Who Killed Martin Luther King?

Well, hello and welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. As always, we have a special guest today who's never been on the podcast before. This is his first time.

We have John Avery Emison, who is the author of this book, The Deep State Assassination of Martin Luther King. And this is going to be an interesting topic and probably a bit of a controversial one, but I'm no stranger to controversy.

So Dr. Emison, thank you for joining me. I appreciate it. And tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, what made you interested in this subject?

Well, glad to be here, John. I appreciate you having me on your podcast. Well, I grew up in West Tennessee, about 75 miles from Memphis in the small town of Alamo. And on April the 4th, 1968, I was one month away from graduating from high school when Dr. King was assassinated.

And so I feel like I've almost lived this situation. Obviously, I wasn't in Memphis when they had curfew and all of the problems that they had. Our local National Guard unit was mobilized down there. So I knew a number of the people who were actually on the scene.

And then my great uncle, my mother's uncle, Harry Avery, was commissioner of correction. And within a year or so of Ray being captured, he was in the custody of my uncle in the Tennessee State Penitentiary.

He began the only real investigation, when I say real, the only independent investigation, free from outside influence, into the King assassination. And within three months, Governor Buford Ellington, who had found out about the investigation and had warned him to stop it.

We don't want to know what happened. Fired him. So he went out the door. And but the interest has always been there. Then I had the opportunity in the early 90s to interview James Earl Ray four times.

There are not many of us left to actually have that experience. And so eventually I knew I was going to do a book. And this is my second one on the King assassination.

So I don't know, I don't think you mentioned it, but you are the current mayor, is that right, of Alamo, Tennessee?

That's correct. I'm the mayor of Alamo, Tennessee.

And you're the third in your family to be the mayor of that small town.

My dad served two different periods. He served a couple of terms and then later on three more terms when they were two year terms. And my grandfather, my mother's father, and my namesake served two non-consecutive periods as mayor as well.

Wow. So, I mean, this is something I've talked about on the podcast before. Not the topic of our conversation today, but thinking local, living in a local area, building up trust over the course of generations is something that I think we've lost that still somehow exists in some of these small pockets in different states.

And it sounds like you're in one of them. So that must be a wonderful thing to live with such a rich history and such a familiarity with the people that you serve there. I want to talk to you, though, about your book.

You have a quote here. This is from page six in the beginning. And you said this, James Earl Ray is a symbol. He is the symbol, the visible, I should say, manifestation of something that is invisible.

The violent Southern white racism that killed Dr. King. At least this is what we are told. And you're writing, I think, more from like you've been doing all the reading on. And I don't know if I want to say the secular world or the academic world, you know, the official narrative of what happened.

You've been reading that. And this is the conclusion you've come to. But for the sake of my audience, which I think many of whom are evangelical Christians, I just wanted to highlight something real quick, get your reaction, because it fits in with what you're saying here.

Thabiti Anabwile is a pastor in Virginia. He was for a long time part of an organization called Nine Marks, which is a Christian ministry. But he had a lot of influence with the Gospel Coalition, another Christian organization.

And he had written a blog a few years ago that caused a lot of controversy. Some people may remember it because he said this. He said James Earl Ray initially confessed to assassinating Dr. King, but he did not act alone.

Many have long believed there was a literal conspiracy of government actors, the mafia and Memphis police. Whether or not you believe Ray acted as a patsy for these conspirators, he did not act alone.

He acted with a tacit and sometimes explicit approval of white supremacists. He acted with the encouragement of a white society dedicated to the advantage of whites above all others and simultaneously the segregation, oppression and exploitation of black people.

Almost done. Ray acted with the assistance of whites who suppress their consciences. He acted with the assistance of anti-civil rights propagandists and white collar country club segregationists. He acted with the assistance of the FBI, which I know we're going to talk about a bit.

He talks about them trying to malign and silence black dissent. And these parties acted in concert in the same direction against Dr. King and by extension, the millions of African-Americans hoping for some larger piece of freedom's promise.

And he stops at the end of the quote, as I'm saying, the entire society killed Dr. King. This society had been slowly killing him all along. And he goes on and calls for, well, basically blames the ancestors of white people from that era for having guilt in this assassination.

So I know there's some overlap there because we're going to talk about the government and what kind of part they played. But this view, when I saw that, I thought I've seen this before. I mean, how common is that view that this is whites, especially Southern, but white people in America, racists who are responsible for this?

