American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [36]
“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
In 1968 I was living a sheltered life in south Minneapolis, enjoying being a kid with my GTO and playing defensive end on my undefeated high school football team. There were never any racial tensions at my school. My best black friend in a predominantly white school was elected Winter Sports King. To me, Dr. King was a TV personality, whom you always saw walking arm-in-arm in front of a group of people and they had a cause. At the time, protests were peaking against the Vietnam War. But I was the flag-waving young American, being naïve and believing what I was taught in school, the domino effect of Communism and all that. After I graduated, I joined the navy.
So, while I remember being shocked by Dr. King’s assassination, Minneapolis didn’t see much if any rioting as happened in other cities. Two months later, when James Earl Ray was picked up in London and charged with the killing, I accepted what the authorities said and figured justice would be served. It was many years later when I began to question the official line. This happened in 1997, when King’s son, Dexter, met face-to-face with Ray in a Tennessee prison. Ray was dying of liver disease. I read about Dexter King asking him point-blank, “Did you kill my father?” Ray answered him, “No, I didn’t.” And Dexter King said, “I believe you, and my family believes you.”1 I thought, wow, if that’s the case, then there’s a lot more to Dr. King’s killing than meets the eye.
Then, in 1999, the King family brought a wrongful death lawsuit in a Tennessee Circuit Court. A nearly month-long trial ensued. Seventy witnesses were called. It took the jury only two and a half hours to come back with a verdict that Dr. King was assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government.2
In the wake of the O.J. Simpson trial where TV had gavel-to-gavel coverage, you’d think the media would have been all over this. Trial of the century, maybe? Not so. I read where only one Memphis TV reporter, and one freelance journalist, covered the whole proceeding. I consider this another indictment of our media. Because O.J.’s trial, regardless of what a major personality he was and how entertaining it was to everyone, didn’t affect anyone really. Not to the level of Martin Luther King’s killing, which affected masses of people and had a far-reaching impact on society as a whole. Has the United States been so “dumbed down” that people are more concerned about the titillating news of a celebrity sports star and his murdered white girlfriend, than about the killing of a great leader like King? (If you want to find out what happened at the trial, the entire 4,000-word transcript is at www.thekingcenter.com.)
Let’s start with a little context for what happened in the early evening of April 4, 1968, when a single shot struck Dr. King as he was standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. He’d just come from leading a peaceful march of Memphis sanitation workers who’d gone on strike. Very soon he was planning to go to Washington for the Poor People’s Campaign, prepared to inspire massive civil disobedience and shut down the Capitol if that’s what it took to put poverty on the front burner. He was also going beyond civil rights and speaking out strongly against the Vietnam War.
A year to the day before his death, Dr. King called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” In essence, Dr. King said things just as inflammatory as Obama’s minister, Reverend Wright. I think King would probably be locked up for talking like that now. We have streets named after him, and a holiday in his name—how come we’re not listening to what he said? We completely ignore the very teachings he taught and the honesty that he showed. We also ignore that the powers that be got rid of him.
The FBI’s attempt to destroy Dr. King as the leader of the