James earl ray9/11/2023 ![]() ![]() "After the assassination, the police found that the window in the bathroom had been jerked up 5 inches. Instead, he went down the hall to a filthy communal bathroom, where he could see King's balcony if he leaned out the window. From the room he rented, there was no direct line of sight onto the balcony where King was shot. Ray checked into a flophouse across the street from the Lorraine. "It's actually extraordinary how little security King had. He had no bodyguards, no entourage watching out for him," Sides says. The answers to what truly happened that day in Memphis? It's anybody's call."Not only that, but King had no security detail. Multiple investigations have been conducted, multiple books written, countless arguments made. "The forces were very much against him in the climate at the time of his death," Jones says.ĭid King's life work - striving for civil rights, aiding the poor, speaking out against war - lead to his death? Did King, the night before, see it coming? It was a comment that didn't sit well with a government trying to win a war that was becoming increasingly unpopular, and it furthered his reputation among his enemies that he was anti-American. "He planned to march with 500,000 Black and white poor people, and he made the comment very shortly before his death that if America continued to give its financial assets to the Vietnam War, America would go to hell." King was en route to Washington, D.C.," the NCRM's Jones says of King's post-Memphis itinerary. The museum also has an interactive timeline of the civil rights struggle that includes a breakdown of the final days of King and the lingering questions that surround his assassination. Yet some of its most popular exhibits, not surprisingly, are King-related: Room 306, where he spent his last night the spot in the building across the street where Ray allegedly fired the fatal shot the rifle that Ray allegedly used and the Ford Mustang in which he made his alleged getaway. Did King's outspoken criticism of the war in Vietnam, and his plans to hold a march later that year in Washington, D.C., play into some powerful entities, government or otherwise, wanting him dead?.Is that enough to believe, as the King family did, that the FBI conspired to kill King? The FBI uncovered several extramarital trysts that King conducted and, at one point, wrote an anonymous letter to King suggesting that he commit suicide. Edgar Hoover hated King, once even publicly calling him "the most notorious liar in the country," and on several occasions launched investigations to dig up dirt on the civil rights leader. How much importance should we assign to the fact that the FBI had continually harassed King before his death? FBI director J.Why were there no definitive findings matching the rifle to the bullet that killed King?. Who was the mysterious " Raoul" that Ray claimed was involved in the shooting?.What about the claim from Memphis restaurant owner Loyd Jowers that he paid a Memphis police officer to shoot King?.Why would Ray dump a rifle he bought, possibly laden with his fingerprints, in a conspicuous spot near the scene of the murder?.Why were several Black firemen dismissed from their duty stations at a nearby firehouse the day of the killing?.Why was a weed-covered hill between the boarding house and the Lorraine Motel - a place where some people reported seeing smoke immediately after the shooting and a man fleeing the area, the Memphis equivalent to Dallas' grassy knoll - cleared by city workers just hours after King fell?.know his assassination was imminent? That's one of a myriad of questions that have flourished in the years since King's murder, a death that now sometimes threatens to overshadow the civil rights icon's considerable legacy. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."ĭid Martin Luther King Jr. He concluded in a crescendo: "And so I'm happy tonight. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. ![]() But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. "Well, I don't know what will happen now. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?" King said to. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. ![]()
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