The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II

A manhunt is launched for MLK’s killer, James Earl Ray. After his capture he pleads guilty. With no trial the world won’t hear the facts of the case laid out in court, giving rise to decades of conspiracy theories that even the King family came to believe. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:06Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:16Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and this is part two of our two parter on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

• 1:26Speaker 03

  That's right. Where we left off with part one was the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. And we're going to pick up now with the investigation and the manhunt. And while we're talking about that, we might as well go ahead and say it's still perhaps the largest manhunt in FBI history, depending on who you ask. Cost a couple of million bucks in those dollars, 3,500 investigators. And it was all just a bit awkward because as we all know, or maybe some people don't know this, but the FBI had been tracking Martin Luther King Jr. since 1956. So for 12 years under a program called racial matters, racial matters.

• 2:08Josh Clark?

  And I don't think they meant like matters, like race matters.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  No, I think they meant the other way, like the matters of race.

• 2:14Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  And then in 1963, they started tapping his phones under the communist infiltration program and J. Edgar Hoover was still around at the time because it seems like he was there for 300 years.

• 2:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  And he didn't like Martin Luther King Jr. He called him the most notorious liar in the country publicly at a press conference because King had been criticizing the FBI because they, you know, weren't protecting the civil rights of black Americans. And so Hoover didn't like the guy, yet he was the guy kind of at the top of this huge investigation.

• 2:48Josh Clark?

  I read Martin Luther King's cool response to J. Edgar Hoover calling him the most notorious liar.

• 2:54Speaker 03

  Get bent? No?

• 2:57Josh Clark?

  No, he said that J. Edgar Hoover must be under tremendous pressure to have said such a thing. Like he was sympathetic.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  Geez, that's, talk about the high road, man.

• 3:09Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 3:10Speaker 03

  All right, so the FBI gets ahold of that .3006 rifle that was determined to be their murder weapon. They couldn't actually conclusively link that bullet to the gun because the shell had been fragmented, but it was the same caliber. And everybody was like, come on, it's, it's the gun. Can we all just agree to that?

• 3:31Josh Clark?

  How many rifles do you guys have just laying around in Memphis that day?

• 3:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, dumped minutes after by a guy who sped away in a Mustang.

• 3:38Josh Clark?

  Right, hundreds of, just a hundred feet or so away from the murder scene. So, um, yeah, they couldn't conclusively link that to the gun, but they were able to trace the serial number and they traced it back to a sporting goods store in Birmingham, Alabama called Arrow Marine Supply. And they confirmed that it had been purchased just a few days before MLK was assassinated.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, along with a scope and a gentleman who said that he was going hunting, on a hunting trip with his brother.

• 4:11Josh Clark?

  Okay. Because, yeah, you have to, you have to be like, that, that's believable, right?

• 4:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:16Josh Clark?

  When you're buying a gun, you gotta have a cover story.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, and under an alias, under the name Harvey Lohmeyer.

• 4:22Josh Clark?

  Right. So, um, two weeks after the killing, they, they figured out that the, the prints on the gun matched those of a guy named James Earl Ray. And at the time, James Earl Ray had been an escaped convict from a state prison in Missouri for basically a year. He'd been on the run. So now we had a suspect and we had photos and they started circulating it around to people who had putatively interacted with James Earl Ray, including the guy at the Arrow Marine Supply Store who sold him the gun.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. So he was like, that's the guy. There were witnesses. We mentioned earlier in part one at the Bessie Brewer boarding house. They also looked at pictures and they were like, yeah, that's the guy we saw running away. And they went to the hotel clerk and or the boarding house clerk and they said, yeah, this guy signed in. That's him for sure under the name John Willard. So he had multiple aliases.

• 5:22Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:23Speaker 03

  And they, that portable radio that they found in the bundle had a scratched out ID number. And they eventually figured out that that was his, his, his prison radio. It had his, his inmate number on it. So he escaped prison and was like, I'm taking my radio.

• 5:38Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it seems pretty conclusive that James Earl Ray would have been the shooter, right?

• 5:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:44Josh Clark?

  So they issued an indictment for his arrest for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. On May 7th, a couple of months after, or no, a month after.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:53Josh Clark?

