Target: Martin Luther King

[furtherfield]

Target: Martin Luther King

By Richard Goldstein, Village Voice
January 17, 2003

We never talked about assassination," says William Pepper, who worked with
King during the last year of his life. Though black activists were being
murdered in growing numbers, King's colleagues didn't connect the dots. "We
never put together what had happened in Vietnam, Cuba, and the Congo [where
CIA-supported assassination plots succeeded, except in Castro's case]. We
couldn't apply that to us. It's a lament of mine that we were not more
aware."


By 1978, Pepper was in a very different place. He'd become an attorney
representing the man convicted of killing King, James Earl Ray. Ray always
claimed he'd been framed, and the King family came to believe him. With
their approval, Pepper fought for a retrial, but the state of Tennessee
successfully blocked the proceeding, and in 1998 Ray died, still protesting
his innocence. A year later, Pepper was back in court pursuing the only
option left: a civil suit. The jury concurred with his case, and their
verdict cited "government agencies" as "parties to this conspiracy." The
Justice Department launched an investigation in 2000 but found no basis for
the jury's judgment. The official explanation remains what it was at Ray's
conviction: that he acted alone.


http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=14903