How common is that view? Yeah, I mean, academic world, that's the persona that was painted by. By the four authors whose works I go through in in my book, George MacMillan. Who wrote The Making of an Assassin and.

William Bradford Huey and his book, He Killed the Dreamer, which he had had a actually had a contract to write that book with James Earl Ray and the initial title was We Killed the Dreamer. And he kind of switched during the process.

And then Gerald Posner, who's written extensively about several assassinations, the JFK assassination, as well as the MLK assassination. And then more recently, Hampton Sides, who wrote Hellhound on His Trail, and they all portray Ray as this extremely violent racist.

Who was on a mission. The only problem is they have no evidence that Ray was a racist. He was in the army. He had a record in the army. He was in the federal penitentiary system. He was in Leavenworth.

So he had a record in Leavenworth. He had a record, I believe he served some time in Florida. I know he served time in in California, I think maybe in Illinois and and certainly in the Missouri prison all before the assassination.

And there's no record anywhere of of his his racism, the of course, he was white and he sounded Southern because he talked kind of slow and had a little bit of a draw, but, you know, he he grew up in Illinois.

He wasn't a Southerner. So there's a lot to the quote that you cited, but look beyond that just a little bit and glimpse how easily it was to manipulate all of us into believing that that Ray did it because of racism, because he certainly didn't have any other motive.

And. As soon as Dr. King was dead and within minutes they came over the radio and said they're looking for a white man and a white Mustang. I dare say that. Just about every Southerner and probably every citizen of the country draw the conclusion, well, a white man killed a civil rights leader because he wanted to shut him up.

Now, these authors went into great detail in making specific accusations, certain bars that Ray was in in California and situations where he worked. Even some of his prison records and so forth. Particularly.

MacMillan, George MacMillan. The only problem is MacMillan's book came out, it was published in 1966, pardon me, 1976, right on the eve of the vote by the U .S. House of Representatives to stand up the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which was in operation from 76 to 79.

It had two different chairmen during that period. And it went across two different Congresses, so the next Congress had to had to reauthorize it, which they did. But the committee investigators, eventually headed by G. Robert Blakey, who was the general counsel, they investigated all of these allegations.

MacMillan had about had about a dozen of them. They could not prove a single one of them, and they positively disproved about two thirds of them. So all of that was made up propaganda. That's that's where that came from.

MacMillan had been a propaganda writer during the war. He worked for the Office of War Information. And he he married Priscilla Johnson MacMillan, who likewise wrote a lone nut gunman about Oswald. So they're the husband and wife team.

They wanted you to believe during their entire lives that their work was unbiased. It came from them. It came from their research. It was not influenced. But the problem is, in recent years, the the releases by the National Archives under the JFK Records Act clearly shows, as and I've got it in in the book, there's a specific reference to the document in the book.

And anybody can look up online. It's very easy to find. That shows that Priscilla MacMillan, who only died a couple of years ago and outlived her husband by decades, was in spite of her assurances to the contrary, including emails to me, personal emails where we exchanged and I asked her questions and she answered most of them.

She was one of the documents shows that her CIA handler, which she had denied her whole life, was handing her off to another CIA handler. So you have to dismiss all of that as a very elaborate effort of propaganda.

Now. Who's behind that effort? To propagandize the people of this country, which CIA, of course.

The Mainstream Narrative on James Earl Ray and the Academic Account

Yeah, well, this gets us to the I guess the main question, who did kill Martin Luther King, Jr., if it wasn't James Earl Ray or James Earl Ray did not act alone, who assisted him? And I know there's there's so much.

I mean, this is this book is quite extensive, so we can't get into all of it. But, you know, maybe give us a few of the main things that people ought to know about the official story that the holes in it that don't make sense.

Well, one of the most interesting holes in the story is Ray's sophisticated aliases that he he used for primarily for aliases from just within a few weeks of his escape from the prison in Missouri at Jefferson City.

And let's say that would have been April, that was about 50 weeks before Dr. King was killed. So that now we're going back to April of 67. So he began using these these aliases very shortly after that.

In fact, as soon as he came back from his first trip to Canada, which was in the summer of of 1967. And. It turns out. Well, well, certainly when he entered his guilty plea, which was a a rambling less than four minute exchange with the criminal court in Memphis, if you run the timer on it, the lapse timer is three minutes and 43 seconds.

That was so that that was the entirety of what the court knew about James Earl Ray. And it didn't even know about these aliases. And these aliases are extremely important and extremely suspicious because.

