Alexander Cockburn has consistently expressed the belief that JFK and RFK were assassinated by lone gunmen, a stance for which he has often been subjected to ridicule, but, when it comes to Martin Luther King, he feels differently:

He was assassinated forty years ago just after 6 pm as he stood on a balcony of the Lorraine motel in Memphis, Tennessee. A single rifle bullet hit him in the jaw, then severed his spinal cord. James Earl Ray, a white man, was convicted of the killing and sentenced to 99 years. Ray was certainly the gunman.

But there are credible theories of a conspiracy, possibly involving US Army intelligence, whose role in the life and death of Martin Luther King was explored by Stephens Tompkins in the Memphis Commercial Appeal in 1993.

The Army's interest in the King family stretched back to 1917 when the War Department opened a file on King's maternal grandfather, first president of Atlanta's branch of the NAACP. King's father, Martin Sr., also entered Army intelligence files as a potential troublemaker, as did Martin Jr. in 1947 when he was 18. He was attending Dorothy Lilley's Intercollegiate School in Atlanta and 111th Military Intelligence Group in Fort McPherson in Atlanta suspected Ms Lilley of having Communist ties.

King's famous denunciation of America's war in Vietnam came exactly a year before his murder, before a crowd of 3,000 in the Riverside Church in Manhattan. He described Vietnam's destruction at the hands of ''deadly Western arrogance,'' insisting that ''we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem." US Army spies secretly recorded black radical Stokely Carmichael warning King, "The Man don't care you call ghettos concentration camps, but when you tell him his war machine is nothing but hired killers you got trouble." Carmichael was right.

After the 1967 Detroit riots 496 black men under arrest were interviewed by agents of the Army's Psychological Operations Group, dressed as civilians. It turned out King was by far the most popular leader. That same year, watching the great antiwar march on Washington in October 1967 from the roof of the Pentagon Major General William Yarborough, assistant chief of staff for Army intelligence, concluded that "the empire was coming apart at the seams". He thought there were too few reliable troops to fight the war in Vietnam and hold the line at home.

The Army increased surveillance on King. Green Berets and other Special Forces veterans from Vietnam began making street maps and identifying sniper sites in major American cities. The Ku Klux Klan was recruited by the 20th Special Forces Group, headquartered in Alabama, as a subsidiary intelligence network. The Army began offering 30.06 sniper rifles to police departments, including that of Memphis. King was dogged by spy units through early '67. A Green Beret unit was operating in Memphis the day he was shot. The bullet that killed him came from a 30.06 rifle purchased in a Memphis store. Army intelligence chiefs became increasingly hysterical over the threat of King to national stability.

I must admit that this is not a subject that I have examined in depth. At minimum, we should be alarmed at the close relationship between the FBI, the Pentagon and white supremacists when it came to King. The prospect that they would see King as threatening is compelling, precisely because he integrated civil rights with anti-imperialism.

Cockburn correctly observes that King is now revered precisely because he was killed without successfully transforming American society as he intended. As a result, his conduct has been sanitized, the rough, populist edges worn away, as the presentation of his life has been forced to conform to a middle class model of socially acceptable behaviour. Note that the revelations about King's promiscuity are completely consistent with such an approach.

If there was a credible argument against the King holiday, it was this, that the institutionalization of celebrating King as an exemplar of the African American experience necessarily requires the deliberate misrepresentation of his life and achievements. Michael Eric Dyson indirectly touched upon this on Friday when he emphasized the judgmental, confrontation rhetoric that King used to condemn the Vietnam War when speaking before African American audiences:

. . . although King spoke famously against the Vietnam War before a largely white audience at Riverside Church in New York in 1967, exactly a year before he died, he reserved some of his strongest antiwar language for his sermons before black congregations. In his own pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, two months before his death, King raged against America's "bitter, colossal contest for supremacy." He argued that God "didn't call America to do what she's doing in the world today," preaching that "we are criminals in that war" and that we "have committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world." King insisted that God "has a way of saying, as the God of the Old Testament used to say to the Hebrews, 'Don't play with me, Israel. Don't play with me, Babylon. Be still and know that I'm God. And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power.' "

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? If King were alive today, Barack Obama would find himself criticized for attending one of his services, but, one suspects, there would be a different rule for whites. The curious aspect is that the fundamental subject of King's sermons, much like the ones of Jeremiah Wright that were publicized recently, was not the Vietnam War (in Wright's case, the Iraq one) or the predations of US foreign policy, but rather, the primacy of the Christian God over nations on earth created by men.

We are not exposed to punishment and degradation because of what we create these nations to do. Instead, we are exposed to it because we believe that the nation state is superior to the word of God. Accordingly, there is a hubris associated with such a belief that invariably culminates in brutality. Naturally, at a time in which Christian evangelicalism is ascendant, no one objected to this aspect of Wright's sermons. Liberals act as if this aspect of King's activism never existed.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Barack Obama, Martin Luther King, Racism

Although I was only just over 7 years old, I still remember the death of Martin Luther King. I lived in Macon, Georgia, and Macon was just 90 miles south of King's church in Atlanta. Macon, like most cities in the Deep South, was also racially polarized between large white and black populations. It was a town where one heard Motown much more often than the Beatles.

