James Earl Ray, the non-assassin of Martin Luther King

When Martin Luther King was shot dead on April 4, 1968, I was a junior in college. A year later, when a guy named James Earl Ray was convicted of that assassination, I didn’t pay any particular attention. Did you? Even in recent years, when I realized that the FBI both persecuted MLK and helped plot his death, it did not occur to me to rethink the person known as James Earl Ray. Who was he? I didn’t care. Anyway, he died in prison in 1998.

Tamara Carter’s book has now come into my hands. It is aptly entitled “A Memoir of Injustice.” It is the story of James Earl Ray as told by his brother Jerry. Understandably enough, Jerry is hoppin’ mad about the way his brother was treated. This book is going to make waves about prison conditions and about media control of juries, but even more, about the way we use, or fail to use, plain logic when faced with an assassination.

Jerry’s anger has provided a very helpful way to observe the long-term planning that the powers-that-be really excel at. Allow me to identify a new epistemological tool and give it the label ‘Jerryistic logic.’ When Jerry Ray says, “Look how they lied about Jimmy in regard to such-and-such,” he is saying “And I can show you the pattern by which they tell lies like that all the time, so I can show you what’s really going on, and how the whole thing was a set-up.”

Before opening this book, “Memoir of Injustice,” I was already cynical enough to accept that a patsy can be created way in advance. Lee Harvey Oswald, you may recall, was selected while he was in the Marines in 1958. Since, at that point, John F Kennedy was only a senator, not guaranteed to become president, Oswald must have been undergoing preparation to fill any role that the bosses might find for him. We can now be sure—yes, sure—that the same thing happened to Jimmy Ray.

Note: his brother refers to him as ‘Jimmy’ and I recommend we follow suit. He had never called himself “James Earl Ray.” Similarly, Judith Vary Baker, girlfriend of Lee Harvey Oswald, who has just published her stunning autobiography, “Me and Lee,” assures us that Lee Oswald’s middle name ‘Harvey’ was never used until the president was shot.

Let’s try not parroting the media. Lee Oswald, okay?

Jimmy Ray was born in 1928, the first of nine children. When the youngest was only a few months old, the father left the household. Four kids were taken away by the state. Jerry notes, “Our family situation had become unbearable, with several young children to support and no conceivable way to provide for them.”

Here we will be concerned only with the four older brothers. Actually, we need be concerned only with Jimmy, John, and Jerry, because Frank was killed in a car crash, age 19, in 1963. The three J’s were in and out of prison, mainly for committing burglaries. Jerry served three sentences for crimes he committed at age 16, 18, and 21.

It would have been a miracle if he didn’t become a burglar, with his father and uncle serving as role models in that capacity, along with his adored brother Jimmy, who was seven years his senior. (“In March 1946, Jimmy enlisted in the army—I missed him so much.”)

To caution you as to my habit of possibly over-reading things: I suspect that Frank’s car crash in 1963 was ‘arranged’ in order to reduce the strength of his family. Tamara Carter’s book, besides being fascinating, is a real salute to the solidarity of three siblings—Jimmy, John, and Jerry. You can’t help admiring them for their loyalty. In 1971, a guy nicknamed Catman ‘dropped a dime’ on John. Specifically, he testified that John had robbed the Bank of St. Peter’s, in Missouri. Jerry says “no way” and there was no evidence for it, yet John got 20 years. Jerry tells us with some glee, how he later evened the score with Catman.

The putting away of John served two purposes: it reduced the strength of the brothers in their attempts to get justice for the unfairly convicted Jimmy (who proceeded to stay in prison for 29 years for MLK’s death), and it contributed to the public image of the Ray family as being a bunch of thugs. (An aside: I have stated elsewhere that I think most of our unsolved bank robberies were committed by the FBI. The robbery of St Peter’s Bank nicely served the FBI by smearing a Ray, and also came to be a ‘solved’ crime in that way!)

Note: Jerry says, “Little did I know the FBI had been courting Catman in order to get him to testify against John. The FBI was paying Catman’s bar tabs, keeping him tanked up on cheap wine, and playing on his ego, telling him what a good, smart guy he was—eventually persuading him to testify.”

Since John’s sentencing reinforced the public’s belief that Jimmy was a thug, let’s look at another aid-to-proper-thinking that the media provided to us, free of charge. (Many are mentioned in the book.) The one that really sticks in Jerry’s craw is the fact that George McMillan published a book about the MLK assassination in which he purported to have interviewed some (unnamed) men who had been co-prisoners of Jimmy during an earlier incarceration. They told McMillan:

“In 1963 and 1964 Martin Luther King was on TV almost everyday talking defiantly about how black people were going to get their rights. . . . Ray watched it all avidly on the cellblock TV. . . . He boiled when King came on the tube; he began to call him Martin ‘Lucifer’ King and Martin Luther ‘Coon.’ . . . ‘Somebody’s gotta get him,’ Ray would say, his face drawn with tension, his fists clenched, ‘Somebody’s gotta get him.’”

