Description:

King Martin


Martin Luther King Assassin, James Earl Ray Discussing the Freedom of Information Act, Conspiracy Theories, and His Lawsuit Against the US Government

 

Single page typed signed letter, 8.5" x 14". Dated "October 4,  1976", and signed by James Earl Ray as "James E. Ray", with his prison identification of "James E. Ray #65477, P.O. Box--73, Petros, Tn. 37845.  Fine condition.

 

James Earl Ray writes to his attorney, Mark Lane who represented Ray for a period of time, but was most well known for being a crusading lawyer for often unpopular causes. Lane was best known as an early and persistent skeptic of the lone-gunman account of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and wrote several books affirming his belief that the president was the victim of a far-reaching government conspiracy. Mark Lane had also been working on a book with Donald Freed called Code Name Zorro - The Murder of Martin Luther King, ultimately published in 1978, and reprinted in the early 1990's as Murder in Memphis. The premise of the investigation originally led Mark Lane to reach out directly to James Earl Ray.  In 1977, Mr. Lane appeared before a congressional panel investigating the assassinations of the 1960s as the attorney for Ray, King’s convicted killer. Mr. Lane said Ray was innocent and charged the FBI with being the “prime suspects” in King’s murder.

 

In this letter, Ray was requesting that Mark Lane pursue and include "the information/material include the complete file, including the file the F.B.I. labels, raw files of the government investigation … " And " … all material from the J.D./F.B.I. files that the Church committee declined to make part of the Senate record. Specifically, the reported 13 packing crates and numerous tapes makes up the F.B.I. file in it's investigation/harassment of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, commencing from the period that the F.B.I, initiated the investigation/harassment campaign."

 

This letter directs Lane to institute a "freedom of information suite against the United States government" on behalf of James Earl Ray who believed that the FBI was directly involved in King's murder. The FBI had been harassing King for years with proposed theories that King was supporting communism. The theories that King had even been threatened by the FBI  were confirmed after 50 years of denial in 2017 during the release of the JFK files through a highly revealing uncovered letter from a secret FBI  dossier, dated only three weeks before Dr. King's assassination in April 1968 stating that:

 

"King is a whole-hearted Marxist who has studied it (Marxism), believes in it and agrees with it, but because of his being a minister of religion, does not dare to espouse it publicly."

And in another part says:

"During the early 1960s, the CPUSA [the communist party was striving to obtain a Negro-labor coalition to achieve its goals in this country… Martin Luther King, Jr, and his organization were made to order to achieve these objectives."

Perhaps most revealing aspect of this Ray situation was that even the King family did not believe James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King. They were already aware that the FBI had tapped King's phones, among other criminalizing schemes. In fact William Sullivan of the FBI was about to testify and air the dirty laundry of "Code Name Zorro," the super-covert program that J. Edgar Hoover initiated to tarnish King's image and influence, but Sullivan was conveniently killed in a hunting accident days before his testimony. The odd and perplexing ending to this saga occurred in 1997,  a year before James Earl Ray's death, when King's son Dexter had a meeting with Ray and asked him, "I just want to ask you, for the record, did you kill my father?" Ray replied, "No. No, I didn't." King told Ray that he, along with the King family, believed him--urging that Ray be granted a new trial. Dr. William Pepper, a friend of King in the last year of his life, represented Ray in a televised mock trial in an attempt to grant him the trial he never received. In November 1999, Pepper represented the King family in a wrongful death civil trial against Loyd Jowers, a restaurant owner in Memphis who was brought to civil court in December 1999 and sued for being part of a conspiracy to murder Martin Luther King Jr. He was found legally liable, and the King family accepted $100 in restitution, an amount chosen to show that they were not pursuing the case for financial gain. The jury, concluding on December 8, 1999, found that Loyd Jowers as well as others, including governmental agencies, had been part of a conspiracy. The King family has since concluded that Ray did not have anything to do with the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.

 

James Earl Ray died in 1998, along with his secrets.


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