Who Killed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr? (part 1)

interview of King family attorney William F. Pepper

by Joe Martin

The following article was originally published in Real Change magazine and is reprinted with permission.

There's a good chance that you missed the trial of the century, the twentieth century, that is. It took place in Memphis, Tennessee in 1999. It was a civil trial in which a jury comprised of six whites and six blacks heard four weeks worth of testimony from 70 witnesses and concluded, after deliberating for about an hour, that elements of the government of the United States conspired to murder Martin Luther King Jr., whose family was awarded damages totaling $100. There was some mainstream media reaction: mostly to disparage the evidence, or to completely dismiss the trial and its disturbing conclusions. There were few, if any, comments from elected officials at any level of government. The silence, as they say, was deafening. This extraordinary civil trial would never have happened if not for the courage and persistence of one man: William F. Pepper. An American lawyer, an expert on international human rights, and a seminar leader on that subject at Oxford University, Pepper became close to King during the last year of his life. It was the insanity of Vietnam that brought the two men together.

During the Vietnam War, Pepper journeyed to that battered Asian land, and out of his experience he rendered a powerful essay, The Children of Vietnam. The piece appeared in the journal Ramparts in January, 1967. Up until that time, King and Pepper had never met. On perusing that issue of Ramparts, King encountered Pepper's shocking photos: Vietnamese children, horrifically scorched by napalm dropped from US planes. King was sickened by what he saw. He had long been very uncomfortable with the war, and Pepper's article convinced King that the time had come for him to formally declare his opposition to the madness. Though it would anger and upset many of his closest supporters, it was a step King now felt utterly compelled to take. And King well knew it was a step fraught with risk.

On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, King gave his eloquent Riverside Church speech in which he came out unconditionally against the war in Vietnam. In the course of the strenuous year ahead, King would consider a run for the presidency as an alternative peace candidate to the two major parties. And he would begin laying the groundwork for his most radical and far-reaching campaign to date: the Poor People's Campaign. All would be shattered when a shot rang out on an April evening in Memphis in 1968. That fatal shot is still echoing throughout our world, a world immersed in the cauldron of military madness while the wretched of all the earth, by the hundreds of millions, go homeless, go hungry, and die of disease and despair. Pepper was in Seattle recently to discuss the implications of King's assassination and the civil trial he helped to bring about, all of which are examined in detail in his stunning new book An Act of State, The Execution of Martin Luther King (Verso, 2003).

Joe Martin: The official story pertaining to Martin Luther King's death is that a lone gunman, a criminal and racist named James Earl Ray, took one rifle shot at King and succeeded in killing him. Ray, the story goes, managed to flee the scene of the crime and for over two months avoided arrest until he was apprehended in England. Eventually, he confessed to the crime and remained imprisoned until his death a few years ago. End of story. What lead you to question this scenario? William Pepper: Oh, I didn't question it right away; in fact, I pretty much accepted the tale that James was the shooter, acting on his own, and that there was little else to prove. Deeply saddened and discouraged, I'd left politics entirely after Martin's death. It wasn't until 1977 that I became aware that something was not right about the official line.

What rekindled your interest?

Martin's old friend, Ralph Abernathy, called me and said that he wanted me to go with him to talk to Martin's alleged killer. This took me by surprise, but I told Ralph that I would go along. Prior to our meeting, I decided to read up on the case. I was frankly intrigued on first encountering James. It turned out that he was not a vehement racist, and, interestingly, he knew little about guns. In fact, he told me that he once had shot himself in the foot. He was rather shy and docile in his demeanor. In 1969, days after he confessed to the crime, James made a retraction and declared his innocence. Right then, he asked for a trial. James had been given very inept legal assistance at that time. During our first meeting in 1977, I heard from James a very different story about the death of King. I began to wonder if the official story we'd been told about Martin's death might be less than truthful. And at this first meeting, we had even brought along a body language specialist from Harvard. We wanted this specialist to observe our interview and tell us if there was anything suspicious in James' expressions that might indicate he was conning us. There wasn't anything. When it was over, the meeting had lasted five hours, both Ralph and I concluded that James had not killed Martin. At that point, I began my own investigation into Martin's assassination. Eventually, years later, I would become James' attorney.

What did you unearth as you undertook your own investigation?

I found out a lot that I had not expected to find. In the post-9/11 age, every American citizen needs to know about the shadowy political underside of this nation. The real story behind Martin's death lays bare this violent and anti-democratic underside. By 1968, Martin had become a true nonviolent revolutionary. He had moved his focus from civil rights to human rights. He had come out firmly against the war in Vietnam. He wanted to restore critical domestic programs hindered by the siphoning off of dollars for the war. He wanted to help bring about a peaceful social revolution in the United States. Martin wanted to restructure the economic apparatus of American society. He wanted to work for the redistribution of wealth in this country. He was about to challenge the fundamentals of American capitalism. It was the greatest risk he ever took. He would be killed as a result.

How was King going to undertake this challenge?

He devised the idea for a Poor People's Campaign that would culminate with a march on Washington, DC. Martin envisioned half a million impoverished Americans of every color, the wretched of the republic, and their supporters pouring into the nation's capital to demand economic justice, an end to their suffering. This vast panoply of the poor would not simply march and demonstrate for a day or two and then disperse. They would stay indefinitely in DC. They would encamp, become an extensive tent city, and reside in the capital of the United States until the federal government met their demands. This proposal caused some people in Washington to absolutely panic. The US Army was convinced that the indigent throng would soon transmogrify into an angry and rebellious mob. There was no way those in power were going to allow this to happen. Martin would be killed first.

So if James Earl Ray didn't do the killing, who did?

Around the time Ralph and I met James, the government itself was reinvestigating the deaths of both Martin and John F. Kennedy. The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that there was no conspiracy to kill King. But the many volumes of evidence and related materials pertaining to Martin's death were a trove of information, of leads that should have been followed up. Predictably, the Department of Justice was indifferent. The government accepted the conclusions and dissolved the Committee. Most Americans, of course, were unlikely to pore over this wealth of material that contained a lot of troubling questions. I was determined to find out the answers. I had concluded that James was innocent, that he was set up to be the fall guy. Eventually, after many years of thorough investigation and analysis, I would conclude that Martin Luther King was assassinated by individuals in the Memphis Police Department and underworld figures, all working in some sort of coordination with covert factions of the US government and military.

See how William F. Pepper came to this conclusion, and the evidence that led the jury to believe him, in part 2 of this interview (next issue).