The spring of 1968 saw the sanitation workers of the city of Memphis go on strike for better wages and improved health care. Martin Luther King, whose experiences in the early days of the civil rights movement had made him sympathetic to the plight of America’s working class, was moved to travel to the city to lend his support to the strikers’ cause. It was a decision that would turn out to have fatal consequences for King, who had barely managed to survive the Montgomery riots twelve years earlier. For somewhere on Memphis’ back streets a bigoted petty burglar named James Earl Ray was preparing to do away with the civil rights crusader by the swiftest and most lethal means possible.

Even by the standards of the segregationist wing of the late ‘60s Old South, Ray was an incredibly hateful figure. He was known to have an abiding and bitter grudge towards blacks in general, and rumors had been circulating for years that Ray might have been involved(if only peripherally) in the 1956 Montgomery riots. At the time he escaped from prison in 1961, Ray had in fact been scheduled to be questioned by the FBI about his alleged part in the rioting. During his seven-plus years on the run, Ray had been contemplating the most dramatic possible way he could hurt the race he considered his mortal enemy; when he learned Dr. King would be coming to Memphis, Ray’s decision was made-- he would kill the civil rights leader and in so doing(at least in his mind) get revenge on black America for its sins.

Dr. King was unaware of the danger he faced as he and his top aides gathered in a Memphis motel room to discuss possible strategies for advancing the sanitation workers’ cause. By a horrible coincidence the room they had booked for their meeting was right across the street from an apartment that Ray was renting under an assumed name to use as a sniper’s nest. For Ray, who’d served in the Army and was a competent marksman, it was simply a matter of waiting for the perfect moment to to take his shot....

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The Memphis police dispatcher’s official log of the first report of Dr. King’s assassination barely even hints at the gravity of the events which unfolded in that motel room. It reads simply: “5:32 PM 4-4-1968 Shots fired near Lorraine Motel, one man wounded. Patrol car sent to investigate.” The true extent of what had happened would only become apparent when the investigating officers arrived on the scene of the shooting and saw one of King’s longtime friends, Reverend Jesse Jackson, holding the body of the slain civil rights leader. A visit to the apartment complex from whose windows Ray had fired the fatal shot gave police their first accurate description of the killer, and before the evening was over an APB had gone out for Ray.

Problem was, by then Ray was already en route to Canada, and from there to the United Kingdom, where he would hide out from the law for most of the next two months under an assumed name. It took the better part of two months for federal authorities to finally catch up with Ray, and in the meantime America’s cities were beset with a wave of civil unrest that vividly recalled the 1956 Montgomery riots. Indeed, one of the first outbreaks of violence after Dr. King’s assassination happened just a block from when the ’56 riots had first erupted. For five long days America seemed to be hovering on the brink of a second civil war; it took the deployment of National Guard troops to finally get the situation under control.

    When Ray was finally arrested on June 2nd near London’s Heathrow Airport, he initially confessed to shooting Dr. King; after he’d been extradited back to the States, however, he subsequently attempted to recant his confession. But the FBI would have none of it, and neither would the jury in his 1969 trial-- they found him guilty on all counts in the King assassination and sentenced him to consecutive life terms in prison, where he would die in 1998 at the age of sixty. In spite of the conviction, a wealth of conspiracy theories sprang up in relation to King’s murder; some would allege King was the victim of a far right scheme to destroy the civil rights movement and subvert the federal government, others suggested that he’d been killed by Communists in an attempt to provoke a race war, and still others that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had personally orchestrated King’s demise in revenge for perceived insults by King and other civil rights leaders against the bureau. There were even far-fetched allegations one of Dr. King’s own aides had secretly arranged to have him killed in a power play aimed at seizing control of the civil rights movement.

     In the 1970s, as the separatist Black Power ideology began to gain traction among the more radical sectors of the African-American community, so did the idea that King’s murder had been a government plot. This belief triggered a fresh wave of anger and violence within urban America-- most notably on the West Coast, where the leadership of the Black Panther Party went down in a series of bloodily dramatic shootings with police. Dozens of books, many of which were of at best questionable merit, came into print arguing heavily if not exclusively in favor of the theory King’s murder had been a government-planned hit job. Some people within the government itself were worried that rogue elements of the Justice Department or the CIA might have at a minimum secretly encouraged Ray to commit his horrific crime. The concern over the possibility of a conspiracy in the matter of King’s assassination was so great that in March of 1977, just two months into his term in the White House, President Jimmy Carter signed an executive order that created a House of Representatives Sub-committee specifically for the purpose of looking into the murder of public figures such as King and former U.S. attorney general Robert Kennedy.

