Martin Luther King serves as a role model for many African Americans because of his contributions and fight towards civil rights.

Everyone has someone that they look up to. It may be a hero or a role model. Martin Luther King serves as a role model for many African Americans because of his contributions and fight towards civil rights. King became very popular and touched the lives of many. According to Robert A. Divine and other authors of America Past and Present, the arrest of Rosa Parks sparked a massive protest movement that witnessed the emergence of Martin Luther King, Jr., as an eloquent new spokesman for African Americans.

King led a prominent bus boycott in honor of Mrs. Parks. The boycott successfully ended a year later when the Supreme Court ruled the Alabama segregated law unconstitutional. As a result, King became well known around the world with his belief of passive resistance. He visited Third World leaders in Africa and in Asia and paid homage to Ghandi. He led a victorious Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington in 1957 on the third anniversary of the Brown decision. He held many vigils and led many protests to end segregation. King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to promote others to fight against segregation a year after the bus boycott. Then, in April 1960, he found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). These newly formed coalitions led to “dramatic success for the movement, but also ushered in a period of heightened tension and social turmoil in the 1960s.

By 1968, he was winning the hearts and minds of more and more Americans on both sides of the color line. His efforts successfully merged the anti-Vietnam war movement and the civil rights movement, and the awful reality of the black situation in America could no longer be hidden behind the “white curtain”. On March 28, 1968, King led a march through Memphis, Tennessee, which, like all his marches, was intended to have been peaceful and non-violent. But thanks to a gang called “The Invaders,” the march disintegrated into rioting and looting. King barely escaped the March 28 event unharmed, and swore to return to Memphis and “conduct this demonstration properly – with no violence.” The date for the new march was set at April 4, 1968. This time, King would not survive his fateful trip to Memphis.

Additionally, local newspapers criticized King when he announced he was coming back to Memphis for a second round. Among other comments, the local press criticized him for staying at a white-owned Holiday Inn, instead of the Motel Lorraine, which was black-owned. Hoping to avoid further antagonistic press in wake of the disastrous March 28 demonstration, King’s camp switched his accommodations to a room at the Motel Lorraine, where he died on April 4. From a security standpoint, changing King’s lodging to this particular motel was a bad mistake. The Motel Lorraine was located in a fairly seedy part of town. The day before King arrived, someone claiming to be an advance security man dropped by the Lorraine Hotel and changed King’s reservation from a ground-floor room to a second-floor balcony room, saying, “Dr. King always likes to have a room on the second floor overlooking the swimming pool.” Questioned later, none of King’s associates were aware of an “advance man” and his description didn’t match any of King’s friends or associates. Switching rooms eliminated any trace of security that the location might have had. The new room was in the rear of the building, the balcony wide open to sniper fire with no cover whatsoever.

At 6:01 p.m., on April 4, 1968, King stepped out of his motel room on his way to get dinner. He leaned over the railing to speak to his chauffeur. A moment later, a single shot from a high-powered rifle blasted out, and King fell to the concrete, where he lay dying. America and Blacks everywhere felt the heat of civil unjust as they learned about the shocking news of their hero and role model.

As soon as King fell, an aide, believed to be Marrell McCullough, pointed to the bathroom window of Bessie Brewer’s boarding house. The fingers of ...

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As soon as King fell, an aide, believed to be Marrell McCullough, pointed to the bathroom window of Bessie Brewer’s boarding house. The fingers of others followed him, as recorded in photographs of the assassination. From that window, or so the official story goes, a man named James Earl Ray allegedly fired the shot that killed King. Yet a number of questions and contradictions offer reason to doubt the official explanation. Although he is serving time for the crime, Ray denies that he personally killed King. However, he says that he may have been partly, but unwittingly, responsible. He claims he was duped into a gunrunning scheme by a mysterious man with CIA and mafia contacts named “Raoul.” The gunrunning scheme enabled Raoul to manipulate Ray into position as the conspiracy’s patsy.

If Ray did not shoot King from the boarding house bathroom window, where did the shot come from? One witness sitting in front of the bank of trees said he heard a rifle fire directly behind him at ground level, not from the boarding house. Other witnesses also reported hearing the shot from ground level. Two people at the fire station nearby reported that a boy ran in and told them a similar story, but he left before police could question him. King’s chauffeur, as well ad some of his aides who were standing on the balcony with King, all testified that King appeared to have been lifted physically off the ground. This is inconsistent with a shot from the boarding house bathroom, but consistent with a shot originating from the ground below the boarding house window. It is possible that Ray had a doppleganger. Ray allegedly escaped in a white Mustang, but several witnesses reported seeing two white Mustangs on the street on April 4.