  MLK was murdered and an international manhunt began. I know the FBI was definitely concentrating on the United States, but they didn't rule out the possibility that he had started to go abroad. And so they issued it far and wide, a wanted poster with his, his data and his photos on it.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  So the FBI started tracking his movements. He's got all these aliases. In that year that he was on the lam after the shooting, he was into politics for a little while, supporting Alabama Governor George Wallace, his presidential campaign. He was in LA for a little while. He took dance lessons. He went to bartending school. He lived in Mexico for like a month or so, trying to become a pornography director.

• 6:40Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  Under the name Eric Salvo Galt. That didn't work out, so he left Mexico, came back to the States. And apparently in like the month or so before the assassination, he had been stalking King and had followed him from Atlanta to Memphis.

• 6:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so it seemed like the month before he murdered Martin Luther King Jr., he suddenly got that idea in his head because none of his movements suggested that he had even focused on Martin Luther King at all up to that point. After the assassination, James Earl Ray fled to Toronto. It's eventually where he landed first.

• 7:21Speaker 03

  I think you mean Torana.

• 7:22Josh Clark?

  Sorry, I'm sorry, Torana. I know that too.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  I know.

• 7:26Josh Clark?

  Thanks Chuck. So at the time, apparently if you were an American criminal, in Canada, they were very, very trusting at the time. They basically said, if you swear that you're a Canadian citizen, you give us your name, we'll send you a passport. And that's what crooks would do. They would go to Canada when they were on the run. They would look up old newspapers at like the library and find birth announcements from about the same time that they were born, finding people who were their age. And they would get their name, they would get their mother's maiden name sometimes. And apparently you didn't even need that. You just fill out this form, say your name, say, yes, I swear I'm a Canadian citizen,

• 8:08Josh Clark?

  and mail off for a passport, which would be mailed back to you, toot sweet. And now you had a fraudulent, but official and legitimate passport that you could use to travel the world with under a new alias.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, and this time his alias was, because you know, it was a real dude. In fact, the guy was a cop, pretty ironic. But his name was Raymond George, I guess Sneyd, S-N-E-Y-D.

• 8:35Josh Clark?

  I heard Sneyd from somebody once, but I don't know if that was definitive.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  Okay, well, it's good that we spelled it out because that'll come into play in a minute here. But from Torana, he went to London. He was actually in London a couple of times. He passed through London on his way to Lisbon after that first flight from Canada. And he was going to Lisbon because he was hoping to go to Africa before the murder. And then afterward, his long-term plan was to go to Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, because in 1965, a 5% white minority there had assumed independence from the UK.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  And he was like, I'm gonna go to Rhodesia and I'm gonna integrate into this small white minority and become a paid mercenary.

• 9:21Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So, I mean, he went to Lisbon hoping to secure passage to Africa. And while he was there, he's like, I've got a great idea. Surely that people are on my trail, that feds are on my trail now and they might even know my alias. So I need a new alias. I'm gonna go to the Canadian consulate here in Lisbon. I'm gonna tell them that they misspelled my name on my passport. So he went there and he told the Canadian consulate there that his last name actually is spelled with an A, not a D. And they're like, okay, whatever. Here's your new passport with your last name spelled correctly. And he had a new alias, Ramon George Sneya instead of Snade. So there was one letter change.

• 10:04Josh Clark?

  And apparently that satisfied James Earl Ray that he had a new alias now.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, we'll get to who Ray was a little bit, but the one takeaway from everything that I've read is he was not a very smart person.

• 10:17Josh Clark?

  Not a criminal mastermind. He was no brain from Pinky in the Brain.

• 10:21Speaker 03

  No, also because he did not throw that first passport away. And that was, would be his undoing. He, like, like we said, he could not secure that passage to Africa. So he went back to London to figure out what his next move was. He called a, this is a sort of a weird part of the story. He called a reporter named Ian Colvin at the Daily Mail's foreign desk. And I don't know if this guy had written articles about it, mercenaries or something.

• 10:48Josh Clark?

  I don't know either.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  That's the only thing I can figure out because he called this random reporter and said, hey, you got any contacts for these mercenaries?

• 10:57Speaker 03

  Colvin was like, no, but if you're, I guess if you're looking to get into that kind of thing, check into Brussels because that's where you might have better luck. It's a very strange little side part of this story, for sure.

