to get the official record of the assassination
changed.
There have always been many unanswered questions about King's assassination.
From the beginning it was clear that the FBI was involved to one degree
or another. The FBI "leaked" the information to the Memphis, Tenn.,
press that King was going to be staying at a "white hotel" a couple
of days prior to his arrival in the city. This forced King to stay at the
less secure Lorraine Motel.
The question remains: Why would the government be part of the conspiracy
against King? Why would they want him dead?
A key to understanding the government's motive is that Martin Luther
King had a different political perspective at the time of his death than
when he made his 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech. His final speeches
and actions reveal that he, like Malcolm X, had begun to view the struggle
for equality as an economic struggle and the capitalist economic system
as the problem.
At a speech given at Stanford University in April 1967-one year before
his death-titled the "The Other America," King addressed the problem
of the rich and the poor in this country. Instead of his "dream,"
he talked about the nightmare of the economic conditions suffered by Blacks.
He alluded to "work-starved men searching for jobs that did not
exist," about the Black population living on a "lonely island
of poverty surrounded by an ocean of material prosperity," and about
living in a "triple ghetto of race, poverty, and human misery."
He explained that after World War II, the unemployment rate of Blacks
and whites was equal and that in the years between then and 1967, Black
unemployment had become double the rate for whites. He also spoke about
how Black workers made half the wages of white workers.
From his experience when he started his campaign for equality in Chicago
and elsewhere in the North, King concluded in this speech that to deal with
this problem of the "Two Americas" was "much more difficult
than to get rid of legal segregation." He pointed out that the northern
liberals, who had given moral and financial support to the struggle against
Jim Crow in the South, would not give such support to the efforts to end
economic segregation.
In this speech King also opposed the war in Vietnam. He criticized the
government for spending hundreds of millions of dollars for war and not
for equality. He stated his goal "to organize and mobilize forces to
fight for economic equality."
In his last letter, requesting support for the "March on Washington
for Jobs and Freedom" in 1968, he wrote: "It is a cruel jest to
say to a bootless man to pick himself up by his own bootstraps." "Black
people", he said, "were impoverished aliens in their own land."
A year earlier, King described the course that he was planning to take
in the fight for economic equality: "It was obdurate government callousness
to misery that first stoked the flames of rage and frustration. With unemployment
a scourge in Negro ghettos, the government still tinkers with half-hearted
measures, refuses still to become an employer of last resort. It asks the
business community to solve the problems as though its past failures qualified
it for success.
"We've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We
are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace. But
one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs
restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. Who owns this oil?
... Who owns the iron ore? ... Why is it that people have to pay water bills
in a world that is two-thirds water?"
"There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from
paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital
worker, laundry worker, maid, or day laborer. "There is nothing except
shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum-and livable-income
for every American family. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish,
to prevent us from reordering our priorities
"The coalition of an energized section of labor, Negroes, unemployed,
and welfare recipients may be the source of power that reshapes economic
relationships and ushers in a breakthrough to a new level of social reform."
These words have even more meaning in today's world. At that time, the
stock market was below 1000 points. Today it is above 10,000 points, and
yet living conditions for millions of African Americans are still lower
than after World War II.
At the time of their assassinations, both Martin Luther King and Malcolm
X were embarking on a course in opposition to the capitalist system. It
is clear from reading and listening to their final speeches that they had
both evolved to similar conclusions of capitalism's role in the maintenance
of racism. That is why they were "neutralized."
Unlike Malcolm X, who never got the opportunity to act upon his convictions,
Martin Luther King was organizing a movement to obtain his stated goals
when he was assassinated in Memphis. He was in Memphis to build "the
coalition of an energized section of labor, Negroes, unemployed, and welfare
recipients" in support of municipal garbage workers on strike.
If such a force had been launched, the whole power of the antiwar and
civil rights movement in the 1960s could have transformed the labor movement
and become "the source of power that reshapes economic relationships
and ushers in a breakthrough to a new level of social reform."
Such a coalition, as King envisioned it 34 years ago, is needed today.
The best tribute to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X would be to begin anew
to build a movement based on the ideas and the concepts that they had developed
before their untimely deaths.
Socialist Action /January 2002 |