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Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-1956)

Martin Luther King's Speech: 'I Have a Dream' - The Full ... - ABC News

Martin Luther King - President Lyndon B. Johnson Signs Civil ...

Oct. 14, 1964 | Martin Luther King Awarded Nobel Peace Prize ...

March 7 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches -

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  1. Happy Birthday To Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.!
     

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     Born Michael King Jr. on this date in Atlanta to parents Rev. Michael, Sr. (later Martin Luther, Sr.) and Alberta, he would later change his name ...

  The King Legacy of Service

  The Corporation for National and Community Service MLK Day Legacy of Service videos feature civil rights luminaries Congressman John Lewis, Ruby Bridges, Reverend Dr. Joseph E. Lowery, and former U.S. Senator Harris Wofford remembering Dr. King and his legacy of service. The PSAs remind us of the importance of keeping Dr. King's legacy of service alive and challenge us to make service a part of our everyday lives.
   Martin Luther King Memorial
  This weekend is a great time to visit the Memorial. National Park Service Rangers discuss King's role in the Civil Rights movement daily. On January 18, 2016, at 12 p.m. the National Park Service will host a wreathlaying service in observance of the birthday-anniversary for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

• MLK Drum Major for Service

  MLK Drum Majors for Service are the helping hands who perform extraordinary everyday acts of service with reliability and commitment, but who seldom receive recognition. The MLK Drum Major for Service recognition is an opportunity to acknowledge that work and share stories of those leaders in your community. Learn more.
  

  What is the MLK Day of Service?

  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "Life's most persistent and urgent question is: 'What are you doing for others?'" Each year, Americans across the country answer that question by coming together on the King Holiday to serve their neighbors and communities. The MLK Day of Service is a part of United We Serve, the President's national call to service initiative. It calls for Americans from all walks of life to work together to provide solutions to our most pressing national problems.

Complete Transcript of the Martin Luther King, Jr ...

Complete Transcript of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Assassination Conspiracy Trial ... Olivia Catling, neighborhood resident around Lorraine Motel. Mr ...

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Dissident Voice : Who Killed Martin Luther King?

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Across from the Lorraine Motel was Fire Station no. 2. Who ordered ... to the question did Loyd Jowers participate in a conspiracy to do harm to Dr. Martin Luther King, your ...

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In the complaint filed by the King family, "King versus Jowers and Other Unknown Co-Conspirators," the only named defendant, Loyd Jowers, was never their primary concern. As soon became evident in court, the real defendants were the anonymous co-conspirators who stood in the shadows behind Jowers, the former owner of a Memphis bar and grill. The Kings and Pepper were in effect charging U.S. intelligence agencies -- particularly the FBI and Army intelligence -- with organizing, subcontracting, and covering up the assassination. Such a charge guarantees almost insuperable obstacles to its being argued in a court within the United States. Judicially it is an unwelcome beast.

Many qualifiers have been attached to the verdict in the King case. It came not in criminal court but in civil court, where the standards of evidence are much lower than in criminal court. (For example, the plaintiffs used unsworn testimony made on audiotapes and videotapes.) Furthermore, the King family as plaintiffs and Jowers as defendant agreed ahead of time on much of the evidence.

But these observations are not entirely to the point. Because of the government's "sovereign immunity," it is not possible to put a U.S. intelligence agency in the dock of a U.S. criminal court. Such a step would require authorization by the federal government, which is not likely to indict itself. Thanks to the conjunction of a civil court, an independent judge with a sense of history, and a courageous family and lawyer, a spiritual breakthrough to an unspeakable truth occurred in Memphis. It allowed at least a few people (and hopefully many more through them) to see the forces behind King's martyrdom and to feel the responsibility we all share for it through our government. In the end, twelve jurors, six black and six white, said to everyone willing to hear: guilty as charged.

We can also thank the unlikely figure of Loyd Jowers for providing a way into that truth.

Loyd Jowers: When the frail, 73-year-old Jowers became ill after three days in court, Judge Swearengen excused him. Jowers did not testify and said through his attorney, Lewis Garrison, that he would plead the Fifth Amendment if subpoenaed. His discretion was too late. In 1993 against the advice of Garrison, Jowers had gone public. Prompted by William Pepper's progress as James Earl Ray's attorney in uncovering Jowers's role in the assassination, Jowers told his story to Sam Donaldson on Prime Time Live. He said he had been asked to help in the murder of King and was told there would be a decoy (Ray) in the plot. He was also told that the police "wouldn't be there that night."