• 11:09Josh Clark?

  It really is. So James Earl Ray was like, "Thank you, thank you much," and starts booking a flight to Brussels from London. And it was in London, on his way to Brussels, that he finally got nabbed, but not because somebody noticed his mugshot or wanted poster and saw that he was him, but because he had those two Canadian passports and he had them in the same wallet.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, two different names.

• 11:35Josh Clark?

  Yes, and the passport checker noticed that he had two passports and asked him about it. And I guess a cop was standing nearby and stepped over and was like, "Hey, why don't you join us in the back room? We've got some questions for you." And that was it for Ramon George Snaide Snea.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:52Josh Clark?

  He was quickly identified as James Earl Ray. He had a .38 caliber pistol tucked in the back of his pants, going to board a plane.

• 12:01Speaker 03

  You could do that back then, because they didn't even have metal detectors.

• 12:04Josh Clark?

  Yeah, as long as you didn't shoot it off because you were excited during takeoff.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 12:10Josh Clark?

  In the plane, then they didn't really care.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. So he was confirmed as James Earl Ray. He was taken into custody and on July 19th was flown back to the US to stand trial. And that seems like a great place for our first break.

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• 15:29Josh Clark?

  Okay, so James Earl Ray's been taken into custody and he's flown back to the United States on July 19th to stand trial and the whole world is watching. They want to know why the man who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. did that, why he murdered MLK. What was the point? What was the reason? They also wanted to know if he had been working with other people because from the outset, people were, the public was just openly skeptical that there was some conspiracy that had resulted in MLK's murder. And the world got none of that

• 16:08Josh Clark?

  because James Earl Ray pled guilty instead of going to trial. And there was a paper reporting on the case who was at this hearing where he pled guilty and said that it brought a shockingly swift ending to the case. And everybody was like, what just happened? And that was essentially that. There was no trial ever and there were no facts presented. So it was just like, yep, I did it. Send me to jail.

• 16:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, his attorney at the time, Percy Foreman, said, well, you know, if you go to a jury trial, you're probably going to get a death sentence because of, you know, because of the murder and its impact on the country, basically. Like, you're not going to avoid the electric chair. So if you plead guilty, you can get the maximum life sentence, which is 99 years in prison in Tennessee. And he said, that's probably the right route to take. So Ray took it. It was a two-hour affair in court. No one got the satisfaction of hearing any of the evidence. It also meant he wouldn't be eligible for parole for 30 years, whereas

• 17:20Speaker 03

  if he had gotten a life sentence and not the 99, he could have gotten out in 12 and a half. But just three days after he pleaded guilty, he recanted and tried for the rest of his life to get a new trial. Tried to escape. He did escape. In fact, if you listened to our Barclay Marathon episode, he escaped successfully for three days in 1977 and was picked up in Brushy Mountain where that race takes place. But he would eventually die in prison in 1998 at the age of 70, which would also been the year he was first eligible for parole.

• 17:53Josh Clark?

  Yes. And you said earlier that we were gonna talk a little bit about James Earl Ray and his criminal career.

• 17:59Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 18:01Josh Clark?

  So he was born in Illinois, but mostly grew up in Missouri. And he was the oldest of nine kids. And his family was impoverished. His father was a convict himself who didn't work very often. His mother was, as James Earl Ray put it, "a woman of very limited intelligence, barely able to communicate." And she also drank very heavily. And there was a report card from grade school that said his attitude toward regulations was that he violates all of them. This was him as a kid, and he didn't improve very much as an adult. He dropped out of high school at 16, worked for a while, and then he joined the Army.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, he joined the Army. Yeah, he dropped out of high school at 16. King was in college at 15. So just contrast the two situations. And 46, he joined the Army after being laid off from his civilian job. In the Army, he was charged with drunkenness, with breaking arrest. He served three months in the Army clink, hard labor for that. He was discharged less than honorably for, quote, "ineptness and lack of adaptability to military service" in 1948. So just a couple of years in the Army. And then was a drifter and a petty criminal who was in and out of jail over and over.

• 19:21Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and he was serving a 20-year sentence for robbery in Missouri. He started at 1960, when he broke out in 1967 and began that year on the lam that culminated in the assassination of MLK.

