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CHAPTER 1
TARGETING MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
On April 3, 1968, an American Airlines flight from Atlanta to Memphis was stuck at the departure gate. The pilot made a general passenger announcement that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was on board and that the airline had received a bomb threat. For everyone's safety, they would have to delay their takeoff until all the baggage had been examined.
Only a week earlier, King had arrived late in Memphis to join a protest march for striking African American sanitation workers who were paid lower wages than their white coworkers and who were forced to work in the worst of weather. The protest began to turn violent, and one of the marchers was shot and killed. Now King was returning to deliver a speech at Memphis's Mason Temple, the world headquarters of the Church of God in Christ, and to lead another protest march. As his flight finally departed, Dr. King was once again reminded that his life was continually at risk.
King was booked at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, sharing a room with his longtime friend Reverend Ralph Abernathy. They had stayed in room 306 so often that it was jokingly referred to as the "King-Abernathy Suite." A thunderstorm brewed that evening as King left for the Mason Temple to deliver an address that would be remembered as one of his greatest — and one that was eerily prescient. As his speech drew to a close, he referred to the day's earlier bomb threat:
And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the Threats ... or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?
Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!
The next day, April 4, 1968, James Earl Ray, a forty-year-old escaped convict from Jefferson City's Missouri State Penitentiary, rented a room at Bessie Brewer's rooming house, located across the street from the Lorraine Motel. Whether Ray came to Memphis with King's murder as his goal, or whether he was, as he later claimed, manipulated by outside forces to come to Memphis, his name would soon join those of the most notorious criminals in American history. He had brought with him a recently purchased Remington 760 Gamemaster rifle, which would be found within minutes of King's shooting in an alcove of a store adjacent to Bessie Brewer's rooming house.
That fateful day was filled with meetings and phone calls for Dr. King, and he and his circle were once again late — this time for a dinner at the home of his good friend, Reverend Billy Kyles. Kyles was at the Lorraine, hurrying King along. In good spirits, King came out of room 306 onto the balcony and bantered over the railing with Jesse Jackson and others waiting in the parking lot. At exactly 6:01 PM, King was struck by a single .30-06 bullet, and was rushed to Saint Joseph's Hospital, and was pronounced dead at 7:05 PM.
Shortly after the shooting, witnesses saw a man race down the hall of Bessie Brewer's rooming house across the street. In the doorway of Canipe's Amusement Company, Memphis law enforcement officers found a green blanket packed with the Gamemaster rifle, ammunition, and a pair of binoculars, as well as assorted personal items. In his original signed statement, the owner, Guy Canipe, said the package was left there within minutes of the shooting. Police found witnesses who said they saw a white Mustang race away from the curb not far from Canipe's store. The FBI traced fingerprints on the binoculars and other items to James Earl Ray, whose 1967 white Ford Mustang was later found abandoned hundreds of miles away in Atlanta, Georgia.
Eventually James Earl Ray would be captured in England, extradited to the United States, and indicted as the sole killer of Dr. King — based on means and opportunity; but the question of his motive was never adequately resolved, allowing for years of assertions, including by Ray himself, that conspirators had killed King and framed the escaped fugitive. There was no shortage of powerful individuals and violent groups who detested King — from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to the Ku Klux Klan. Ray's supporters would claim that a massive conspiracy organized by the military and intelligence community killed King. But many of these claims rested on the word of Ray himself, a dubious practice when dealing with a career criminal serving a life sentence.
Others tried to thread the needle, to argue that Ray was a witting participant in a broader conspiracy. Congress, in their late-1970s reinvestigation of King's assassination, argued that Ray was responding to a bounty offer on King made by a group of right-wing businessmen from Ray's hometown of Saint Louis, Missouri. But these businessmen had no record of or connection to violence, including against Dr. King. Those who specifically had a connection to a series of attempts to kill Martin Luther King Jr. before 1968 were dismissed as suspects. These groups had the motive, some argue, but not the sophisticated means to succeed in such a conspiracy, nor did they have the opportunity to collaborate with James Earl Ray. Had investigators looked more carefully, they would have found a good deal of evidence to believe that these groups that had been seriously trying to kill King for almost a decade were, in fact, the best suspects in his actual assassination.
