Excerpts

Using evidence from previously unpublished FBI and police informant files as well as new sources uncovered by their own investigation, the authors reveal: A detailed chronology of over nine serious plots on Dr. King's life, including documented connections between the individuals organizing the attacks. Newly revealed connections between the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi and contract killers from the Dixie Mafia, including evidence showing the use of these criminals in a series of plots against Dr. King. New interviews with an informant who provides additional detail on a $100,000 bounty on Dr. King's life, offered by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, whose members were reported as suspects to both the FBI and Congress. Evidence that money was raised in Atlanta, Georgia to pay for attacks on Dr. King and new information tracing the money through Jackson, Mississippi, home of the White Knights. Informant reports implicating specific individuals involved in the actual April 4, 1968, King Memphis murder conspiracy. Details of connections between James Earl Ray, and members of the extremist network, including new information connecting Sam Bowers and the White Knights to the purchase of James Earl Ray's rifle. Evidence that bounty offers on King's life, linked to Southern businessmen and racists, were known to James Earl Ray prior to his prison escape. For the first time, the likely identity of "J.C. Hardin" the mysterious figure who visited and called James Earl Ray only days before Ray began to stalk Martin Luther King Jr. _____ Introduction On April 4, 1968, a single shot from a .30-06 rifle killed the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. At the time, Robert F. Kennedy was campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination and learned of King's death as he landed in Indianapolis to deliver a campaign speech to a predominantly black neighborhood. Aides feared a riot, and the chief of police told Kennedy that he could not guarantee his safety, but rather than inciting a riot, Kennedy's brief, heartfelt speech was credited with helping to prevent racial riots in the aftermath of King's assassination and is widely considered one of the best speeches in American history. From the back of a flatbed truck, Kennedy offered the following words: In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black--considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible--you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization--black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion, and love. And then Kennedy quoted his favorite poet, Aeschylus: Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God. We chose "the awful grace of God" as the title for this book because it captures not only the enormous feeling of loss at the death of Martin Luther King Jr., but also the need for an understanding of what happened that fateful day in Memphis. Who murdered King? Was there a conspiracy? What was the motive? And what do the answers to those questions mean for our nation's history and our future? Forty years after King's assassination, we are still looking for that wisdom. The day following the assassination, while criminal investigations were just beginning, United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark stated to the press that there were no indications of conspiracy in the shooting, "all of our evidence at this time indicates that it was a single person who committed this criminal act."2 Within two weeks of the killing, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's manhunt had begun to focus on James Earl Ray, an escaped convict with a long history of theft and armed robbery. Ray had never been involved in militant racism, and his history revealed only a single constant--a continuing quest to score big money. At the time of the King shooting, Ray had been on the run for over a year. He had traveled to both Canada and Mexico in unsuccessful efforts to continue his escape overseas. Almost two months to the day after King's assassination, Ray was taken into custody at a London airport. Both the director of the FBI and the attorney general of the United States singled out James Earl Ray as the lone killer of Dr. King. No motive was ever given for his act. Ray avoided trial with a guilty plea, which he later claimed had been orchestrated by his attorney as the only option for his escaping the death penalty. Ray's own remarks, his lack of any apparent motive, and the fact that he had no personal history of racist activism or connection to racist groups left much of the public with the impression that there must be more to the King assassination, that the story had not been fully told. That view was solidified by the findings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), formed in 1976 to reexamine the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The committee's report on Dr. King's death was presented in 1978. Their wording was precise; their message clear: The committee believes, on the basis of the circumstantial evidence available to it, that there is a likelihood that James Earl Ray assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King as a result of a conspiracy. . . . The Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation performed a thorough investigation into the responsibility of James Earl Ray for the