• 19:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you know, it was, it was really a 20-year prison sentence for everything. Uh, cause it was a pretty small, like robbery at Kroger.

• 19:44Josh Clark?

  Uh huh.

• 19:44Speaker 03

  Uh, that wouldn't have gotten a 20-year, but he had other armed robbery convictions. He had mail fraud convictions, um, and escape attempts. So it was like, hey, we're just gonna try and put you away for a while.

• 19:55Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 19:56Speaker 03

  Uh, and if you're curious how he escaped, he hid in a bread delivery truck that was leaving the prison.

• 20:02Josh Clark?

  I heard, I heard that too.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:05Josh Clark?

  You would have found me eating loaves of bread too.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  With your little portable radio, prison radio.

• 20:10Josh Clark?

  That's right. Just snapping my fingers with a mouthful of bread. Um, so his criminal history, just because you're a lifetime criminal doesn't mean you're good at it.

• 20:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:21Josh Clark?

  And James Earl Ray is an excellent example of that. Um, Time Magazine described him back in 1977 as a bungling petty gunman and burglar whose life of crime has mostly been one fizzle after another. And they weren't lying because some of his greatest hits that they went on to cite was that at one, um, crime scene, he dropped identification, he dropped his ID.

• 20:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:47Josh Clark?

  One holdup, uh, in a neighborhood, he got lost, drive, and as he was making his getaway, ended up back, driving back into the neighborhood where he'd just robbed somebody and was caught by the police who'd arrived on the scene by then.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, who were apparently surprised. I imagine they were like, oh, wait a minute. Is that him coming back?

• 21:06Josh Clark?

  Yeah, get a load of this guy.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  Uh, another time he came back, uh, to, to re-rob a place he had already robbed, uh, re-entered the window to, to get more stuff.

• 21:18Josh Clark?

  That is a no-no. That is crime 101.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, get out of there. I'm not a criminal, but I would get out of there.

• 21:26Josh Clark?

  So even when he was in London, too, when he was on the run, after assassinating MLK, he carried out not one, but two bungled robberies.

• 21:36Speaker 03

  It's crazy.

• 21:37Josh Clark?

  One was a bank, and he managed to only get 100 pounds from a bank.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:43Josh Clark?

  The other was a jewelry store where he got nothing because the owner knocked the gun out of his hand and pressed the alarm, so James Earl Ray ran away.

• 21:52Speaker 03

  And these are Londoners. They're not used to knocking guns out of hands, and this guy still managed to do it.

• 21:57Josh Clark?

  That's right.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  You know?

• 21:58Josh Clark?

  Yeah, he just was not a very good criminal, even though he tried it over and over again. And he was successful. I mean, like, he did successfully rob people and break into places and all that. But if you put it all together, he didn't have, like, a violent criminal rap sheet. He was just kind of this petty criminal. That's how he supported himself in life as a criminal, who went from that to murdering one of the most important Americans in history in one single action, seemingly overnight. And a lot of people say that just doesn't add up.

• 22:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, you know, we don't lend our show and ourselves to conspiracy. We're not conspiracy-minded, generally.

• 22:40Josh Clark?

  No.

• 22:41Speaker 03

  But you don't have to be to look at this and say, "He probably didn't act alone." It just doesn't add up, like you said. So there have been congressional committees over the years. There have been family members of Martin Luther King Jr. that said, "Yeah, this was part of a conspiracy." There's never been any solid agreement on what kind of conspiracy and who else was behind it.

• 23:06Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:07Speaker 03

  And we're not going to get into the nitty-gritty of all the... There's a lot of discounted stuff and stuff, rabbit holes you shouldn't even go down.

• 23:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 23:16Speaker 03

  So we're not going to get into those, but we are going to talk about the legit idea of a conspiracy and who could have been involved, like, for real.

• 23:25Josh Clark?

  Yeah, because, again, how did this petty criminal plan an assassination that he successfully carried out, and then also panicked, in a panic, like, dropped the murder weapon and ran off in a place where it would be found within a minute or two?

• 23:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:41Josh Clark?

