Last year (2019) in a few conferences that I attended, I showed the video of an appearance on the Today Show of Dexter King, Dr. King’s younger son, who explained the King family’s motives behind their cooperation with Dr. William Pepper in conducting a civil suit against Lloyd Jowers, for his involvement in the plot to murder Martin Luther King Jr. That suit led to a trial in 1999 attended by one journalist, James Douglass, who wrote the only reported story of that milestone event[1]
File Under “The Use of Film in Critical Thinking Techniques”
The televised show in this video (linked below) was made during that period of time (1997-99) and watching it in retrospect provides viewers an important insight into the character traits of this son of Dr. King. As it does about the prize-winning author of a biography of Dr. King who was only able to get that gig because the King family granted him access to their most private files.
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Though David Garrow wrote a commendable book up to the murder of Dr. King, unfortunately, he showed no indication that he had ever studied the real facts of his assassination, apparently satisfied with the screed originally written by the three original FBI-commissioned novelists William Bradford Huie (1970; 1977), Gerold Frank (1972) and George McMillan (1976). In the interim between that period and 1998 — with the addition of other books based upon those tomes — the mythology grew further, to the last of that distinctive FBI-crafted genre, which was published in 1998 by Gerald Posner. Since then the myths continued to grow, the lies compounded into ever more syrupy fiction with Hellhound on His Trail by Hampton Sides (2010), along with a number of others of lesser note.
The sad reality was that the books written by the earliest actual truth-tellers (Mark Lane and Harold Weisberg primarily — and later by several others including Philip H. Melanson and Dr. Pepper’s earlier volumes) — being less syrupy and more detailed, were too hard to read for some people and thus, ignored.
Yet it seems ill-befitting to a well-known, prize-winning author like Mr. Garrow, that he has apparently missed the numerous pieces of factual evidence that had been completed by the time this video was made. That he referenced the “report” of the House Select Committee on Assassinations — the one based upon the FBI’s original fictitious report — both of which were derived in part from the writings of the novelist William Bradford Huie, is lamentable, even more so now than it was then. There has been nothing since published which suggests that his opinions are any different now than they were twenty years ago, as reflected within this short video:
You be the judge!
Reprinted with the author’s permission.