In a sense, they weren't aliases, these were personas Ray used for personas. Well, he was on the lam from about May, maybe early June 67 until June of 68, when he had escaped from Canada and gone to England and was already in in Portugal and had come back to come back to England.

And these four personas were real Canadian men. Who lived within a five mile radius of each other, but otherwise did not know each other, and one of them, the one that he used for the longest. Was Eric S. Galt, G-A-L-T, and all this is in the book and the pictures are in the book.

In fact, there's an array of pictures, maybe I can maybe I can find this pretty quickly because it's it's it's striking. It's just striking. But the Eric S. Galt persona that here we go.

Yeah, is that yeah. What page is that?

That's on page four thirty seven, four thirty seven. So they're they're the four guys, real Canadian men, all of them alive, all of them about James Earl Ray's age, all of them about five, 10 or so. All of them with dark hair, blue eyes.

And a medium build. And these so you see what Ray looked like, there's oh, yeah, let me put you full screen.

Yeah, hold on. There you go.

There you go.

Right.

That's a picture of Ray.

Right.

Cleaned up when he applied for the the Canadian passport.

Yeah, so he used all these aliases. I know you you talk about he wound up. There's so many details that were fascinating. But one of them was the commonalities between him and Lee Harvey. Oswald was showing up at the Mexican embassy, you know, right before there's this allegation.

First of all, we're we'll chase rabbits just a moment. Right. I don't think Oswald, it wasn't Oswald at the Mexican embassy in sixty three. And and what would that have been? October of sixty three. I don't believe it was.

Didn't look like him. And when this this document that was released just in the Trump and Biden era document releases. There was this allegation raised that, well, we think it was James Earl Ray at the same Cuban embassy a few years later in the in November of nineteen sixty seven.

So. You need to know something about James Earl Ray and maybe maybe we should touch on this. James Earl Ray probably didn't even know what an embassy was. I mean, he would be one of the last people that you would think of that would have any business with an embassy, particularly a foreign embassy in a foreign country.

He just he was had he was personally incapable of the extremely complex crime of stalking a prominent person, of knowing where to stalk him and shooting him. And escaping and getting out of the country.

I mean, this was a guy who had eighth grade education. He was a ninth grade dropout and he eluded the largest manhunt in the history of North America. And took a bus from Atlanta to Toronto. And then had very suspicious contacts at two different rooming houses.

By then, he had dumped the GALT persona, the GALT alias, and he was using the, I believe, the Bridgman alias first and then eventually the Snead alias. So all these are, you know, you're dealing with a guy who you wouldn't hire to wash your car because he's going to mess something up.

And he's able to elude by himself the largest manhunt in the history of North America.

I mean, that's why don't you walk us through a little like what was involved, like the chances of someone being able to get a firearm that's sighted incorrectly to the exact place where they can, from this supposed hotel room, shoot Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.?

What are the chances? What are the obstacles?

Yeah, just the location is a let's start with that problem, because if you want to kill somebody, you need to know where they are. Right. I mean, it's not just a matter of aiming it somewhere. You're aiming it where, you know, they are.

And all of the explanations as to how Ray knew where Dr. King was in Memphis, the one by Posner, the one by McMillan, the one that was that was repeated in Hampton's book, all that's false. It's made up.

They said it was on the front page of the either the Commercial Appeal or the Press Emitter. I've forgotten which. I think maybe the Press Emitter was the afternoon paper at the time, the Memphis Press Emitter.

And it wasn't. I went back to the archives. It's not there. I even had an email exchange with Hampton Sides. He said, well, well, you know, that's probably a mistake. We conflated that from some other stuff and we'll take care of it in the next edition.

Well, I looked in the next edition. They didn't. It was still there because it it it is one of those. Let me put it this way. Judge Arthur Haynes, Jr., who. He and his father were Ray's original attorneys when he was extradited from England back to Memphis.

He made a statement, he made a comment to me a number of years ago now that is really stuck with me. And as I look at various elements of the case, you know, it's just a series of aha's. But he said that when they were representing Ray.

The government storyline was so precise. And and so meticulous that if you attacked successfully any element of it, the whole.

Thing collapsed.

And certainly the whole thing of where Ray knew Dr. King was. Never existed, it was never proven, the House Select Committee had no explanation for it. The writers had no truthful explanation for it. They they proposed some ideas that they said were fact when actually they were not.