  Where did he get the funding that he would need to support himself for a year on the lam and then to travel abroad to flee after the assassination? These are just a few of the questions people have come up with. And the obvious solution is that he had help in some way, shape or form. But another really big question that I think that a lot of people overlook is why? Like, why did he murder Martin Luther King Jr.? He wasn't known as a fanatic. He was a racist. And like we said, he supported George Wallace for his segregationist presidential bid. But he wasn't, he wasn't like a fanatic. And also like, he didn't have any particularly deep emotions, one way or another, for MLK.

• 24:26Josh Clark?

  He just was his murderer. And this just does not make a lot of sense.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, so after he retracted that confession, just days after his conviction, he started saying, I was set up and I was set up by a guy named Raul. So supposedly, he had a lot of interactions with this Raul guy, but he went from describing him as a Latino with blonde hair to a French Canadian with red hair. Nobody ever witnessed him with anyone that looked like either one of those people. A lot of people think there is no Raul at all, but he still could have had help, you know, from someone else.

• 25:04Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so you mentioned congressional committees who, that concluded that there was some sort of conspiracy. One of them was House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978. They said that there was a likelihood of conspiracy in the assassination of Dr. King, but they didn't think it like Raul was involved or anything like that.

• 25:25Speaker 03

  Right.

• 25:25Josh Clark?

  It was much more pedestrian and mundane, and in my opinion, than much more likely as far as the conspiracy theories go. But they put it on two. Prominent but shady St. Louisans. I'm pretty sure that's what you call people from St. Louis. One was a former stockbroker who became a motel owner. His name was John R. Kaufman. The other was a patent lawyer in town named John H. Sutherland. Both of them were dead by the time the committee hearings were held in 1978. But they supposedly put a bounty on MLK's head, and James Earl Ray, whose brother was a tavern owner in St. Louis at the time, heard

• 26:09Josh Clark?

  about this bounty and decided that he would go ahead and murder MLK and collect on the bounty. And I also saw that he probably believed that, as a white man, he would never be convicted of murdering a black man in the South. And even if he did, George Wallace was definitely going to win the 1968 election, and George Wallace would pardon him. So if you put all that together, it really seems like a pretty legitimate explanation for the whole thing.

• 26:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. As far as Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow, Coretta Scott King, she was, she always thought the FBI might have had something to do with it. She knew that they had been surveilled, and their phones had been tapped. She thought they, you know, were a possible, you know, bad actors. They even, you know, this is sort of startling, and in fact, it startled the country in the late 90s. But they came around to believing James Earl Ray, Dexter Scott King, one of his sons, visited James Earl Ray in prison. They pushed for him to get an appeal. He apparently asked him point blank, like, "Did you kill my father?" And James Earl Ray said, "No, I didn't. No." And then, apparently, he also said, "But like

• 27:21Speaker 03

  I say, sometimes these questions are difficult to answer. Sometimes you have to make your own evaluation, and maybe come to the conclusion. I think that could be done today, but not 30 years ago." None of that makes any sense.

• 27:34Josh Clark?

  No, because it isn't difficult to say you either did or you did not commit murder.

• 27:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. But as shocking as this meeting was, they got on board and said, "I don't think you did this. I think you were patsy. I think you were set up." And a lot of Americans were confused and a lot were offended. Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Martin Luther King Jr., David Garrow, said that Dexter King's support of Ray was egregious and embarrassing.

• 28:05Josh Clark?

  I say we take a break and we come back and kind of get, stick with the late 90s because they were kind of, the 90s were a big decade for conspiracy theories and the MLK assassination. How about that?

• 28:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 29:07Josh Clark?

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• 30:22Josh Clark?

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• 30:38Speaker 03

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• 31:15Speaker 03

  So there's an attorney named William Pepper, who is a very conspiracy theory-minded attorney. He became James Earl Ray's attorney eventually. And he's not someone that a lot of people thought a lot of in his career. He'd been described as disgraceful by some, the most gullible person I've ever met by someone else. He was readily and willing to just malign innocent people to get his theories out there. And I remember this happening. I didn't watch it, but on the 25th anniversary of King's murder, so I guess somewhere in the mid 90s, he sold HBO on producing and broadcasting a mock trial TV special of James Earl Ray

• 32:00Speaker 03

  in which Ray was acquitted by the mock jury.