In that interview, the transcript of which was read to the jury in the Memphis courtroom, Jowers said the man who asked him to help in the murder was a Mafia-connected produce dealer named Frank Liberto. Liberto, now deceased, had a courier deliver $100,000 for Jowers to hold at his restaurant, Jim's Grill, the back door of which opened onto the dense bushes across from the Lorraine Motel. Jowers said he was visited the day before the murder by a man named Raul, who brought a rifle in a box.

As Mike Vinson reported in the March-April Probe, other witnesses testified to their knowledge of Liberto's involvement in King's slaying. Store-owner John McFerren said he arrived around 5:15 pm, April 4, 1968, for a produce pick-up at Frank Liberto's warehouse in Memphis. (King would be shot at 6:0l pm.) When he approached the warehouse office, McFerren overheard Liberto on the phone inside saying, "Shoot the son-of-a-bitch on the balcony."

Café-owner Lavada Addison, a friend of Liberto's in the late 1970's, testified that Liberto had told her he "had Martin Luther King killed." Addison's son, Nathan Whitlock, said when he learned of this conversation he asked Liberto point-blank if he had killed King.

"[Liberto] said, `I didn't kill the nigger but I had it done.' I said, `What about that other son-of-a-bitch taking credit for it?' He says, `Ahh, he wasn't nothing but a troublemaker from Missouri. He was a front man . . . a setup man.'"

The jury also heard a tape recording of a two-hour-long confession Jowers made at a fall 1998 meeting with Martin Luther King's son Dexter and former UN Ambassador Andrew Young. On the tape Jowers says that meetings to plan the assassination occurred at Jim's Grill. He said the planners included undercover Memphis Police Department officer Marrell McCollough (who now works for the Central Intelligence Agency, and who is referenced in the trial transcript as Merrell McCullough), MPD Lieutentant Earl Clark (who died in 1987), a third police officer, and two men Jowers did not know but thought were federal agents.

Young, who witnessed the assassination, can be heard on the tape identifying McCollough as the man kneeling beside King's body on the balcony in a famous photograph. According to witness Colby Vernon Smith, McCollough had infiltrated a Memphis community organizing group, the Invaders, which was working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In his trial testimony Young said the MPD intelligence agent was "the guy who ran up [the balcony stairs] with us to see Martin."

Jowers says on the tape that right after the shot was fired he received a smoking rifle at the rear door of Jim's Grill from Clark. He broke the rifle down into two pieces and wrapped it in a tablecloth. Raul picked it up the next day. Jowers said he didn't actually see who fired the shot that killed King, but thought it was Clark, the MPD's best marksman.

Young testified that his impression from the 1998 meeting was that the aging, ailing Jowers "wanted to get right with God before he died, wanted to confess it and be free of it." Jowers denied, however, that he knew the plot's purpose was to kill King -- a claim that seemed implausible to Dexter King and Young. Jowers has continued to fear jail, and he had directed Garrison to defend him on the grounds that he didn't know the target of the plot was King. But his interview with Donaldson suggests he was not naïve on this point.

Loyd Jowers's story opened the door to testimony that explored the systemic nature of the murder in seven other basic areas:

• background to the assassination;
• local conspiracy;
• the crime scene;
• the rifle;
• Raul;
• broader conspiracy;
• cover-up.

1. Background to the assassination
   James Lawson, King's friend and an organizer with SCLC, testified that King's stands on Vietnam and the Poor People's Campaign had created enemies in Washington. He said King's speech at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, which condemned the Vietnam War and identified the U.S. government as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," provoked intense hostility in the White House and FBI.
   Hatred and fear of King deepened, Lawson said, in response to his plan to hold the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C. King wanted to shut down the nation's capital in the spring of 1968 through massive civil disobedience until the government agreed to abolish poverty. King saw the Memphis sanitation workers' strike as the beginning of a nonviolent revolution that would redistribute income.
   "I have no doubt," Lawson said, "that the government viewed all this seriously enough to plan his assassination."
   Coretta Scott King testified that her husband had to return to Memphis in early April 1968 because of a violent demonstration there for which he had been blamed. Moments after King arrived in Memphis to join the sanitation workers' march there on March 28, 1968, the scene turned violent -- subverted by government provocateurs, Lawson said. Thus King had to return to Memphis on April 3 and prepare for a truly nonviolent march, Mrs. King said, to prove SCLC could still carry out a nonviolent campaign in Washington.
    