assassination of Dr. King, and conducted a thorough fugitive investigation, but failed to investigate adequately the possibility of conspiracy in the assassination. The HSCA tried to move beyond the FBI conspiracy investigation, but its resources were limited, it's timing perhaps ten years too late. In many instances HSCA investigators were thwarted by the fact that key individuals were deceased. Witnesses who provided reports in 1968 were too frightened to even confirm their original stories, much less expand on them, and named suspects were simply unwilling to talk. And although the HSCA had subpoena power, they lacked the leverage that came with the realistic threat of jail time, perjury charges, or negotiated immunity to get results. Beyond that, the HSCA inquiry also suffered from some of the same fundamental problems that prevented the FBI from adequately investigating Ray's possible involvement in a conspiracy in the first place. In 1968 and well into the 1990s, many key informant files were held in strict confidence, not available for exchange between individual FBI field offices, not available to local or state law enforcement or prosecutors, and not offered to the HSCA. Director J. Edgar Hoover had an established policy of not sacrificing informants in civil rights cases that he viewed as being unwinnable in southern courts. It has only been through a series of successful cold-case prosecutions over the last decade that we have come to realize the extent of such information and its implications for the King investigation. Reports that the FBI produced in the King murder investigation suggest that the local offices had little understanding of the background and associations of the information they produced. Challenges such as compartmentalization of information; the inability to correlate names, aliases, and organizations; and the lack of any of today's data-mining capabilities all fundamentally handicapped individual field offices in the pursuit of leads suggesting any potential conspiracy in the murder of Dr. King. With access to FBI files and oral histories that only became available over the past decade, with information from successful cold-case prosecutions, and with our own primary source interviews, we are now able to relate a much more comprehensive view of the events that we feel led to Dr. King's assassination. Part I: The Conspirators exposes an insidious subculture that was united in the goal of killing Dr. King and whose efforts we follow over a period of some five years. It reveals that certain individuals involved in that effort were far more organized, disciplined, and shrewd than had been commonly pictured in existing literature. We trace the efforts of that network by examining several plots against Dr. King, which were deadly serious and, in some cases, quite sophisticated. The individuals and groups you encounter in this book had indeed been targeting Dr. King for years. They viewed King as the ultimate target because his death represented their best opportunity. Their goal was massive riot and bloodshed, racial violence on a national scale. They wished to kill Dr. King in a dramatic and symbolic manner, a killing that would put an end to any thought of compromise and concessions between liberal white America and an increasingly nationalistic and frustrated black America. There is no longer any doubt about the existence of such a network or of its ongoing effort to kill Dr. King. What remains are questions about its direct or indirect connection to the actual murder of Dr. King in Memphis, about the role of James Earl Ray, and the possibility of conspiracy in the assassination. In Part II: The Accused, we closely follow James Earl Ray from his escape in 1967 from the Missouri State Penitentiary to the steps that seem to have brought him in touch with an offer he couldn't refuse, an offer that led him to begin stalking Dr. King in Selma, Atlanta, and finally Memphis. We explore a number of bounties offered on Dr. King's life, raising the possibility that James Earl Ray may have been only the final individual to respond to such an offer. And in Part III: The Crime, we examine the possibility that nothing in Memphis actually came about, for either Ray or the plotters, as was intended. And we direct our attention toward investigations and existing FBI documents that might well help resolve the issue of conspiracy once and for all. If we are right, our conclusions likely point to a group of violent individuals who saw King's murder through the eyes of a much more vengeful God than the one that inspired the slain civil rights figure to continually risk his life in the name of peace and mutual understanding. If the Sermon on the Mount was the religious inspiration for Dr. King, then, for these calculating, violent men, the book of Revelations was the guiding scripture. But their version of the end times was far different than anything one would hear from most preachers on a Sunday. Their hope was for a race war that would bring on Armageddon itself. For these men, God's grace had run its course, and Bobby Kennedy's soothing words must have seemed like the calm before the awful storm they desired. Excerpted from The Awful Grace of God: Religious Terrorism, White Supremacy, and the Unsolved Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Stuart Wexler, Larry Hancock All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.