Civil Rights Leaders Memorialize Martin Luther King’s Birthday Last Year
Given the known fact that many current-day leaders of the civil rights campaign harbor doubts (while some have no doubts as to the proven fallacies) about the “official” story, they must have conflicted thoughts as to their participation in the twice-annual memorials to his life and legendary accomplishments. Does the desire to honor his legacy at the site where he was killed connote an implicit acceptance of the mythology about how he became a martyr? Other newspapers from across the country and around the world will also deal with this “disconnect” one way or another.
Deconstructing the Official Mythology: Starting With the Original Sources
It is safe to say that the vast majority will choose the easy course: to repeat the “same old” story originally concocted by the novelist William Bradford Huie in his three articles published in Look magazine in 1968-69 and his 1970 book He Slew the Dreamer (though originally “He” was supposed to be “They”, a canard he used to solicit the cooperation of the subject of his book: the accused assassin James Earl Ray).
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But Huie’s story was clearly commissioned by the FBI, in advance, as a means to convince an entire nation that Ray was the assassin, in the process casting him just as the assassin’s profile described him: “An uneducated, poor, southern White man, who hated Blacks and Martin Luther King especially; who stalked Dr. King for weeks before murdering him in Memphis.” Huie, following Hoover’s directive, succeeded in creating this meme despite the fact that, according to many credible people including Dr. King’s own family and several associates, Ray was not a racist, nor did he hate or stalk King. Even the HSCA found that Ray was not a racist, one of the only accomplishments of that corrupted “investigation.”
In my book Who Really Killed Martin Luther King Jr. — The Case Against Lyndon B. Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover, I have proven that Huie’s book (used by the FBI, DOJ and the HSCA to support their faux “investigations”) is filled with brazen lies, half-truths and concocted “events” that never happened. It is the sum total of this irrefutable evidence that proves Huie’s mission was defined for him by the men (Hoover, Tolson, DeLoach and Sullivan) and entity (FBI) from whom he obviously got his orders.
There is no other realistic and plausible explanation for why Huie did what he did: What else could possibly explain why he went out of his way to concoct a story that was built on a foundation of now-provable lies? (thanks to the internet, which makes once extremely difficult access to old newspapers and previously-classified FBI and HSCA documents now readily accessible).
And after Huie’s story was published in book form in 1970, he still wasn’t done. In 1977, after the Church Committee’s report came out in 1975-76 chronicling the FBI’s outrageous harassment of Dr. King for decades before his assassination — when many people, especially Blacks, began suspecting a continuing FBI role in his final “neutralization” — Huie republished the book under a new title: Did the FBI Kill Martin Luther King? The chapters were not changed, but he added a new introduction and epilogue.
Between the original and later editions of Huie’s book, two other FBI-commissioned books, recycling and adding to his lies, were published (Gerold Frank’s An American Death . . ., and George McMillan’s The Making of an Assassin . . . ), all of which became the foundation for — and the “bibles” quoted by the HSCA and the national media — the official version of what has been exposed as another “great” American Myth.
Since then, in practically every decade, new offerings have joined those fictional accounts, including those by Gerald Posner, Hamilton Sides, Pate McMichael, Larry Hancock and Stuart Wexler, (and numerous others of lesser note). Each of them add more fodder to the now-severely addled official story that almost no one believes, but many accept merely because it is so often repeated — and relentlessly pushed by the MSM — as per the aphorism by Joseph Goebbels about lies eventually becoming “truths.”
MLK to his “Friend” (From the Grave): Et tu, Bradford?
Huie’s repackaged original book, with a new Introduction and Epilogue intended to refute the swirling scuttlebutt — and head off the fear that it might evolve into “urban legend” — of public animus towards the FBI that had been triggered by the 1975-76 Church Committee’s revelations (and retitled to encourage previous purchasers to buy it again).
The following excerpts summarize what he added and illustrate the point that, despite his claims about being a friend of Dr. King, their paths only crossed for the purpose of collaborating on Huie’s book. No “friend” would betray the other as Huie did, in framing James Earl Ray — allowing the real culprits to remain free — then attempting to rationalize King’s murder as he did in the new epilogue of the reissued book, with the dozens of lies still intact:
I was a friend of Reverend King, and he was my friend. We first met in 1956. In May, 1965, less than three years before his death, he wrote an introduction to my book Three Lives for Mississippi. Our names appeared together on that book in every major language. The book was published in the United States by the New York Herald Tribune and was serialized by the Herald Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, and about forty other newspapers belonging to the Herald Tribune Syndicate. [ . . . ]
When Reverend King was murdered, it was as his friend . . . and as the reporter whom he admired . . . that I paid Ray and his lawyers $40,000 on their promise to help me to establish the truth [sic]. I carried out my contract with Ray to the letter [sic]. And he, at first, tried to give me what he had promised. Then he began lying, and I proved to him that he was lying. And despite his lies, I established and published the truth in 1968-70 [sic, sic and sic — see note below].