1. Local conspiracy
   On the night of April 3, 1968, Floyd E. Newsum, a black firefighter and civil rights activist, heard King's "I've Been to the Mountain Top" speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis. On his return home, Newsum returned a phone call from his lieutenant and was told he had been temporarily transferred, effective April 4, from Fire Station 2, located across the street from the Lorraine Motel, to Fire Station 31. Newsum testified that he was not needed at the new station. However, he was needed at his old station because his departure left it "out of service unless somebody else was detailed to my company in my stead." After making many queries, Newsum was eventually told he had been transferred by request of the police department.
   The only other black firefighter at Fire Station 2, Norvell E. Wallace, testified that he, too, received orders from his superior officer on the night of April 3 for a temporary transfer to a fire station far removed from the Lorraine Motel. He was later told vaguely that he had been threatened.
   Wallace guessed it was because "I was putting out fires," he told the jury with a smile. Asked if he ever received a satisfactory explanation for his transfer Wallace answered, "No. Never did. Not to this day."
   In the March-April Probe, Mike Vinson described the similar removal of Ed Redditt, a black Memphis Police Department detective, from his Fire Station 2 surveillance post two hours before King's murder.
   To understand the Redditt incident, it is important to note that it was Redditt himself who initiated his watch on Dr. King from the firehouse across the street. Redditt testified that when King's party and the police accompanying them (including Detective Redditt) arrived from the airport at the Lorraine Motel on April 3, he "noticed something that was unusual." When Inspector Don Smith, who was in charge of security, told Redditt he could leave, Redditt "noticed there was nobody else there. In the past when we were assigned to Dr. King [when Redditt had been part of a black security team for King], we stayed with him. I saw nobody with him. So I went across the street and asked the Fire Department could we come in and observe from the rear, which we did." Given Redditt's concerns for King's safety, his particular watch on the Lorraine may not have fit into others' plans.
   Redditt testified that late in the afternoon of April 4, MPD Intelligence Officer Eli Arkin came to Fire Station 2 to take him to Central Headquarters. There Police and Fire Director Frank Holloman (formerly an FBI agent for 25 years, seven of them as supervisor of J. Edgar Hoover's office) ordered Redditt home, against his wishes and accompanied by Arkin. The reason Holloman gave Redditt for his removal from the King watch Redditt had initiated the day before was that his life had been threatened.
   In an interview after the trial, Redditt told me the story of how his 1978 testimony on this question before the House Select Committee on Assassinations was part of a heavily pressured cover-up. "It was a farce," he said, "a total farce."
   Redditt had been subpoenaed by the HSCA to testify, as he came to realize, not so much on his strange removal from Fire Station 2 as the fact that he had spoken about it openly to writers and researchers. The HSCA focused narrowly on the discrepancy between Redditt's surveiling King (as he was doing) and acting as security (an impression Redditt had given writers interviewing him) in order to discredit the story of his removal. Redditt was first grilled by the committee for eight straight hours in a closed executive session. After a day of hostile questioning, Redditt finally said late in the afternoon, "I came here as a friend of the investigation, not as an enemy of the investigation. You don't want to deal with the truth." He told the committee angrily that if the secret purpose behind the King conspiracy was, like the JFK conspiracy, "to protect the country, just tell the American people! They'll be happy! And quit fooling the folks and trying to pull the wool over their eyes."
   When the closed hearing was over, Redditt received a warning call from a friend in the White House who said, "Man, your life isn't worth a wooden nickel."
   Redditt said his public testimony the next day "was a set-up": "The bottom line on that one was that Senator Baker decided that I wouldn't go into this open hearing without an attorney. When the lawyer and I arrived at the hearing, we were ushered right back out across town to the executive director in charge of the investigation. [We] looked through a book, to look at the questions and answers."
   "So in essence what they were saying was: `This is what you're going to answer to, and this is how you're going to answer.' It was all made up -- all designed, questions and answers, what to say and what not to say. A total farce."
   Former MPD Captain Jerry Williams followed Redditt to the witness stand. Williams had been responsible for forming a special security unit of black officers whenever King came to Memphis (the unit Redditt had served on earlier). Williams took pride in providing the best possible protection for Dr. King, which included, he said, advising him never to stay at the Lorraine "because we couldn't furnish proper security there." ("It was just an open view," he explained to me later, "Anybody could . . . There was no protection at all. To me that was a set-up from the very beginning.")

Hatred and fear of King deepened, Lawson said, in response to his plan to hold the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C. King wanted to shut down the nation's capital in the spring of 1968 through massive civil disobedience until the government agreed to abolish poverty. King saw the Memphis sanitation workers' strike as the beginning of a nonviolent revolution that would redistribute income. "I have no doubt," Lawson said, "that the government viewed all this seriously enough to plan his assassination."

