Friends and associates of Dr. King including Reverends Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, historians and authors have raised questions about the murder and about the role the U.S. government may have played as part of a wider conspiracy.
In a 2008 interview on CNN special, “Eyewitness To Murder: The King Assassination,” with journalist Soledad O’Brien, Rev. Young, a top aide to Dr. King, said he thought there was a determination in very high places the civil rights movement be stopped.
“But it certainly went as far as the FBI. And the Memphis police. And the U.S. military,” he said according to the show transcript available on cnn.com.
In 1999 the King family successfully won a wrongful death lawsuit against Loyd Jowers, a Memphis restaurant owner who said he was part of a conspiracy with the U.S. government and Mafia to kill Dr. King and Mr. Ray was not involved. The Justice Department discounted his claims as “inconsistent” and not credible.
At the trial’s conclusion the jury found Mr. Jowers and “others, including government agencies” participated in a conspiracy to assassinate Dr. King.
“Four weeks of testimony, more than 70 witnesses, and a 1999 civil trial jury’s unanimous verdict that Dr. King was ‘assassinated as a result of a conspiracy’ was a step in the right direction but it’s not enough,” Mr. Kambon argued. Mr. Jowers died in 2000. A transcript of the trial can be found online at www.ratical.org.