Introduction
On April 4, 1968, a single shot from a .30-06
rifle killed the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., as he stood
on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
The day following the assassination, while criminal
investigations were just beginning, United States Attorney General
Ramsey Clark stated to the press that there were no indications
of conspiracy in the shooting, “all of our evidence at this time
indicates that it was a single person who committed this criminal
act.”
With access to FBI files and oral histories
that only became available over the past decade, with information
from successful cold-case prosecutions, and with our own primary
source interviews, we are now able to relate a much more comprehensive
view of the events that we feel led to Dr. King’s assassination.
About
the Book
The authors chose “TheAwful Grace of God” as
the title for this book because it captures not only the enormous
feeling of loss at the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., but
also the need for an understanding of what happened that fateful
day in Memphis.
Who murdered King?
Was there a conspiracy?
What was the motive?
And what do the answers to those questions mean
for our nation’s history and our future? Forty years after King’s
assassination, we are still looking for that wisdom.
It has only been through a series of successful
cold-case prosecutions over the last decade that we have come
to realize the extent of such information and its implications
for the King investigation. Reports that the FBI produced in
the King murder investigation suggest that the local offices
had little understanding of the background and associations of
the information they produced. Challenges such as compartmentalization
of information; the inability to correlate names, aliases, and
organizations; and the lack of any of today’s data-mining” capabilities
all fundamentally handicapped individual field offices in the
pursuit of leads suggesting any potential conspiracy in the murder
of Dr. King.
With access to FBI files and oral histories that
only became available over the past decade, with information
from successful cold-case prosecutions, and with our own primary
source interviews, we are now able to relate a much more comprehensive
view of the events that we feel led to Dr. King’s assassination.
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