• 32:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And so that was, you know, whoa, that's crazy, but it's a mock trial on HBO and it's a mock jury. It doesn't mean anything. It just basically promoted William Pepper and his theories. But after that special was aired, conspiracy theories about the MLK assassination got a real boost because a guy named Lloyd Jowers came forward. He said he was inspired to come forward by the series and come clean essentially after all of these years. And he owned a tavern in Memphis called Jim's Grill, which just happened to be located beneath Bessie Brewer's boarding house where the fatal shot that killed MLK was fired

• 32:44Josh Clark?

  from. And Lloyd Jowers said that he was part of a big, giant conspiracy to murder MLK that included the Memphis police, the FBI, the mafia, himself and some other just, you know, tangential players who were all coming together to kill King in order to collect on a bunch of money. Lloyd Jowers said that he was, him, just him alone, was offered a hundred thousand dollars to basically project to manage the contract killing.

• 33:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I feel like if you're floating a conspiracy about an assassination, if you just throw out like local cops and mafia, then you're probably halfway there.

• 33:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Oh, definitely. That'll get everybody's attention.

• 33:34Speaker 03

  So Martin Luther King Jr.'s family sued him for wrongful death in civil court. Again, this is not a criminal trial or anything. They didn't want money. They wanted a hundred bucks. They basically wanted to get all these claims heard in court and have it, you know, published, you know, out in public. And they, this is sort of shocking as well. The family was represented by that attorney, William Pepper, who had represented James Horay. The jury did decide that Jowers and others, including government agencies, had been responsible for King's death. So they actually won that civil trial.

• 34:09Josh Clark?

  They did. And I read two things. I read that Dexter King basically said, like, we did this so that, you know, to prove that the investigation needed to be reopened. And then he also said, regardless of whether it gets reopened or not, this is like the period on the sentence for us. Like this, this just basically supports everything we've always said. The Justice Department, their Civil Rights Division, had simultaneously launched an investigation into Lloyd Jauer's claims. I guess they seemed legitimate enough. But also, this investigation entailed claims made by a former FBI agent named Donald Wilson. And Wilson said that he had been, I guess he had been,

• 34:54Josh Clark?

  one of the people who had searched through the Mustang that James Earl Ray got away in, and that he had found some papers in this Mustang that had info about the JFK assassination. Okay. I think Donald Wilson was like, how can I get people to listen? JFK. He also said that the name Raoul was mentioned in it as well, in these papers. And so the Justice Department starts looking into it, and they concluded in a report in 2000 that this is all just kind of BS, to paraphrase.

• 35:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, basically. He was out for a book deal, is what they concluded. Percy Foreman, the original attorney for James Earl Ray, as far as he was concerned, he thought Ray acted alone. His biographer, William Bradford Huey, also said, yeah, I think he acted alone, and he was trying to just become a bigger criminal and like impress larger criminals, that he was a valuable guy to work with.

• 35:56Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:57Josh Clark?

  There was an investigative reporter too, who investigated James Earl Ray, as investigative reporters do. His name was George McMillan. He interviewed a bunch of Ray's fellow prisoners from the Missouri prison that he broke out of in 1967. And they were like, yeah, he was a huge drug dealer in prison. Like, he was rolling in it. One of them claimed that he was able to smuggle out $6,500 from the prison. And in today's money, that's about $60,000. So that alone, if true, satisfies that really big question about how could this petty criminal support himself for a year on the lam? 60K can go a long way, especially if you're committing other crimes.

• 36:42Josh Clark?

  But yeah, it sounds like he blew a lot of it on bartending, school, and dance lessons. Still, you could live for a year on 60K, no problem.

• 36:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, and he had to buy some of that camera equipment because he tried to be a porn director in Mexico.

• 36:54Josh Clark?

  That's right.

• 36:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I guess we're at the point now where we can kind of talk a little bit about, you know, had the sliding doors gone another way and had that march gone forward on April 4th and maybe James Luray doesn't get that shot, what would have happened had King been around?

• 37:13Speaker 03

  I guess we'll talk at first about what happened since that that did occur was that he was an instant martyr. You know, for all practical purposes, he was he was sainted in that moment. It was just so sudden, it was so violent. And the polling, you know, we talked about polling in episode one about how white Americans felt about him. In 1966, people polled 36% of all Americans had a favorable opinion of King, 27% of white America, and in 2011, that number had gone to 93% of white Americans had a favorable view of King and 81% of all American adults said

• 37:53Speaker 03

  he had a positive impact on the US. So that's from 66 to 2011. But that was also happening at the time, like in the days and months before and after, there was a stark difference, right?