THE MORE THAN NINE LIVES OF MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
For Dr. King, the April 3 bomb threat was just one more warning. In the thousands of pages of files the FBI collected on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. there are dozens, if not hundreds, of reported threats against Dr. King's life. Almost all were similar to the plane threat: menacing but harmless. They came mostly by phone, often to newspapers, often anonymously. When law enforcement could trace these threats to their source, they often led to drunks and mentally disturbed individuals. Yet in some cases, such as the January 1956 bombing of Dr. King's home in the midst of the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, the attempts were far from innocuous. Indeed, from the time of that first bombing until his assassination in 1968, law enforcement investigated serious threats against King, some foiled only by the vagaries of chance.
In one sense, these ongoing public threats simply constituted a constant level of "noise"; Dr. King had no choice but to live with them if he wanted to continue his mission. When asked a question about when he had personally been most frightened, King replied that it had been during a visit to Mississippi. His visit was not only to mourn the victims of the Mississippi Burning murders but also to bring public scrutiny and pressure on law enforcement to pursue justice in what history now calls the Mississippi Burning killings, the brutal slayings of three young civil rights workers. King offered a prayer in which he had said, "O Lord, the killers of those boys may even be within the range of my voice." At that moment, he overheard a big burly sheriff standing near him say, "You're damn right they are."
At the time Dr. King had no way of knowing that the individuals who had killed the young civil rights organizers were associated with the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi and that the order for their murders had come from its leader, Samuel Holloway Bowers. King had no idea that Sam Bowers had himself targeted King for murder and that Bowers was part of a network that had incited and planned attacks on King over a period of years. King also did not know that a local Mississippi sheriff's deputy would eventually be one of those convicted in the murders of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney — the three young men for whom King had prayed. As we shall see, King's visits to Mississippi, to bring national attention to these murders and to the 1963 assassination of his National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) colleague Medgar Evers, brought King into the crosshairs of committed radicals.
The nature of the radical network that was targeting Dr. King was more national in scope and more united in purpose than has been previously thought. There was a series of systematic attempts on his life by a little-known subculture that was obsessed with King's murder. These efforts to kill King provide the best window into the likeliest conspiracy behind King's murder in Memphis. But when examined in depth for links and commonalities, these plots also reveal a glimpse into a sinister, clandestine movement within American history, one that entwined religious zealotry, reactionary politics, and out-and-out hatred, a story that — if told at all — is often disconnected from the tumult of the 1960s or, just as important, from the twenty-first-century terrorism to which it bears such a close resemblance.
THE FIRST CONTRACT: BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA, 1958
Alabama was the scene for one of the first serious recorded efforts to kill King, one that came against the backdrop of the heated civil rights battles that engulfed Birmingham, Alabama, in the late 1950s. This plot did not even originally target King but rather the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, president of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, who was arguably even more defiant and strident in his efforts to desegregate Birmingham than King was in Montgomery. Shuttlesworth famously said of the repeated attempts to "dissuade" him (including beatings, bombings, and general harassment ), "We mean to kill segregation or be killed by it!" Having seen that the local white establishment, led by Birmingham's notorious commissioner of public safety, Eugene "Bull" Connor, could not deter the indefatigable Reverend Shuttlesworth, the state's Ku Klux Klan sought another avenue to stop him: a contract killing.
For this, they summoned Jesse Benjamin "J. B." Stoner, a Georgia native who supported the Nazis during World War II for their stance on racial purity and anti-Semitism and who was the founder of the new and virulently racist and anti-Semitic National States Rights Party (NSRP) Stoner, who earned national attention for a public feud with Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad (famously telling Muhammad that "you want white blood pumped into your race"), had originally been contracted by local Klan leader Hugh Morris to bomb Shuttlesworth's Bethel Baptist Church. But Stoner offered to include the contract killing of Shuttlesworth and other civil rights leaders, with Dr. King notably at the top of the list. Stoner offered a special reduced rate of $1,500 to kill King and only failed because law enforcement — in conjunction with the FBI — had been running a sting against the Klan and stopped the plot in advance.
BIRMINGHAM AGAIN, 1963
Birmingham continued to be a flashpoint in the civil rights struggle and was the scene for two other attempts on King — one involving another bombing and the other a planned shooting.
