Murdering Martin Luther King, American-style, Part 2

The true legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. has been dangerously distorted by corporate media and white washing official historians.

While the first half of King’s career has been preserved--that of nonviolent protest against legal segregation and the resulting legislative victories--the second half has been all but erased. That second half is the radical phase which began when Martin King and Malcolm X forged a secret alliance in 1964, as documented in Karl Evanzz’s book The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X.

Martin Luther King had moved well beyond what would become his most over-quoted and ultimately clichéd phrase “I have a dream,” a phrase which was only the poetical culmination of a much more aggressive indictment of the threat posed by wealth and White supremacy that was the United States government and corporate establishment. King had moved into the American north, fighting de facto segregation inside the supposedly liberal heartland.

But much more dangerously for himself, his movement and the US government, King had poised himself to become the chief domestic opponent of the US war against the people of Vietnam. King had already been under FBI surveillance for years, and had been the target of an FBI counter intelligence programme to try to extort him into suicide, rather than let news of his extramarital affairs come to light. And now he was denouncing American hegemony, saying in 1967 that “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world is my own government.”

King had become perhaps the single greatest threat to the massive economic interests of US imperialism in Vietnam, and even more so with his leading of the proposed Poor People’s March on Washington. That projected mobilisation of around half a million people was intended to be less of a march, and more of an occupation, which according to some analysts, American intelligence feared could spark, in a highly destabilised USA, a revolution.

Tonight on The Terrordome, we’ll hear about the King assassination and the wider context of American intelligence operations and nefarious activities. Our speaker is John Judge.

John Judge is an independent historian, and for four decades he’s been researching the criminal operations, drug and gun-running, tortures, assassinations, population control programmes and so-called secret wars that keep American power flourishing.

He’s the co-founder of 911 Citizen’s Watch, “a grassroots watchdog group demanding transparency and a thorough investigation by the National Commission on Terrorist Acts Upon the United States. [He also helped found the] Committee for an Open Archives, [the] Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA), and Committee for High School Options and Information on Careers, Education and Self-Improvement [or CHOICES], a group countering military recruitment in the schools and providing civilian alternatives. [He’s] currently on the board of the Washington Peace Center.”


In 1999, John Judge participated in the King family civil suit against Lloyd Jowers in the murder of MLK, a suit which they won. On April 6, John Judge, who is Special Project Coordinator for Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, addressed an audience of the US-based Information Collective on the topic of the US government’s role in the assassination of King.

Tune in on CJSR FM88 at 6 PM Mountain Time in Edmonton, or go to cjsr.com on the web, or click on The Terrordome link on the upper left links menu, in part 2 of our 4 part series on the USG and the assassination of Martin Luther King.