And so that element is just a complete mystery. Now, let's go to the rooming house. And that was interesting because Ray checked into the rooming house, it certainly was Ray. On the afternoon of the assassination, and he used the alias of John Willard, that's as far as we know, that was the only time that he used that particular Canadian persona.

But so he was on the second floor. There's a community bathroom. There are several other tenants up there and. Here he is with a with a bathroom, a community bathroom that he's going to spend maybe two or three hours in, he's got a rifle in there, nobody saw the rifle, nobody saw him on that floor that afternoon, they saw somebody.

Nobody saw him fire the shot. And the position of having to stand in the bathtub and look out the window with a very narrow view. Across the street, it's just it doesn't make any sense, it doesn't make any sense.

Well, here's a picture, I think this is of I was just looking it up, that's it's kind of small, I guess, and that's the bathroom, I guess, from where he so he would have been standing right there. That's the window.

Yes. And he would have had to have been there knowing that he would be in range. I mean, it is it is an interesting, you know, I would have thought with the profile that Martin Luther King Jr. had, things would have been fairly kept under wraps.

He had bodyguards and that kind of thing.

And the police department met him at the airport the the the afternoon before. And I didn't even know where he was going to stay. He had been at a holiday in Rivermont about 10 days earlier when he had been in Memphis, but they didn't know where he was going to stay.

Right. I don't know if James Earl Reagan is going to know something the Memphis Police.

Department didn't even know.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of interesting pictures here, but here's the famous one. Maybe you can let me see if I can pull this up for you. You've seen this picture, I'm assuming.

Oh, yes. Right.

Yeah, yeah. So that way they're all pointing. And I think they're are they pointing towards then where the shots are pointing.

They're they're pointing at an angle that is closer to the top of the adjacent building, the flop house, the house, Betsy Brewer rooming house, rather than the window, because it was only a slight downward angle from that bathroom window to a man standing standing up on the catwalk, as you see there.

OK, so they're they're pointing to something that's probably a little higher than that.

Window. Are you suggesting the building or do you think in the picture that they're suggesting it was the roof then? Or I'm not sure. What are you trying to say? What's the significance of them pointing on the roof?

Well, they're they're they're pointing at an angle that. Could have been the second floor or it could have been the roof.

I got you. OK. OK, so I want to make sense of this for everyone who's listening, because there's other things I'd love to get into, like the ballistics tests and these kinds of things. But I think the thing popping in most people's minds at this point is, but didn't James O 'Reilly confess to doing it and didn't he go to prison for doing it?

Why is that? Like what evidence do you need?

Let's get into that, because that's a that's that tells a lot.

Well, you've talked to him personally. So I figured there was something if he meant something different or disagreed with that. Well, then you would know.

First of all, let's look at the circumstances of James Earl Ray's incarceration. And the pressure he was under. The Shelby County Sheriff's Department, all sheriffs run the county sheriffs run the county jail, jail system in Tennessee.

Basically, they're not anymore. There are almost no cities that have their own city jail anymore. It's all run by the county. And that's the way it was even in the 1960s with in Shelby County, the the county that Memphis is in.

So they took out they made two cells. Into one, they took out the bars in between. Now, the reason they did that is because they installed a closed circuit television camera system in that cell. They and and back then, the resolution was very bad unless you had a lot of lights.

It took TV studio type lights to make that work. So they installed the lights. They had them on 24 -7 for from June until the following March. They had a jailer in Ray's cell 24 -7 the whole time. They welded steel plate on the on the window so that Ray couldn't even see outside.

He could if he if he woke up taking a nap or woke up in the middle of the night and he asked him what, you know, it's two o 'clock. Is it is it a .m. or p .m.? He wouldn't know. He didn't see the sunlight.

They didn't let him out to exercise. And. He was under surveillance in the view of the jailer when he went to sleep, when he woke up, when he went to the bathroom, when he dressed, zero privacy, 20, 24 -7.

And they they logged all of his activities, everything that he said, everything that he did, whether he read a book or read a newspaper or whatever, that all that's in the in the logs, whether he asked for an aspirin and he took aspirin, whether he had sweet tea or unsweet tea with his bologna sandwich for lunch, all that's in there.

And the Haines's, his attorney, tried to get the court to intervene and stop that sort of surveillance and at least give him an opportunity to sleep at night without having. TV studio cameras on him. But the court turned that down in the process, they asked Sheriff Bill Morris about all these details and all that's in the.

