Over 30 years ago, Malcolm X (1965) and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1968) were assassinated. In the case of Malcolm X, several members of the Nation of Islam were convicted of the assassination. In the case of Martin Luther King, one man, James Earl Ray, was convicted of the assassination and sentenced to life in prison. Despite the convictions, ongoing campaigns by the government, police agencies and various authors and pundits to put the assassinations to rest, there have always been many unanswered questions about these murders.
According to a Memphis jury's verdict on Dec. 8, 1999, in the wrongful death lawsuit of the King family versus Lloyd Jowers and other unknown co-conspirators, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of the United States government. Almost 32 years after King's murder at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, l968, a court extended the circle of responsibility for the assassination beyond the late scapegoat James Earl Ray to the U.S.
Crowds surrounding the Reflecting Pool, during the...
English: Dr. Martin Luther King giving his "I Have...
Martin Luther King leaning on a lectern. Deutsch: ...government.
Following the assassinations, in the 1970s, the COINTELPRO (the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program) disruption operations by the government against the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-War Movement and radicals and socialists became public knowledge. Under COINTELPRO, U.S. spy agencies used informers, agents and agent provocateurs to disrupt these organizations.
One of the stated purposes of this program was to neutralize Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Elijah Muhammad in order to prevent the development, in the government's terms, of a Black Messiah who could unite and lead a mass organization of Black Americans in their quest for freedom and economic equality. (Draper, 2002)
During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns...