MLK III reflects on his father’s life and legacy

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was slain 56 years 
ago. His son, Martin Luther King III, was in
Memphis on April 4 to commemorate his father. 
Photo by Wiley Henry

MEMPHIS, TN – While addressing a dense crowd in the courtyard of the National Civil Rights Museum on the evening of April 4, Martin Luther King III wasn’t sure if he could keep his composure if he was still speaking at 6:01 p.m. That’s when an assassin’s bullet ended the life of his father, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

King, his wife Arndrea Waters King, and the Reverend Dr. Dorothy Sanders Wells were in Memphis on that day to commemorate Dr. King during a ceremony at the museum entitled “Remembering MLK: The Man. The Movement. The Moment.”

“Dad was killed this day…this is Thursday…56 years ago at 6:01 p.m., just 30 or so minutes from now,” said King, clearly welled up with emotions.

“This is a challenge to stand here at the spot that my father walked out of the room here behind me and lost his life,” said King, who was 10 years old in 1968 when tragedy struck his family and turned their lives topsy-turvy.

“He didn’t see me graduate from high school or from his beloved Morehouse College. He didn’t get the chance to meet my wife, or our daughter (Yolanda Renee King), or so many other things,” said King, chairman of The Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, a nonprofit progressive think tank founded in 1961. 

Arndrea Waters King also said it was difficult for her family to stand next to room 306 and deliver remarks about her father-in-law, whom she has never met. Nevertheless, her reflections were just as heartfelt. 

“We’re here today to remind America that the Dream is alive, that love is alive, that hope is alive,” she said. “We’re here to remind America that no matter how difficult the days are, how dark it may seem, those words still ring true that Martin Luther King Jr. reminded all of us on April 3, 1968.”

Dr. King didn’t make it to the mountaintop, she said, referencing his prophetic speech at Mason Temple Church of God in Christ on the eve of his death. “But he ignited in each and every one of us a vison and a dream.” 

Arndrea Waters King is president of the progressive think tank. She said it is up to each one of us in 2024 to do our part in making Dr. King’s global vision of “The Beloved Community” a reality for all of God’s children.

“We’re here today because we’re a strong people. We are a mighty people. We’re here today to remind America that we will continue to stand until all the triple evils of racism, bigotry, poverty, and violence are things of the past,” she said.

Wells addressed the issue of Dr. King’s life and legacy through the prism of a pastor. Dr. King was a Baptist preacher who once pastored Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala.

“It was with a pastor’s sense of justice that Dr. King employed us to follow the commandments that have been given to us by our creator so that all would be well with us to love God, to be truthful in all of our dealings, to eschew violence,” said Wells, rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church in Germantown, TN.

Wells noted in Micah 6:8 in the Bible that we should “…do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God,” and added that all children should be judged “not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character, which is the essence of our creative being.”

Meanwhile, King asked a pointed question: “What is wrong with society that chooses to remove someone who was only promoting love?”

He concluded by saying that we haven’t learned anything from his father’s teachings. “Dad told us we must learn nonviolence or we may face nonexistence,” he said.  

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Dr. William Pepper Explores the Plot to Kill Dr. King

Nearly 50 years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of the Loraine Motel, James Earl Ray is still – and forever will be – inextricably linked to the civil rights leader.

That fact cannot be disputed. What is often disputed is whether Ray, described as a two-bit petty criminal with a hankering for money, acted alone or was merely the patsy that a well-heeled apparatus employed to divert attention from the real assassin.

Ray did not kill Dr. King, according to Dr. William F. Pepper, who offered his perspective and keen insight on the role Ray played leading up to the assassination and afterward during a book talk at the National Civil Rights Museum on Nov. 2.

Dr. William F. Pepper

Drawing his conclusion from countless interviews, court documents, sworn depositions, and other painstaking research material, Pepper compiled what he’d learned into his latest book, “The Plot to Kill King: The Truth Behind the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.”

Questions still abound, however. Was Ray indeed the patsy rather than the assassin whose aim was spot on? And was Ray telling the truth when he implicated the mysterious “Raoul” in the murder of Dr. King?

Ray pleaded guilty to Dr. King’s murder to avoid a jury trial and possibly the death penalty, if he had been convicted. Three years later he recanted his confession and aroused suspicion when he fingered Raoul.

The book talk wasn’t centered precisely on Ray, but around a chain of events that conspiracy theorists and the inquisitive alike have long chewed on and regurgitated over and over since that fateful day on April 4, 1968.

“The Plot to Kill King” is Pepper’s third and final book in the trilogy surrounding Dr. King’s assassination and the trail of evidence leading to government culpability, including a plot, Pepper maintains, with far-reaching tentacles across the United States.

“What I’m trying to do in the final book is to now put the full context of all the critical depositions we took in the appendix of the book so nobody can say Pepper is making this up.”

“A volume of new people had evidence and wanted to relay it before they died,” added Pepper, detailing, for example, in book two – “Orders to Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” – that new evidence confirmed Ray’s innocence.

“‘Orders to Kill’ laid out the evidence at that time,” said Pepper, a New York-based attorney also working from London. He represented Ray and fought valiantly to get him a trial that he’d never had.

“The case took on a whole new perspective,” he said.

Pepper’s first book, “An Act of State: The Execution of Dr. Martin Luther King,” was the end product of an exhaustive investigation that Pepper began in 1978, 10 years after the martyrdom of Dr. King.

He surmised it was Frank Liberto, a Memphis grocer with supposed Mafia connections, who admitted on TV that he’d killed Dr. King during the 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations.

In his quest to find the elusive truth, Pepper has tarried over the years with laser-focus determination to bring the murder conspiracy to its final conclusion by uncovering the real culprits behind this inglorious chapter in American history.

The bullet that killed Dr. King was fired by a civilian, claimed Pepper, who’d befriended the civil rights leader in 1967 and represented the King family in a wrongful death lawsuit following the death of Ray in 1998.

The King family was convinced that Ray did not kill Dr. King after his son, Dexter King, had interviewed him. They weren’t buying the lone gunman theory and that Ray was the mastermind.

It was Pepper’s revelation of Dr. King’s admittance to St. Joseph Hospital that likely drew some attention – even disbelief that a nonviolent crusader of international repute would be whisked on a gurney to the emergency room.

“Dr. King was not dead when they took him to St. Joseph,” Pepper shared with the audience. “Martin was alive in the emergency room on a gurney.”

Pepper said Lula Mae Shelby, a surgical assistant at the hospital, maintained that Dr. King was alert in the operating room when a team of surgeons began working to save his life.

He said according to Shelby’s testimony, Dr. Breen Bland, the hospital’s chief of surgery, forbade the team to “stop working on the nigger and let him die.” Then he ordered them out of the operating room.

“The witness said Dr. Bland put a pillow over Dr. King’s head and suffocated him. I believe that’s how he died,” Pepper said.

There was a Q&A session following the book talk. After drawing to a close, an unsuspecting man on a cane was determined to have his say.

“You remember me, John Billings?” the man asked Pepper. “I do respect your education and your perseverance – because we know each other quite well – to find out the true killer of Martin Luther King.”

Pepper acknowledged knowing Billings, who worked with him in 1990 to investigate the death Dr. King, and again in 1993 for the televised mock trial to determine Ray’s guilt or innocence.

“Why didn’t you ask me?” said Billings, a 20-year-old college student and emergency room orderly in 1968 who was asked to guard Dr. King’s body.

“What you’ve said is full of crap,” he shouted at Pepper. “I was there (at the hospital). He’s going on hearsay.”

While being escorted from the auditorium by Memphis police, he exhorted the audience to Google “John Billings, Private Investigator.”

“Find out for your own self,” he said.