Coretta Scott King Dies at 78

[William Kelly]

Now, maybe they'll honor MLK's memory by releasing the government records on his assassination.

The former (3rd) Chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations Louis Stokes (D. Mich.), didn't make any effort to release the MLK HSCA records when the JFK Act was passed in 1992.

When other liberal democrats were asked why they wanted the MLK assassination records to remain sealed, they said that the HSCA investigation uncovered evidence of conspiracy in King's death, but also discovered incidents of King philandering around with white women. They didn't want to subject Mrs. King with the news.

Although Mrs. King herself sought the release of the assassination files, now that she's dead, that's no longe an excuse to keep the records sealed from the public.

They say a lot more info on LBJ will be publicly released when Lady Bird goes.

BK

[John Dolva]

Now, maybe they'll honor MLK's memory by releasing the government records on his assassination.

The former (3rd) Chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations Louis Stokes (D. Mich.), didn't make any effort to release the MLK HSCA records when the JFK Act was passed in 1992.

When other liberal democrats were asked why they wanted the MLK assassination records to remain sealed, they said that the HSCA investigation uncovered evidence of conspiracy in King's death, but also discovered incidents of King philandering around with white women. They didn't want to subject Mrs. King with the news.

Although Mrs. King herself sought the release of the assassination files, now that she's dead, that's no longe an excuse to keep the records sealed from the public.

They say a lot more info on LBJ will be publicly released when Lady Bird goes.

BK

Fighting the enemies of 'The Dream'

By Tim Wheeler

Working people across the nation are celebrating the 70th birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. this weekend.

Born Jan. 15, 1929, King is revered as one of the greatest mass leaders in U.S. history, a fighter for equal rights, living wage jobs and world peace. The national holiday named in his honor is a time when people rededicate themselves to the goals for which he fought.

If he were alive today, King would be leading the grass-roots movement that defied all the media predictions and inflicted defeat on the ultra-right Republicans in last fall's election. That movement rests on the coalition of African Americans, other people of color and the labor movement.

King had envisioned just such an alliance. In his book, Stride toward Freedom, he wrote: "Labor unions can play a tremendous role in making economic justice a reality for the Negro. Trade unions are in a struggle to advance the economic welfare of those American citizens whose wages are their livelihood. Since the American Negro is virtually non-existent as the owner and manager of mass production industry, he must depend on the payment of wages for his economic survival."

A leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Dr. King went on: "Strong ties must be made between those whites and Negroes who have problems in common. White and Negro workers have mutual aspirations for a fairer share of the products of industries and farms. Both seek job security, health and welfare protection. The organized labor movement, which has contributed so much to the economic security and well-being of millions, must concentrate its powerful forces on bringing economic emancipation to white and Negro by organizing them together in social equality."

Multiracial unity was key in the great 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. African American churches and community organizations were joined by the United Auto Workers and many other unions despite the opposition of AFL-CIO President George Meany who once bragged, "I never walked a picketline."

The unions that defied Meany on Aug. 28, 1963 joined the surge - 250,000 strong - marching down Constitution Avenue to the Lincoln Memorial where King delivered his immortal "I have a dream" speech.

After the passage of the landmark civil rights laws of the mid-1960s, which tore down legal segregation, the struggle for economic justice took center stage. King pointed out that even with laws against housing discrimination, for example, cities remained segregated when African American people were excluded from jobs that paid enough to buy or rent decent homes in integrated neighborhoods.

In this new phase of the struggle, many who had given at least lip service support, sharply criticized King.

They turned on him when he spoke out against the Vietnam War and when he challenged corporate profiteering as the source of poverty and inequality. King turned increasingly toward organized labor as the Black people's most reliable ally. King died struggling to solidify that coalition.

He was cut down April 4, 1968 by an assassin's bullet as he prepared to lead a march of striking Black sanitation workers through Memphis. The slogan of the strike was "I Am A Man."

Millions believe it was revenge by powerful Big Business and government circles enraged that King had "gone too far," leading a movement that now encroached on corporate profits. Like other great freedom fighters, including Paul Robeson and Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, King had to be stopped.

A few weeks before his murder, Freedomways magazine sponsored a memorial to Du Bois at Carnegie Hall in New York City. King spoke at that Feb. 23 event.

"Some people would like to ignore the fact that [Du Bois] was a Communist in his later years," King said. "It is worth noting that Abraham Lincoln welcomed the support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely ... It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a Communist. Our irrational, obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thought."

After his assassination, Dr. Ralph Abernathy took over SCLC, leading King's "Poor People's Campaign" with its "Resurrection City" tent encampment in Washington D.C. There was also a march on Wall Street, with poor people following a mule train.

What a contrast to the annual visits to Wall Street today led by Operation PUSH president, the Rev. Jesse Jackson. These are more like lovefests with the chieftains of high finance.

President Clinton is expected to speak, along with U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, at this year's confab. Last year, Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a keynote speaker.

"Dr. Abernathy led us in a march on Wall Street in 1968 to confront the source of economic power - American capitalism. Rev. Jackson seems to be leading a 'rich people's march' to Wall Street," Jarvis Tyner, vice chair of the Communist Party USA, told the World.

"How is that carrying on Dr. King's legacy? King's point of departure was always struggle, mobilizing the masses in the fight for justice. We need to speak truth to power. We must call for an end to the racism, inequality and poverty generated by Wall Street, not demand a piece of the pie for an elite few."

Dr. King would easily recognize and embrace the militant activism of today's "new" labor movement. But King would also instantly recognize the reactionary forces that are using the impeachment and trial of President Clinton in an attempt to break up that movement.