Now, because Americans . . . particularly young Americans . . . need the truth to save themselves from being hoodwinked [sic – ibid], I have added this prologue and reissued He Slew the Dreamer. I have also added an epilogue which refutes the more recent lies being told mostly for the profit of the liars [sic – ibid.].
Who is “hoodwinking” whom? He must have been very frightened that his own numerous lies might be exposed if the HSCA investigation was aggressively pursued and his decision to republish his book with even more deceitful bluster was intended to help prevent that outcome. [1]
The “lies” he accused Ray of (mostly to protect others who had assisted him in his escape from prison or during his travels through Canada, the U.S. and Mexico; others were in response to information that Ray had told his attorney, which he considered confidential, that was leaked to Huie) were nothing compared to the scurrilous deceits Huie was writing — and the cover-up plot he was executing — about Ray.
The following rather insightful excerpts come from the new “Epilogue”:
Of all the men in America, Hoover was the one least likely to be tolerant of Reverend King’s sexual content. In addition to being anti-Negro, Hoover considered himself to be a devout Christian. Apparently he was a celibate and he may have been a latent homosexual. So a black reverend troublemaker receiving the Nobel Peace Prize while practicing adultry . . . this was enough to drive Hoover up the wall! Then the question becomes: since Hoover despised Reverend King to the point where he suggested that he kill himself, why didn’t Hoover have him killed? Especially since having him killed would have been easy? [ . . . ]
Why didn’t Hoover have him killed? The only reasonable answer is that Hoover was not a murderer. Whatever he was and whatever illegal actions he may have arranged at presidential direction, none of his detractors has produced evidence, or even suggested prior to 1977, that Hoover ever arranged the death of anyone. To suggest that he arranged the death of Reverend King at a time when police and press were watching . . . and that he employed an unreliable escaped convict as trigger man . . . this is to suggest that Hoover was stupid as well as vindictive (Emphasis added].
[After recounting some of Dr. King’s partying incidents, he continued:] But considering his obscenity and profanity in Bimini, isn’t it possible he had lost his faith . . . that he, too [like Adam Clayton Powell Jr.], had concluded that he didn’t believe anything . . . and that what he was expressing was a death wish? Isn’t it possible that as he stood there on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, asking a singer to sing “Precious Lord, Take My Hand and Lead Me Home,” he was welcoming what Jame Earl Ray was preparing to give him from the dirty bathroom in Bessie Brewer’s flophouse?
With a “friend” like William Bradford Huie, Dr. King certainly needed no enemies. With these words he completed the circle of betrayal he had begun when he set forth on his mission to frame James Earl Ray. His tacit acknowledgement that Hoover had merely been following “presidential direction” all along (in various and sundry “high crimes and misdemeanors”) further tightened that circle.
But it was within the last paragraphs of that epilogue which revealed his ultimate betrayal: They can, and should, be interpreted as unambiguous assertions, not only that Martin Luther King Jr. wanted to die at an assassin’s hand, but indirectly justifying (explicitly to the reader and implicitly to himself) his own actions in facilitating the cover-up, thus the crime itself.
It was the ultimate perfidy that exposed his own duplicity: In self-righteously, judgmentally, condemning Dr. King for his personal behaviors, he rationalized the need for King to be murdered. In his own novelist-oriented mindset, he explained to the American public why they, too, needed to accept the notion that King’s murder was a “justified kill.”
Endnotes:
[1] However, he needn’t have worried about that, since many other people were put to work to derail the possibility that the HSCA “investigation” would be effective, including getting congressional leaders to fire the original (agressive and determined) director and his staff, then replacing them with people willing to conduct a much more passive and “token” review of the previous (i.e. “tainted”) FBI investigation. The new director, Robert Blakey, made few real attempts to discover truths and allowed the CIA and FBI to manipulate the direction and dampen the resolve of the committee members and staff. In fact, much of their work consisted of trying to prove Ray acquired his funding from bank robberies that the local authorities had already eliminated both James and his brothers as suspects.
Reprinted with the author’s permission.
