On April 4, 1968, at 6:05 p.m., a lone shooter named James Earl Ray shot civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) in the face while he stood on a second-story balcony of a Memphis hotel. The revered minister died an hour later at a nearby hospital. Ray’s assassination provoked worldwide demonstrations and suspicion about Ray’s intentions. During a recent interview, Vice President Kamala Harris appeared to flog a long-debunked conspiracy theory about the event.
The Nation published portions from an interview with the vice president conducted by John Nichols, its national affairs correspondent, on September 5. He added that Harris made a connection between the 1960s civil rights and labour revolutions.
MLK was assassinated, according to Harris, because “he was bringing together” workers and civil rights activists. According to Harris, MLK recognized the two groups’ shared interests and the influence he could wield by combining them.
The vice president’s remark appears to support a long-standing conspiracy belief that the government and other wealthy interests planned to assassinate MLK when he became involved with organized labor.
MLK’s surviving family members bolstered that claim in 1998 when they sued Memphis restaurateur Loyd Jowers after he appeared on ABC News’ “Prime Time Live” in 1993 and said he plotted to assassinate King with US government officials and the Mafia.
The jury ruled in favor of the King family, concluding that “[Jowers] and others, including government entities,” were complicit in MLK’s killing. However, in the aftermath of that civil trial, the US Justice Department launched an extensive investigation and decided that the government had nothing to do with the assassination.
Harris’s office did not respond to a request for comment from The Washington Free Beacon regarding the connection between her remarks and the theory that the government plotted to assassinate MLK.
