by
kaimi0achava
@ 2008-04-03 - 21:56:38
The FBI considered King "the most dangerous Negro leader in the country,” so much so that Then-U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy authorized the wiretapping of King's home and offices in a campaign to ferret out communists. The secret recording campaign failed to prove that King was a communist, but it did provide evidence of the civil rights leader's extramarital affairs.
William C. Sullivan, head of domestic intelligence under Hoover, told a congressional committee that King was subjected to the same tactics used against Soviet agents and, "No holds were barred."
His so called assassin, Ray, was befriended by a mysterious man named Raoul before the murder and, perhaps most strange of all, two of the few black police officers and fire-fighters in Memphis were reassigned from their usual duties near the Lorraine Hotel on the day King was shot there.
Even if you except Ray did pull off an Illinois bank robbery in the months before the murder, his movements after the assassination of getting to Canada, then to England, (where he was caught and extradited) seem beyond what one would expect of a small-time criminal.
Ray at first confessed, then attempted to withdraw the confession and denied firing the murder shot to the end. His denials were later accepted by King's heirs and even former aides like Andrew Young.
Much of this is circumstantial.
Yet just as the twin assassinations of King and RFK marked 1968, five years earlier the Birmingham church bombing, resulting in the deaths of four little girls was followed two months later by the John F. Kennedy assassination.
"If they'll kill a president, I won't live to be 40," King predicted all too accurately.
Four decades after the assignation of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, so many still ask the question: What if he had lived?
Were King alive today, the preacher in him would have continued speaking out against injustice, poverty, hunger, against violence, against war.
Were King alive today he would likely not have run for president. And probably would have endured more harassment from J. Edgar Hoover.
In the months before his death, King was speaking out against the growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam and was working with other civil rights leaders on a Poor People's Campaign, with a march on Washington scheduled for that May. He was in Memphis that spring day to support striking sanitation workers
Were King alive today, he would most certainly, in my opinion, be speaking out against the Iraq War.
"God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war," King said of the fighting in Vietnam "And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it."
Were King alive today would the FBI still considered King "the most dangerous Negro leader in the country,"
How far did they go to stop him?