So, King's death there was analogous to the death of a President or a Pope, except that it had a much more intimate quality. King was the local African American minister writ large, he could have been the pastor across town in one of the churches in the black section. He was paradoxically larger than life, yet someone that people felt they knew personally.

By comparison, RFK was a distant, remote figure, a manifestation of Northern political power that southerners both respected and resented, a modern day Sherman. His death a couple of months later was traumatic, but had nowhere near the emotional consequences in the Deep South that King's did. RFK was someone that you would only ever expect to see on television, but you could imagine yourself bumping into King walking down the street.

But a lot of this was beyond me at the time. I could tell, however, from watching the television and hearing the radio that something very bad had happened, and that it involved white and black people very much like the ones that I lived around in Macon. You couldn't escape black and white there. My parents were divorced, and my mother worked evenings in the composing room of the Macon Telegraph.

For a long time, I suggested that my life during this time was poverty stricken, but it really wasn't. Her salary, as a unionized newspaper employee, was probably one of the best in Macon outside of the Brown and Williamson cigarette plant. A middle aged African American woman named Louise Walker took care of me while she was away. Back then, we called her a maid, as everyone else would have, but now she would be known as a nanny.

Every now and then, we would go over to visit Louise and her family, and it was a trip into a segregated world that a lot of people have never experienced. The roads in her neighborhood were not paved, and the drainage lines were above ground. In that respect, it was not so very different from the peripheral squatters' neighborhoods adjacent to Venezuelan cities like Caracas and Barquisimento that I encountered in 2005. Unlike these neighborhoods in Venezuela, though, they did have utilities such as water and power, and the homes were far superior.

It was incomprehensible that I would go to the same school as Louise's children. I attended an elementary school on the outskirts of town that was virtually entirely white. There may have been an African American or two, but I have no recollection of them. By 1972, my mother had remarried and moved us across the country to midtown in Sacramento, California, where I was enrolled in fifth grade at Fremont Elementary at 24th and N Street.

Today, midtown is a gentrified part of the central city, with some of the highest property values, but, back then, it was a neighborhood significantly abandoned by whites who had fled to surburbia. My classmates were the children of the remaining lower middle income ones, along with many Latinos and Asians, most of them from immigrant families. It was about as different from Macon, Georgia as one could imagine. It was a privilege to go through the educational system with them.

But it is hard for me to think of King without remembering Louise Walker. At first, King seems to have believed that he could open the door to opportunities for people like her by changing the law. But, as Michael Eric Dyson observes in today's Los Angeles Times, King recognized that something more was required. Although he was scrupulous about never publicly using the term, he decided that it would be necessary for the country to adopt socialist practices in order to overcome the poverty that afflicted millions of Americans of all kinds.

Hence, King was killed in Memphis while championing the cause of sanitation workers laboring under embarassingly demeaning conditions. He was just about to launch the Poor People's Campaign, which aspired to shut down the government unless it confronted poverty. Of course, he had already condemned the Vietnam War in stark terms in a 1967 speech at the Riverside Church in Harlem.

King the civil rights advocate could be incorporated within the American social system, but King the closet socialist and anti-imperialist could not. James Earl Ray, and possibly others, eliminated the threat he posed to the established order. Afterwards, millions of African American entered the middle class while millions of other lower middle income and lower income ones struggled to survive, as many of their children were warehoused in the prison system through increasingly draconian sentencing laws.

One rarely hears King described in relation to anarchism. Certainly, he did not espouse an overtly anarchist vision of society. And yet, as a religious figure, his vision transcended the boundaries of the nation state. He did not believe that the war in Vietnam was immoral just because of its baleful consequences for Americans, as many liberals today believe about the war in Iraq, but rather because the recourse to such violence itself was immoral, and that the victims of this violence were the peoples of the world subjected to American militarism.

Indeed, one can interpret King's references to American militarism in his 1967 Riverside Church speech as references to the inherent militarism of the nation state itself. It is doubtful that King actually went this far in his thought, but he must have certainly been aware that nation states find the use of this kind of violence extremely seductive. Had King lived, would he have emphasized the notion that nation states manipulate violence to justify their existence and control others? It's not at all implausible.

King also brushes against anarchism in his recognition that we had to confront poverty as a global phenomenon. For him, a woman like Louise Walker stood with millions of others around the world. His covert socialism was not for just one country, a nationalistic kind, but, ultimately, for everyone. His death casts a shadow that remains to this day.

Labels: Activism, African Americans, American Empire, Anarchism, Martin Luther King, Racism, Sacramento