People in the neighborhood said Ray “stood out” in the seedy area because he wore a suit. The driver of the other Mustang might have been a man in a similar suit seen several times eating at Jim’s Grill near the Motel Lorraine. This mystery man became known as the “eggs and sausages” man, because he started showing up shortly before the assassination and always ordered eggs and sausages. On April 4, 1968, the “eggs and sausages” man ate his usual fare, paid his tab, and left the café. A few minutes later, King lay dying. Police picked up the “eggs and sausage” man for questioning after diners at the café reported what had happened, but he was never booked on suspicion of being involved with King’s death. In March 1994, Betty Spates, a former employee of Jim’s Grill, signed an affidavit stating that restaurant owner Lloyd Jowers “ came running through the back door” carrying a rifle just moments after the assassination. He then placed the rifle, broken down into its component pieces, in the trunk of his car. Jowers purportedly told Spates he would kill her if she ever told anyone what she’s seen.

Moreover, Ray was not apprehended until June 8, after traveling form Memphis to Toronto to London to Portugal and back to London, where he was arrested at Heathrow Airport while en route to Belgium. While taking his tour of Canada and Europe, Ray spent $25,000, even though he had no known source of income. So who was the triggerman? Researcher Philip Melanson suggests that “Raoul” may actually be a man named Jules Ricco Kimble, currently serving two life sentences for racketeering and murder. Kimble, an associate of the Ku Klux Klan and New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello, claims that he knew James Earl Ray and that he took part in a conspiracy to assassinate King.

According to Kimble, Ray was a patsy, and the real assassins were a team of seven men from the CIA, three disguised as Memphis police, one of whom shot King from below the boarding house bathroom window. Regardless of whether Kimble’s story is true, witnesses heard a shot from ground level at the same location as the alleged CIA sniper, and the only witness who placed Ray at the boarding house bathroom window at the time of the murder was Charles Stephens, and alcoholic who, according to another, was “peeing in some bushes” when the fatal shot rang out.

The Memphis police department handled the King assassination with the efficiency of the Keystone Cops. In fact, enough weirdness transpires to suggest that at least some elements of the Memphis police department and/or the city government didn’t want to catch King’s assassin(s) at all. Also, Shortly before the killing, King’s police security detail was reduced from eight officers to two officers, in spite of more than fifty death threats against the civil rights leader. Ironically, just hours before the shooting, a black officer named Edward Redditt was sent home because of a mysterious threat against his life. This left a single policeman on the immediate scene. Edward Redditt admitted under oath before the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he was working for the Memphis police department’s Intelligence Division on April 4, and that he was not actually part of the security for King was “absolutely false.” Redditt’s removal against his will because of the supposed threat to his life served the dual purpose of removing a black witness from the scene and distracting elements of the Memphis police just before the assassination. But in all likelihood, there was nothing Redditt could have done that would have saved King’s life. Adding insult to injury, when private ambulance arrived seven minutes after the shooting, the police insisted on waiting for the city ambulance to arrive, and would not allow the private ambulance to drive King to the hospital. Disturbingly, the FBI had targeted King for surveillance, harassment and sabotage just as they had done to Malcolm X and countless other black activists during the civil rights struggle. Most of this spying and subterfuge was carried out under COINTELPRO. Legendary FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, America’s least attractive drag queen, once described Kind as “the most dangerous man in Americas, and a moral degenerate”. A few months before the assassinations, Hoover distributed an internal memo at the FBI calling for King’s “removal from the nation scene.” In April, Hoover approved the plan, which led to King’s switch to the Motel Lorraine. One documented COINTELPRO caper involved surveillance of King’s alleged “sexual escapades.” The tapes of these supposed escapades were later used in an attempt to blackmail King into committing suicide. The Memphis city official that ordered the relocation of the two black firemen and black police officer Edward Redditt on the day of the assassination was an ex-FBI agent and a former associated of Hoover. Obviously it is a quite likely that the FBI was involved with the cover-up-and possibly the execution-of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. Suffice it to say that in 1978, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that there was a 95% probability that King was killed by a conspiracy. However, the House Select Committee also concluded that “James Ray fired one shot at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; the shot killed King.” After the House Select Committee released its final Report in 1979, Committee Chairman Louis Stokes (D-Ohio) and Chief Counsel G. Blakey ordered that all of the committee’s backup.

Credits

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters : America in the King Years, 1954-63.

Simon & Schuster, 1988.

Divine, Robert, et al. America: Past and Present. 5th edition; volume II,

Addison Wesley, New York: 1999.

Garrow, David J. bearing the cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the

Southern Christian Leadership Confrence. Morrow, 1986.

Jakoubek, Robert E. Martin Luther King, Jr. Chelsea Hse., 1989

For younger readers.

Lewis, David L. King: A Biography. 2nd ed. Univ. of Illinois Pr., 1978.

Rosa Parks: Black woman who refused to give up her seat for a white person on a bus.

Alabama Segregated Law: allowed whites to sit at the front of public buses and have first choice of seats; separated whites from blacks.