For King's April 3, 1968 arrival, however, Williams was for some reason not asked to form the special black bodyguard. He was told years later by his inspector (a man whom Jowers identified as a participant in the planning meetings at Jim's Grill) that the change occurred because somebody in King's entourage had asked specifically for no black security officers. Williams told the jury he was bothered by the omission "even to this day."

Leon Cohen, a retired New York City police officer, testified that in 1968 he had become friendly with the Lorraine Motel's owner and manager, Walter Bailey (now deceased). On the morning after King's murder, Cohen spoke with a visibly upset Bailey outside his office at the Lorraine. Bailey told Cohen about a strange request that had forced him to change King's room to the location where he was shot.

Bailey explained that the night before King's arrival he had received a call "from a member of Dr. King's group in Atlanta." The caller (whom Bailey said he knew but referred to only by the pronoun "he") wanted the motel owner to change King's room. Bailey said he was adamantly opposed to moving King, as instructed, from an inner court room behind the motel office (which had better security) to an outside balcony room exposed to public view.

"If they had listened to me," Bailey said, "this wouldn't have happened."

Philip Melanson, author of the Martin Luther King Assassination (1991), described his investigation into the April 4 pullback of four tactical police units that had been patrolling the immediate vicinity of the Lorraine Motel. Melanson asked MPD Inspector Sam Evans (now deceased), commander of the units, why they were pulled back the morning of April 4, in effect making an assassin's escape much easier. Evans said he gave the order at the request of a local pastor connected with King's party, Rev. Samuel Kyles. (Melanson wrote in his book that Kyles emphatically denied making any such request.) Melanson said the idea that MPD security would be determined at such a time by a local pastor's request made no sense whatsoever.

Olivia Catling lived a block away from the Lorraine on Mulberry Street. Catling had planned to walk down the street the evening of April 4 in the hope of catching a glimpse of King at the motel. She testified that when she heard the shot a little after six o'clock, she said, "Oh, my God, Dr. King is at that hotel!" She ran with her two children to the corner of Mulberry and Huling streets, just north of the Lorraine. She saw a man in a checkered shirt come running out of the alley beside a building across from the Lorraine. The man jumped into a green 1965 Chevrolet just as a police car drove up behind him. He gunned the Chevrolet around the corner and up Mulberry past Catling's house moving her to exclaim, "It's going to take us six months to pay for the rubber he's burning up!!" The police, she said, ignored the man and blocked off a street, leaving his car free to go the opposite way.

I visited Catling in her home, and she told me the man she had seen running was not James Earl Ray. "I will go into my grave saying that was not Ray, because the gentleman I saw was heavier than Ray."

"The police," she told me, "asked not one neighbor [around the Lorraine], `What did you see?' Thirty-one years went by. Nobody came and asked one question. I often thought about that. I even had nightmares over that, because they never said anything. How did they let him get away?"

Catling also testified that from her vantage point on the corner of Mulberry and Huling she could see a fireman standing alone across from the motel when the police drove up. She heard him say to the police, "The shot came from that clump of bushes," indicating the heavily overgrown brushy area facing the Lorraine and adjacent to Fire Station 2.

3. The crime scene
   Earl Caldwell was a New York Times reporter in his room at the Lorraine Motel the evening of April 4. In videotaped testimony, Caldwell said he heard what he thought was a bomb blast at 6:00 p.m. When he ran to the door and looked out, he saw a man crouched in the heavy part of the bushes across the street. The man was looking over at the Lorraine's balcony. Caldwell wrote an article about the figure in the bushes but was never questioned about what he had seen by any authorities.
   In a 1993 affidavit from former SCLC official James Orange that was read into the record, Orange said that on April 4, "James Bevel and I were driven around by Marrell McCollough, a person who at that time we knew to be a member of the Invaders, a local community organizing group, and who we subsequently learned was an undercover agent for the Memphis Police Department and who now works for the Central Intelligence Agency . . . [After the shot, when Orange saw Dr. King's leg dangling over the balcony], I looked back and saw the smoke. It couldn't have been more than five to ten seconds. The smoke came out of the brush area on the opposite side of the street from the Lorraine Motel. I saw it rise up from the bushes over there. From that day to this time I have never had any doubt that the fatal shot, the bullet which ended Dr. King's life, was fired by a sniper concealed in the brush area behind the derelict buildings.
   "I also remember then turning my attention back to the balcony and seeing Marrell McCollough up on the balcony kneeling over Dr. King, looking as though he was checking Dr. King for life signs.
   "I also noticed, quite early the next morning around 8 or 9 o'clock, t