• 38:04Josh Clark?

  Yeah, there was an almost immediate change in opinion of him after he died. It was like the band Cinderella said, you don't know what you got till it's gone.

• 38:14Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 38:16Josh Clark?

  There was this just complete happenstance study that had been carried out in February and March of 1968, where they sent 10,000 surveys to college and university trustees, I guess to take a pulse on the university and college trustee subculture.

• 38:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:37Josh Clark?

  That asked, among other things, how they felt about Martin Luther King, how they felt about his views, how much they aligned with their own views. And after MLK was assassinated, they they went through and they separated the surveys that they'd received before his death and after his death. And there was a stark difference. Before he was assassinated, 36% of the respondents said that they held similar views to King. After the assassination, that rose to 50%. This is within a couple of weeks.

• 39:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:08Josh Clark?

  Before the assassination, 30%, more than 30%, said that King's views were very unlike theirs. Afterward, it dropped down to 19%.

• 39:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:18Josh Clark?

  So it was happening in real time, and we know that thanks to that that poll.

• 39:25Josh Clark?

  And it's really hard to overstate the effect, the immediate effect that his assassination had on the conscience of the United States. I think it really made a lot of probably everyday racist Americans really rethink themselves, you know, that at the time you could dislike Martin Luther King Jr. He was alive. He was railing against Vietnam and going on about poor people and everything, but now he's gone, murdered, and just something like that can really shock people into focusing more on themselves and on their viewpoints than otherwise you would.

• 40:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, one thing that definitely came out of this was Lyndon Johnson kind of used this to get the Fair Housing Act of 1968 passed. It had failed in 66 and 67. So it wasn't a bill that looked like it had an immediate future. So he kind of did the same thing with the Civil Rights Act of 64, right after JFK was assassinated. So, you know, very politically savvy to kind of get these things passed through when the nation would have been more on board with that and politicians would have been more on board. Maybe wouldn't have been able to get it passed through in 68 and then he had already announced that he wasn't running for reelection before the assassination. So

• 40:46Speaker 03

  given what happened with Nixon and then Reagan coming in, if King had lived, it's doubtful that he would have had the kind of relationship that he had with Johnson, with those two guys.

• 40:56Josh Clark?

  Yeah. But remember also that he and Johnson had already had a rift because of MLK's more open vocal stance against Vietnam.

• 41:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:05Josh Clark?

  And, you know, he would have definitely kept railing against Vietnam. So that rift would have widened even further. And also, general Americans' opinions of him probably would have declined even further because remember after that 1967 Vietnam speech, his popularity, especially among white Americans, just plummeted, in part because he called the US government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." That's a pretty direct shot against, you know, the government. And if you are all about the government and this, you know, black civil rights leader saying stuff like that, you're going to take your angst out on the black civil rights leader who's saying it, rather than stopping and questioning whether he's right.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. A lot of people point out that like the, he would have continued to work for civil rights for black Americans, but also may have started championing the cause of the LGBTQ rights as a community. Coretta Scott King vocally supported this stuff, you know, after his passing. And Martin Luther King Jr. worked very closely with a gentleman named Bayard Rustin, an openly gay civil rights advocate who, who could have kept himself in the closet, but very much was out. And so people think that, yeah, King probably would have taken up that cause as well later on.

• 42:28Josh Clark?

  Yeah, we did an episode from 2015 on the March on Washington. We talked about Bayard Rustin a lot.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:34Josh Clark?

  He's also often compared to Nelson Mandela. Had MLK lived, they, people say like, he might have followed some sort of trajectory similar to Nelson Mandela's. But Mandela became president of South Africa. Would MLK have ever run for president? From what I saw, most historians say probably not. That was never an aspiration of his.

• 42:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:56Josh Clark?

  And in fact, he actually turned down an offer to run on a third party ticket, the people's party ticket for the 1968 election with pediatrician, the, the author of the very famous baby book, Dr. Benjamin Spock, who had turned anti-war activist as his vice president. So he probably would not have ever run for president, but he still would have remained a very potent, powerful voice for civil rights for everybody. But had he not been assassinated, I don't think his legacy would be anything like it is today.