In the court record, so. He was he was confined and isolated. And. Then you come to the point where. He and his brothers decide right before the trial, we want to get rid of the Haines's and we want Percy Foreman.

So Percy Foreman came in, one of the leading.

Murdered lawyers.

In the country.

And at first. Indicated to Ray and to his family that this is going to be an easy case, I'm going to get him off, we're going to put up a defense, we're going to we're going to go to trial. The state doesn't have a chance, the state can't prove anything, they don't have a murder weapon.

This is part of the ballistics that you referred to, and maybe maybe we'll get to that and maybe we'll have to do that later. But the the weapon was never proven to be the murder weapon. And so over time, somebody got to Percy Foreman and made a statement.

And the FBI started feeding him information to pressure Ray. They discovered that his elderly father had skipped parole in Iowa decades before and they told him they're going to if you don't confess. FBI is going to arrest your daddy and he's going he's going to die in jail just like just like you are, if you don't get executed.

As a matter of fact, Foreman threatened him, they said they're going to fry you in the electric chair. Well, that's a problem because Tennessee did have a death penalty, but it had successive governors that serve for a let's see, I guess about a 16 year period.

Frank Clement and then Buford Ellington, they had not allowed any executions. They had committed, they had commuted, pardon me, they had commuted the death sentences to life and present of every person.

Tennessee had not executed an inmate in way more than 10 years. And then Foreman gave his brother Jerry money. And we've got in the book, there's a picture of one of the checks that. That Percy Foreman wrote to Jerry Ray and he told Jerry, James Earl Ray's brother, and he told James Earl Ray, I've given you your brother money and I'm not giving him any more unless you go into the courtroom and plead guilty.

And in addition to which. There was a three party contract that helped pay for Ray's defense, it initially was between Ray and William Bradford Huey, who was doing the writing and the Haines's, so that the Haines's, so that James Earl Ray would feed the information to Huey, Huey would write it up and sell it to Look Magazine, Live Magazine, others, and eventually do a book.

And then from those proceeds, he would pay Ray's legal bills. So, so Foreman inherited that. And right on the eve of the guilty plea in March of 1969, Foreman told Ray, I'm assigning, and put this in writing, this is in writing, this is all documented and referenced in the book, that Ray would, that I'm going to assign this contract back to you.

It's my property, by then he had gotten Ray to give him the value of the whole story. But he says, this contract is my property, but I'm going to assign it back to you if you go in and plead guilty and don't say anything embarrassing in the court about this whole thing.

In other words, just keep your mouth shut and say that you, except to say that you, you did it. Well, that's suborning testimony. That's, that's bribery. He proposed and did this in writing. He proposed giving Ray something of value as long as he said what Foreman wanted him to say in court the next day.

And the court knew nothing about, about any of this. All of that was in the background.

Coerced Guilty Plea and Suppressed Defense in the Ray Case

So is your contention or your, is what you're proposing that James Earl Ray then confessed to a crime he did not do because he was pressured into doing so?

That's correct. One of the elements that a court is obligated to establish is whether or not in accepting a guilty plea, whether it's for a fight, whether it's assault, a simple assault or whether it's murder, the court has to know that the person is entering the guilty plea under no duress.

If there is duress, the court is obligated under the undercourt precedent not to accept the guilty plea.

So did, I'm just curious, did he, when you've talked to him, interviewed him, has he said to you, hey, look, I didn't actually do it. I, or is he not? Well, of course he did. He did. OK, all right.

I mean, that's right.

So I'm sure you're not the only one that he said that to.

Oh, well, he said that to Martin Luther King's children who have concluded that he.

Didn't do it. Oh, I didn't.

So wait, his Martin Luther King Jr.'s children don't believe it was James Earl Ray.

Right now, I'm not speaking on their behalf, but just just publicly, Dexter King, I think, and some of the other relatives have said they don't believe that James Earl Ray was.

Guilty. So who's guilty in this? Who, you mentioned a source that you think now, but you do make it clear that you can't piece everything together because we don't have all the information. But you do have a fairly strong case, I think.

Yeah. It's too late now for us to ever know who the trigger man was. That's, you know, we'll never know that too many years have passed. But obviously it was a professional hit because somebody fired one shot from a remote concealed location, escaped with the weapon and was on the lam.

