Guest Post – Reopen The Investigation Of The Murder Of Martin Luther King

Stu Wexler, a superb teacher from New Jersey, is the author of the following article about the necessity of reopening the an investigation of the murder of Martin Luther King. The ideas and words are his. I believe the reopening of cold cases from the Civil Rights Era is a moral imperative. The murder of Martin Luther King was, clearly, a conspiracy – James Earl Ray did not have the means to pull it off on his own. I applaud Stu for his energy in this cause! The passage of time does not negate responsibility for murder.  -Barry

————————————————

A Mighty Stream:  Martin Luther King, Jr. and Legal Justice In Cold Case Murders

by Stuart Wexler

Today, children across the country are off from school in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. But this was not before teachers exposed millions of students to King’s legacy by showing the minister’s “I Have A Dream Speech.” The hope is that Dr. King’s paean to egalitarianism and social harmony will excite a new generation of citizens, just as it has inspired Americans for close to five decades. Other than Thomas Jefferson, few historical figures can lay claim to such a universally revered meditation on America’s core values, one that inspires political commentators as different as Al Sharpton and Glenn Beck.

But the speech did not merely describe a vision of hope for America; King aimed to “dramatize an appalling condition,” whether it was a “Negro in Mississippi who could not vote” or a “Negro in New York who believes he has nothing for which to vote.” Quoting from the Book of Amos, King insisted “… we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

That last quote can be found engraved on a marble wall dedicated to a different kind of justice that is often forgotten when discussing Dr. King’s crusade for civil rights. In front of King’s quote at the Civil Rights Memorial at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama is a list of forty martyrs, individuals who were killed in the name of reactionary racism. The murderers almost all escaped punishment during King’s lifetime. Dr. King used his fame to call attention to these crimes in hopes of bringing pressure for a resolution. He eulogized the four little girls killed at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. He commemorated the three civil rights workers killed in Neshoba County, Mississippi, the so-called “Mississippi Burning” killings.

In doing so he risked his own life, bringing himself into the cross-hairs of the victims’ murderers. Documents show that four racists plotted to kill King in connection with his visit to Birmingham. In Neshoba, the very people who plotted the murders included law enforcement officers that provided “protection” for King when he commemorated those deaths. The minister’s efforts in honor of these martyrs became so commonplace that one innocent black farmer was killed to lure King himself into a death trap. Ben Chester White had no connection to the civil rights movement, but the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi arranged his death expecting King to come to the Magnolia State to protest the crime. King did not, but Ben Chester White’s name is on the memorial in Montgomery.

As with some of the other “appalling conditions” King referenced in 1963, progress is being made. One of White’s murderers went to prison in 2003. Sam Bowers, the Klan leader who arranged Whites’ murder, died in prison in 2006, having been convicted in 1998 for ordering the murder of another civil rights leader three decades earlier. As late as 2005, a prosecution was brought against Edgar Ray Killen, for the Mississippi Burning killings. What many of these prosecutions have in common is the dedication of outside investigators to their closure; reporters like Jerry Mitchell, who would not give up on crimes that went unpunished for decades. Killen went to prison, in large part, due to the efforts of a high school teacher, Barry Bradford, and three of his students.

Unfortunately, a Justice Department initiative, created in honor of civil rights murder victim Emmett Till, has not been as successful in bringing new prosecutions. Commissioned to investigate over 100 cold cases from the 1950s and 1960s, the Civil Rights Cold Case Initiative has closed the majority of its docket without any resolution; no new charges have been filed in any case. This is premature, and the cases should be re-opened.

In honor of Dr. King, and his pursuit of legal justice, the Justice Department unit should move in a new direction even as it continues conventional investigations. The files on each of the 100-plus crimes it is investigating should be digitized and made available, in searchable format, to the public, so that investigators like Mitchell, Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Hank Klibanoff, and others, can pursue leads even as the Justice Department pursues other cases.  It is outside investigators, again, working in tandem with law enforcement, who have been responsible for nearly every cold case prosecution since the 1990s. Outside investigators often have access to sources unavailable to the FBI, and to witnesses who might be uncomfortable or reluctant to speak to law enforcement. In the case of Killen, he was willing to provide incriminating information to seemingly “innocent” high school students that he never said to professional investigators. Outside investigators are also more apt to “think outside the box” in exploring leads. Mitchell provided the most damning material used to convict Birmingham church bomber Bobby Frank Cherry– a TV guide listing that contradicted Cherry’s alibi on the day of the crime. Outside investigators can augment the Justice Department’s work, and breath new life into cases that, due to the passage of time, may only have one more opportunity for closure.

A renewed Justice Department effort can also rectify a glaring omission in its queue of investigations: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s own assassination. Listed on the memorial in Montgomery, he is not among the martyrs whose murder merited a renewed examination. While King’s alleged assassin, James Earl Ray, was convicted after his court confession in 1969, he quickly disavowed his plea and maintained his innocence until his death in 1998. When Congress re-investigated the assassination in the late 1970s, they did not believe Ray’s claims of innocence, but they did conclude that he was part of a conspiracy to kill the minister. If there was such a plot, King’s murderers escaped justice.

Indeed, King’s murder illustrates the power of online technology to unearth new leads in cold cases. For my co-authored book on the crime in Memphis, The Awful Grace of God, we data-mined online investigatory files to unearth a new witness; a career criminal like Ray, he was offered a bounty on King while in prison in 1967, just like Congress believed happened with James Earl Ray before he escaped from Missouri State Penitentiary. But Congress never made the connections across file streams to find Donald Nissen much less interview him; he is alive and willing to tell his story to the Justice Department. Nissen’s account leads to a network of white supremacists many of whom– like Bowers– participated in other civil rights crimes, and who targeted King several times for assassination. New technology also offers a unique investigative opportunity in King’s murder, one not available in many other civil rights crimes. Investigators failed to match several sets of fingerprints either to James Earl Ray or to other possible sources. In 2000, the FBI ran these prints through their special database, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) and found no new leads. But the system is far more robust now, with access to tens of millions of additional suspect prints going back decades. Investigators used it to solve crimes committed as far back as 1957.  The unknown prints from the King murder are still available at the National Archives near College Park, Maryland.

If Killen can go to jail for a crime committed in 1964, there is still hope that actual justice may be realized in Dr. King’s murder and the other martyrs on the memorial in Montgomery.  To this end, I have created two petitions. The first is to add Dr. King’s murder to the cold case queue, and can be found at: http://wh.gov/mFpn. The second is to digitize the other files from the cold case investigation, and release them to the public.  That can be found at http://wh.gov/mF6C .

At the very least, historians and researchers can examine the historical record for new insights into our past. These opportunities become more limited as witnesses pass away.  Time is the enemy here, but as Dr. King frequently noted, while “the arc of universe is long…  it bends toward justice.”
Stuart Wexler is the co-author of the book, The Awful Grace of God: Religious Terrorism, White Supremacy, and the Unsolved Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., published by Counterpoint Press, in April of 2012.  He is a high school history teacher from New Jersey.

He can be reached at:

swexler2@hotmail.com