• 43:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. How, how great though, would it have been to be able to source a King Spock 68 t-shirt or bumper sticker?

• 43:40Josh Clark?

  I guess somebody like dummy that up or else

• 43:44Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 43:45Josh Clark?

  It got far enough that somebody made buttons, because I saw

• 43:48Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting.

• 43:49Josh Clark?

  An image of that on the internet. Yeah, I don't know if it was made up or not. You can't tell these days, you know?

• 43:55Speaker 03

  You can't. And then this all culminated finally with Martin Luther King Jr., the national holiday. The campaign for that federal holiday began just a few days after he was killed in 1968.

• 44:10Speaker 03

  And it would be installed in 1983. Took a little while. Representative John Conyers, a Democrat from Michigan, reintroduced that legislation every single year with the backing of the Congressional Black Caucus, which he helped found, and it was denied every single year until 15 years later when President Ronald Reagan signed that bill, making the third Monday in January a federal holiday. And then it was first observed in 1986 by everybody, very famously, except for Arizona. They were the last holdout. And I remember this happening very well.

• 44:48Josh Clark?

  Oh, me too.

• 44:49Speaker 03

  Mainly because of the great, great song "By the Time I Get to Arizona" by Public Enemy that came out. So we got that out of it, which is pretty great. But the NFL was like, you know what? You're not getting the Super Bowl in 1993. And then after that, they said, all right, we'll get on board. So we can have a Super Bowl.

• 45:08Josh Clark?

  Whatever it takes. By any means necessary.

• 45:11Speaker 03

  Come on. Arizona, get it together.

• 45:13Josh Clark?

  They did. That was way back in 1993. Those people, those policymakers are all dead and gone by now.

• 45:19Speaker 03

  I know. I lived in Arizona. I love that place.

• 45:21Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah, that's right. Yuma, right?

• 45:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:24Josh Clark?

  Did you ever take the 310?

• 45:27Speaker 03

  Uh, no, no trains.

• 45:30Josh Clark?

  Okay. Well, since I made Chuck laugh, I think that we should end on a high note here and say that it's time for listener mail.

• 45:40Speaker 03

  That's right. By pointing out a Josh math error.

• 45:43Josh Clark?

  Oh, great.

• 45:44Speaker 03

  So sorry.

• 45:45Josh Clark?

  Let's do it.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  Hey, guys. Always laugh when hearing when you quickly correct yourselves before the emails start. I didn't hear that one today, though, and I'm sure you're getting more than just this email. Actually, Andrew, we didn't. You were the only one that caught this.

• 45:56Josh Clark?

  Oh, nice. Way to go, Andrew.

• 45:58Speaker 03

  This was in the, what would this have been? GPS, I guess.

• 46:03Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 46:04Speaker 03

  Oh, by the way, I never posted that, that.

• 46:08Speaker 03

  That, uh, what do you call it when things intersect? The Venn diagram that I sent you that said bingo. I need to put that on our Instagram.

• 46:13Josh Clark?

  Yeah, please do.

• 46:14Speaker 03

  I'll do it. Hey, guys. When Josh was describing the 2D trilateration circles and distance from Denver, he said to draw a circle around the named city with a diameter of distance described, but that would be a circle half too small. You need a circle with a radius for that distance or a diameter of twice that radius. Your compass would be set to the width of the distance you are from the city, and you draw that circle, which would give you a circle around a city where every point on that circle is that described distance from city center point.

• 46:49Josh Clark?

  That makes sense.

• 46:49Speaker 03

  And this is from an electrical engineer in Knoxville, Tennessee, Andrew White, who said, "It makes me happy to listen and learn from you all each day." So I trust you, Andrew, because you're an electrical engineer.

• 47:00Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Andrew White, the fastest compass in Tennessee. Thanks a lot, Andrew. I totally get that. That was very well explained, better than I explained it, for sure. And if you want to be like Andrew and correct my math, there's not really much sport in it, but you can still do it anyway by sending us an email to [email protected].

• 47:27Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 47:43Josh Clark?

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• 48:16Speaker 02

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• 48:44Speaker 00

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• 49:42Speaker 02

  paid for by Genentech and Novartis.

• 49:44Speaker 07

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