So that's that's not amateur. And by the way, that's not KKK. I mean, they they would take credit for it. And it's certainly not mafia. They would spray the whole thing with machine gun bullets. And and and, you know, it would have it would have all their their their ear markings of it.

But Ray is. Ray was just not capable of that sort of sophisticated crime.

What was this? Because he was a CIA asset, though, right? He had an involvement.

Oh, yes. He had a he had a handler. His name was Raul. And in the book, in the book, there's there's information in there that obtained from Judge Arthur Haynes, Jr. That. They got the contents of Ray's of the trunk of Ray's Mustang.

Sometime during the summer of 68. And he said it was just he said it was it was electric that they got a very small jacket. Now, Ray had always described Raul, which the government says didn't exist.

Raul was made up.

Raul, the House Select Committee said, well, maybe maybe he's. It's a conflation of various characters, including probably his brothers. But neither one of them were.

So a psychological reading of it.

Right, right, right.

So Ray had always described Raul as a very diminutive man, a small man. And Judge Haynes said, we got the. We got the contents of the trunk, the evidence released to the defense. And there was a small, small jacket that he said Ray couldn't possibly get it on.

And he made kind of a funny comment to me that I guess I guess if we had if Ray hadn't fired us at the last minute right before the trial and hired Percy Foreman, that I would have been the one who said, if the jacket doesn't fit, we.

CIA Surveillance, the Handler Raul, and the Government’s Interest

Yeah, I mean, it's funny, but it's it's it's sad that this that evidence hasn't. I mean, is that even mentioned in the other books that you cited at the beginning? Does anyone try to?

No, I don't think I said anything about that.

Yeah.

So that's that that's evidence that doesn't line up right with the government storyline. Sure, there are things there are some things that line up with the government storyline. But when you start looking at all of the elements of it and and and you you see where these weaknesses are, the whole thing just falls apart.

You take a you know, it's it's like a big Lego thing. You know, you you pull out the wrong block and the whole thing collapses.

Yeah. And there's so many little things like this. You've just scratched the surface, like even with the ballistic tests. You talk about how, you know, the rifle that they assume was used wasn't even sighted in like right.

So there's all kinds of little things like that that just don't make sense.

And I wonder like what. And the rifle had a three round magazine. I have one very similar to that that I use for deer hunting. Mine's an automatic. That one was was was a pump, a Remington pump action rifle.

But there was only one round in the magazine. So. Here you've got. A property hoodlum. Who's not real bright, let's say he fired the shot, he's going to load one.

One round.

Into a rifle that'll take one in the chamber and three in the magazine. What if what if he hits his target? But he runs into a little trouble trying to get away. He's going to have to. Fumble around and try to try to read just stuff like that, that doesn't make any sense at all.

Nobody's nobody's going to do that.

Well, well, not if he's the kind of person to sit there waiting for hours and be, you know, if he's a careful, cautious man, then of course he would have more rounds. So the question I think naturally probably coming across people's mind at this point is that if it was the government, if there was a hit man, if so, what was the government's interest in this?

Well, they it the chapter on that I have in the book that deals with the military and other surveillance of Dr. King establishes if you are open minded and you are willing to read what the circumstances tell you, the circumstances are clear that the Pentagon and CIA were very concerned that Dr. King was going to interrupt the draft by telling black teenagers don't register and don't comply with induction notices.

And they were likewise fearful. And this is also in the book documented that he might tell soldiers and Marines in the field in Vietnam, lay down your weapons and don't go on patrol. So whether or not he was about to do that, they certainly feared that.

And you can imagine the chaos. Of the late 60s. With an unpopular war, if suddenly only white people were going to die from now on. I mean, that would. Yeah, it's problems.

Well, I mean, I've also, of course, heard that, you know, there's this surveillance of MLK because there was a concern he was talking to the Soviets that maybe he was on their side in a sense that he was a Marxist.

And I mean, they were afraid that he was being financed by international communist governments. Yes, that's clear that that's that's documented. They were never of course, they were never able to prove that there was no evidence.

They just missed the fact that there was a lot of legitimate. Opposition to the war across the board, white, black, northern, southern, everywhere, Democrats, Republicans, they just they just couldn't believe that these were the people who were who served in and had some leadership capacity even then in World War Two.

And that that only been about 20 years. But the whole society changed in that period of time.

And they did.

Why do you think it was to their advantage to take him out completely? Why not like just blackmail him with the information they collected about his sexual escapades and that kind of thing and use him for their own purposes instead of kill him?