In the spring of 1963, a large dynamite bomb was thrown at room 30 at the A.G. Gaston Motel where King had set up the headquarters for his efforts to integrate Birmingham's eateries and businesses. An apparent response to countless King-led sit-ins, marches, and protests — efforts that scandalized the local business community into reaching a prointegrationist agreement with King and his aides-the bomb left a five-by-five-foot hole in the motel wall and destroyed two adjacent house trailers. King narrowly escaped death, as he had unexpectedly abandoned plans for a celebration at the motel and had left Birmingham. Law enforcement strongly suspected that the bombing was the work of the Eastview, Alabama, Klavern known as "The Cahaba River Group" or "The Cahaba Boys," a militant KKK subgroup that J. B. Stoner heavily influenced.
Another attempt on King occurred as the nation once again turned its attention to segregationist violence in Birmingham, this time in the wake of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four young girls in September 1963.
The four men who reportedly plotted this attempted assassination of King included William Potter Gale, a Californian who organized racist and anti-Semitic paramilitary organizations on the West Coast; Admiral John G. Crommelin, a National States' Rights Party luminary who would one day run as a vice presidential candidate on their national ticket; Sidney Crockett Barnes, a suspected serial bomber who fled a crackdown on racial violence in Florida to settle in Alabama; and Noah Jefferson Carden, a violent racist from Mobile, Alabama. The plotting against King — which involved cooperation with local extremists — actually started just before the Sixteenth Street Church bombing and was among the first plots the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) considered when Congress reinvestigated the King murder in the late 1970s. The plot apparently continued into 1964, and though details of the exact murder scheme are somewhat sketchy, conversations secretly taped by the Miami Police between Barnes and police/FBI informant William "Willie" Somersett suggest that Carden may have received a rifle from Gale, who hoped that Carden would do the deed. Police even arranged to provide Barnes with a rifle so as to trace it back to the extremist colonel from California .
Birmingham was apparently one of several sites in Alabama considered for a King attack, with Mobile being another preferred location. In fact, the four men even planned a larger wave of statewide violence to lure King to these other areas, notably the sites of the first experiments in school desegregation in Alabama. King may well have been saved from these attempts by another act of violence in Saint Augustine, which drew him to Florida and away from Alabama.
"NOTHING LEFT BUT WHITE FACES ...": SAINT AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA, 1964
In 1964, civil rights activist Robert Hayling and others were kidnapped at a Klan rally in Saint Augustine, Florida, beaten unconscious, and nearly burned to death. This drew King and his focus away from Alabama and toward Florida. In fact, it was King's response to the growing civil disorder in Saint Augustine, Florida, that triggered the next major attempt on his life.
After four sit-in organizers had been badly beaten and guns fired into their homes, Saint Augustine protests degenerated into serious racial violence, extending over several months in 1963 and 1964 as civil rights activists battled against southern reactionaries. Some of this antagonism was stoked by J. B. Stoner and his erstwhile friend the Reverend Charles "Connie" Lynch from California, a minister in a white supremacist church with nationwide reach who, commenting on the four young girls who died in the Birmingham bombing, said that they were not children, but "little niggers ... and if there's four less niggers tonight, then I say 'Good for whoever planted the bomb!'"
Stoner and Lynch, known as a two-person "riot squad," consistently followed King and staged counterrallies, where they inflamed white audience members, often to the point of violence. In one Saint Augustine rally, Lynch promised, "There's gonna be a bloody race riot all over this country. The stage is being set for a bloodbath. When the smoke clears, there ain't gonna be nothing left but white faces!" The aftermath of this rally sent nineteen blacks to local area hospitals.
In response to the ongoing violence, Dr. King visited Saint Augustine in May 1964 and announced his support for demonstrations, even telling President Lyndon Johnson that "all semblance of law and nonviolent order had broken down in Saint Augustine." King was tempting fate once again in his trips into Florida. Although little is known as to the exact identities of those who did the deed, a suspected group of Klansmen opened fire on King's rented beach cottage near Saint Augustine, perforating walls and shattering the furniture inside with their bullets. King had been in California at the time, having been warned of plots against his life in Florida.
ENTER THE WHITE KNIGHTS: JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI, 1964
The next reported effort to kill King came in the spring and summer of 1964 and involved a new and very serious group of players in the white supremacist movement, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Awful Grace of God"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
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