Ah, I hear you say, you never read McMillan’s book, so you did not get twisted by that disinformation. Wanna bet? On January 26, 1976, Time magazine (which probably wrote the book in the first place) carried lengthy excerpts from it, including the above. Anyway, Jerry is delighted to have discovered that the cellblock did not acquire TV sets until 1970, so the tale has to be a tall one. “So there!” says Jerry.

Ahem. What should the duped audience—namely, all of us—say? Maybe we should clench our fists and say, “Somebody’s gotta get ’em. Somebody’s gotta get ’em.” (I think the time has come, really.)

Let us apply Jerryistic logic, regarding the cellblock TV story. Ask: Is there any reason to keep on believing that Ray was motivated by racism, if Time had to resort to such balderdash? No. And. . . . so. . . . the logic continues: if the famous assassin James Earl Ray was therefore not a racist opponent of MLK, why would he go to the considerable trouble and expense of assassinating him? Jerryistic logic demands: when the media deceive us, don’t just refuse to believe what they say, think more deeply about what’s behind this.

Let me now list five insights that emerge (unless I am imagining it all) from the text.

The first insight is one that Jerry himself provides. Namely, he deduced that Jimmy’s original defense lawyer, Percy Foreman, was actually working for the prosecution (something, I think, that happens in many cases, given the obvious temptation). “Percy Fourflusher” coerced Jimmy to enter a guilty plea, says Jerry.

A second insight is that a later attorney in the case, J B Stoner, was also on the wrong side. He was said to be a racist “so far right and extremist that even the KKK distanced itself.” But it’s now known that the KKK, in its budding days, was the creature not of ‘prejudice’ but of the Illuminati types who always practice divide-and-rule. Surely Stoner didn’t give a hoot who was black and who was white. And why did Stoner run against Jimmy Carter for governor of Georgia in 1970? A good guess is that he was placed into that campaign to make Carter look good.

A third item parallels the aforementioned imprisonment of John for the St Peter’s bank heist (that caused John to be handily unavailable to help the family). I’m afraid this insight may disappoint the proud brother Jerry: Jimmy’s famous 1967 escape from prison, by way of hiding in a bakery cart, was probably not ‘native.’ I hypothesize it was planned by you-know-who, in order to have him outside when his services were required for the 1968 assassination.

Fourth is that the poor victim’s death, by liver and kidney failure, in 1998, was probably foul play. Jimmy got ‘shanked’ by fellow prisoners. He then required 77 stitches and “a blood transfusion tainted with Hepatitis C.” He had never, previously, been the object of the wrath of co-prisoners, and he was nearing age 70, so why would this happen? I say it happened because Youtube was about to come into vogue and, with it, people might see the famous ‘assassin’ more sympathetically. (There is a photo of Jimmy with bloated liver that will really shock you.)

Finally (but this is hardly an exhaustive list!), the fifth insight concerns the civil action filed against Loyd Jowers by Coretta Scott King. Granted it did a lot of good, and happily concluded with the jury saying that Jimmy was not the triggerman, but it has the hallmarks of disinformation artistry. Jowers, at the very end of his life, ‘owned up to’ being the rifle-provider to a now-deceased Memphis policemen who, he said, was the assassin. Probably this court case was ‘under control’ and was a way for the government to take people’s attention off the real story—involving Raoul in Canada.

And so to Raoul. Tamara’ Carter’s new book yields plenty of hints as to how Jimmy Ray came to meet, and be controlled by, an elusive but very real person who was known to him as Raoul, in Canada. Surely someone had to communicate between the masterminds of MLK’s takedown and the gunman on the ground! Note: I do not pretend to know who that gunman was. I do claim, as above, to know that it was “not James Earl Ray.”

How can I claim that? By means of ‘Jerryistic logic.’ Using Jerryistic logic, we have seen that persons in high power (high enough to control police, courts, media) went to great trouble to give us a story. The George Macmillan/Time magazine caper, being a thoroughgoing lie, suffices to demonstrate that it was all must have been a Big Lie. The five things I pointed out also relied on a sort of Jerryistic logic (I asked WHY did Stoner happen to get on the case; WHY was Jimmy able to escape from prison in 1967, etc).

Thank you, Jerry Ray. Thank you, Tamara Carter.

Mary W Maxwell, PhD, is the author of “Prosecution for Treason.” Her publisher, Kris Millegan at TrineDay Press, also published Carter’s “Memoir of Injustice,” and Baker’s “Me and Lee,” not to mention a sizzler about Allen Dulles entitled “A Certain Arrogance.”