    That sub-committee, known as the House Panel on Assassinations, would spend the next eighteen months probing the circumstances of Dr. King’s death. They found little if any evidence that would contradict the official jury verdict Ray had murdered the civil rights leader; at the same time, however, they also couldn’t conclusively rule out the possibility Ray had been part of a larger plot against King and other civil rights activists. During the Reagan Administration there were at least three dozen bills filed in the U.S. Senate and eleven others in the House of Representatives calling for further federal investigation into the possibility Ray might have been part of a conspiracy; none of those bills ever reached the president’s desk, and few of them could even make it out of committee. It was only with the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency in 1992 that the Justice Department finally started a comprehensive inquiry into allegations Ray might have been involved in a conspiracy.

The investigation continued under Clinton’s successor, former Texas governor George W. Bush, and when Barack Obama made American political history in 2008 by becoming the first African-American to be elected President of the United States, one of the first topics he touched on in his victory speech was the need to keep looking for the truth about whether a conspiracy had been behind Ray’s murder of Dr. King. But to this day the question of whether Ray acted alone or was part of a broader conspiracy remains unsettled.

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What started with the passage of a civil rights law under John F. Kennedy in 1962 would continue under Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson; in 1966, right about the time the Justice Department was concluding its investigation into former Selma sheriff Bull Connor’s 1965 attack on NAACP voting rights marchers, Johnson signed a series of executive orders increasing the federal government’s authority to prosecute defendants indicted for civil rights violations as well as enforce existing and future civil rights laws. Johnson followed this up in the spring of 1967 with the creation of a permanent civil rights commission whose primary function would be to advise the White House on civil rights-related domestic matters. This commission was one of LBJ’s last significant domestic accomplishments before the escalation of the Vietnam War overwhelmed his presidency and forced him to cancel any plans of running for another term in the Oval Office. During his first term as president Richard Nixon contemplated the establishment of a Cabinet-level civil rights department, but this notion would end up becoming a casualty of the Watergate scandal.

    Little if anything happened in regard to civil rights legislation during the brief tenure of Nixon’s replacement, Gerald Ford, but when Jimmy Carter won elected to the White House in 1976 he wouldn’t even wait for his inauguration before beginning to move aggressively to get tougher civil rights legislation passed by Congress. And not only was Carter adamant about getting new civil rights laws passed, but he also pushed relentlessly for the Justice Department to be more energetic in enforcing those laws already on the books.

    After Carter lost to Ronald Reagan in 1980, conventional wisdom maintained that civil rights-related prosecutions and lawsuits by the Justice Department would diminish. But if anything just the opposite happened; the number of civil rights cases handled by Justice actually went up by 20 percent. In fact, the first major civil suit brought by the U.S. Attorney General’s office in the Reagan Administration was an anti-discrimination case filed by the AG’s civil rights branch against a Midwest junior college that had been accused of denying a potential student’s application on racial grounds. By the time Reagan’s second term as president concluded in January of 1989, one out of every six criminal cases being investigated by the Justice Department were civil rights-related. Reagan’s successor, the first President Bush, briefly considered disbanding the White House civil rights commission only to abandon the idea when internal polling among his White House staffers suggested such a decision wouldn’t be well-received by the public.

     It was during the Clinton presidency that the Justice Department was at its most aggressive in going after civil rights violations. The department’s budget for prosecuting hate crimes was increased fourfold and hundreds of new agents were recruited by federal law enforcement organizations to investigate and, when necessary, arrest, people that were suspected to have committed racially motivated crime. Until the Monica Lewinsky scandal overtook his administration, Clinton took an extremely active role in shaping anti-hate crimes legislation; when he left office in 2001, he said his greatest regret was that he couldn’t have done more to eliminate hate crimes and racial discrimination from American society.

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Clinton did, however, make considerable progress towards the fulfillment of a dream long held by civil rights activists; in the final months of his second term in the Oval Office he signed an executive order mandating the establishment of a national monument to the victims of the 1956 Montgomery riots. Groundbreaking ceremonies for the monument were held in May of 2003, just after U.S. troops in Iraq overthrew Saddam Hussein; construction would be completed in late November of 2007. When Barack Obama made history in 2008 as the first African-American to be elected President of the United States, he made it a point in his inaugural address to pay homage to the victims of the Montgomery riots and to visit the national monument in one of his public appearances after his inauguration.

While there is clearly still a great deal of work to be done in race relations in America, few would dispute that substantial progress has been made in this area since the ’56 riots. One notable example of such progress: the ethnically diverse team of architects who designed the Montgomery riot victims’ national monument, a team headed up by a grandson of one of the black Montgomery citizens injured in the riots.

The End