Certainly Clinton is not King. Yet there are striking parallels between the conspiracy that ended in King's assassination and the current "vast right-wing conspiracy" that First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton warned about a year ago.

In his book, Orders to Kill (Carroll & Graf, 1995), William Pepper, who had worked closely with King on the 1967 National Conference for New Politics, lays out the evidence of a vast conspiracy against King and the movement he led.

Pepper, a lawyer, became so obsessed with the King assassination that he became James Earl Ray's last attorney, struggling to win a full trial for King's accused assassin.

Rebuffed in that appeal, Pepper put together the mock television trial of Ray in a conference room in Brushy Mountain Penitentiary in Tennessee Jan. 25, 1993.

HBO aired it April 4, 1993, the 25th anniversary of King's assassination.

Whether or not Ray was part of that conspiracy, it is now beyond question that the FBI, the CIA, U.S. Army intelligence and the Ku Klux Klan targeted King for dirty tricks. This created an atmosphere that invited his assassination. Large majorities of the people continue to reject the official "lone assassin" line and believe that U.S. intelligence agencies were involved in his killing.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ordered King placed under surveillance in the FBI's infamous counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO.

In 1966, King was scheduled to meet with Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa, then fighting the Justice Department drive to railroad him to jail.

Writes Pepper, "Any alliance between Dr. King and the powerful labor leader would have greatly concerned the Bureau and the federal government because Hoffa had an enormous work force and a virtually unlimited treasury."

The FBI used the compliant media to force a cancellation of the King-Hoffa meeting. After his release from prison, Hoffa disappeared, certainly the victim of a "hit," by the mob, the government, Big Business - or all three.

Pepper uncovered evidence that the FBI had put out a similar contract on King, just as the CIA hired the mob to kill Cuban President Fidel Castro.

It is a case of political deja vu that the current right-wing witch hunt against the Clinton administration also targeted the Teamsters union with the federal government repeatedly intervening to overturn the union's elected leadership.

The FBI leaked to the media fabricated stories implicating King in sexual improprietes, again, echoes of the Monica Lewinsky affair. It included a report, leaked days after King's assassination, that King had fathered a child in an illicit affair with a married woman.

Newspaper columnist Jack Anderson reported, "Hoover sent word to me that the motive behind the murder was cuckoldry, that the assassin apparently had been hired by a jealous husband ... who had become enraged by the discovery that his wife had borne King's child."

Anderson flew to Los Angeles and met with the couple.

"I could find absolutely no evidence that contradicted the couple's own explanation that Dr. King was an honored friend of the family, a frequent guest and nothing more," Anderson wrote.

In 1964, an FBI agent was sent to Tampa to mail a poison pen message to King telling him he should commit suicide.

"King, look into your heart," it began. "You know you are a complete fraud and a greater liability to all of us Negroes ... I repeat, you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that ... a dis solute, abnormal, moral imbecile. We will now have to depend on our older leaders like [Roy] Wilkins a man of character ... But you are done. Your 'honorary' degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you ... King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is ... There is but one way out for you. You had better take it ..."

Roy Wilkins was then NAACP executive secretary. It was later revealed he had collaborated with the FBI.

Former FBI agent Arthur Murtagh, who had resigned in disgust over the dirty tricks operation, testified during the HBO trial that while serving in the FBI's Atlanta field office, he had handled FBI informers planted in the SCLC.

One of them embezzled SCLC funds with FBI knowledge to supplement his SCLC salary and FBI payoffs, Murtagh said.

"The informant informed on the SCLC and Dr. King, sometimes daily, right up to the day of the assassination," Pepper writes.

"Among other information, details of Dr. King's itinerary and travel plans were provided ... Murtagh said that in Atlanta, 90 percent of their time was spent on investigating and attempting to denigrate Dr. King. This focus reflected a hatred that seemed to permeate the Bureau from top to bottom."

Pepper could be describing Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr with his team of 50 FBI agents, Delta Force spy Linda Tripp, and unlimited financial backing of extremist moneybags, Richard Mellon Scaife.

They, too, are driven by a fanatical hatred in their search to uncover - or manufacture - dirt on the Clintons.

Pepper reports on allegations by a number of confidential sources that King was murdered by a secret U.S. Army two-man hit squad code-named the "Alpha 184 recon team" based in Alabama and connected with the Klan. It was part of the infamous CONUS Army Intelligence operation then based at Fort Holabird, Maryland, where computerized dossiers on seven million law-abiding American citizens, including Dr. King, were stored.

Army covert agents infiltrated peace, civil rights, and labor organizations. They often served as agent provocateurs, advocating violence to discredit the movement.

Pepper includes the photocopy of what purports to be a top-secret Pentagon cable ordering the Alpha 184 team to Memphis.

Investigative journalist Gerald Posner refutes the report in his book, Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (Random House, 1998). Posner, who also wrote the book Case Closed about the assassination of President Kennedy, claims that both Kennedy and King were victims of a "lone assassin."

Yet in a footnote, Posner writes, "In Memphis, the local 111th Military Intelligence Group closely monitored the 1968 sanitation strike. Five agents watched public gatherings and used civilian, police and FBI sources to report on King and others."

Millions are remembering this sinister history as the Senate Republican leadership struggles to drape the robes of "bipartisan" dignity on the witch-hunt trial of Clinton.

It proves that the forces that "killed the dreamer" are still trying to kill the dream.

The mass democratic movements of the people, that King died for, are the real target of this inquisition.