Martin Luther King

Not to be confused with Martin Luther

Martin Luther King Jr.
Born	Michael King Jr. (1929-01-15)January 15, 1929 Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America
Died	April 4, 1968(1968-04-04) (aged 39) Memphis, Tennessee, United States of America
Cause of death	Assassination via gunshot by the FBI
Nationality	New Afrikan

Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was a Statesian Baptist minister and activist who was the most visible spokesman and leader in the US civil rights movement from 1955 until the FBI assassinated him in 1968.

King's legacy has been absorbed into the liberal capitalist establishment as a hero of nonviolence, yet his legacy as a critic of capitalism has been whitewashed by these capitalist powers. As Lenin famously said:

During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.

— Vladimir Lenin, State and Revolution: Class Society and the State, 1917

While King may not have been a communist revolutionary, he was a coalition-builder with widespread appeal to the poor and downtrodden in the United States, which made him a natural ally to communists and socialists struggling for a more equitable society. The FBI even believed that he was a Marxist-Leninist with connections to CPUSA.

Activism

Anti-Vietnam War

A year before his assassination, King denounced the Vietnam War in a speech at the Riverside Church in New York. Kwame Ture warned King that his anti-war views would endanger him.

Poor people's campaign

In 1968, King came to Memphis to support a strike of sanitation workers. He was running for president with Benjamin Spock at the time of his death.

Assassination

At 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 1968, a bullet hit King while he was on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. His chauffeur Solomon Jones and SCLC attorney Chauncey Eskridge said his body moved upwards, indicating he had been shot from below. King was declared dead an hour later.

Investigation

Map of the shooting area. Mainstream media claims that the shot came from the rooming house while many witnesses believe it was from the bushes next to the fire station.

James Earl Ray was accused of assassinating King by shooting him from the bathroom of Bessie Brewer's rooming house across the street. However, the path from the bathroom window to the balcony was blocked by tree branches that were only cut down the next day. Several witnesses said that the real shooter was in the bushes near the fire station. The bushes were cut down the morning after the shooting.

Police found a rifle wrapped in a bedspread in the doorway of the Canipe Amusement Company. The rifle had Ray's fingerprints, but its could not be matched to the bullet that killed King. Guy Canipe said that a person who did not match Ray's appearance dropped the rifle there two to five minutes before the shooting.

Charles Quitman Stephens, another tenant in the rooming house, said he saw a man running out after the assassination, but said that his appearance did not match Ray's. Stephens's cab driver, James McCraw, said that the bathroom was empty at the time of the shooting. He also saw two white Mustangs, one with an Alabama plate and another with an Arkansas plate.

Civil trial

In 1999, the jury of the wrongful death suit by the King family ruled unanimously that King was killed by a U.S. government conspiracy.

See also

• Quotes by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.