Informant38

One of the consequences of Martin Luther King's presence at the center fore of the history of the black civil rights movement in the US is it's given the narrative a much more peaceful and benign ambience than it had. It's as though there was slavery, in the long ago and only really in the South, and then there was Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, and then Condoleeza Rice and Clarence Thomas.
There were public spectacles, in the mid-West in the 1930's, at the lynchings of black men, where whole families dressed up and came down to see the show; people were gunned down in the struggle to get southern blacks registered to vote.
Many people were beaten, and blasted with fire hoses, and set upon by police dogs, and arrested - not to end slavery in the long ago, but to get at the right they already had, to vote, to participate in the civic responsibilities of citizenship.
Of course it was about a lot more than voting, that was the hard tangible thing that it all could hang on.
Real history's filled with more than images and events, it's a great big river of everything happening, breakfasts and lunches and births and deaths and little victories and defeats, and a kind of ambience that's part of the time, how it was.
One of the problems in getting the stories handed down is that history now has to be passed through the market-sensitive filters of the television before it even gets to the classroom. King makes a very marketable image that way, an immortal line in a majestic speech, a handsome face and clean public record. There's a bunch of smirking FBI wannabes with some inside dope on his alleged promiscuity, but all in all the world looks at him with respect and a kind of fondness. A nice man.
There aren't any pictures of him being beaten to the ground.
Personally, whenever I think about him for any length of time I remember Judge Joe Brown, on TV, my mom watching his show every day, the way he'd get exasperated but stay patient and insightful.
Joe Brown was the presiding judge at the final review of James Earl Ray's appeal of his conviction, for the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968, in Memphis Tennessee.
Brown was removed from the case. I saw him interviewed about it a year or two ago on Tavis Smiley. He had that same almost contemplative air, but you could see something else there too. I don't know what to call it exactly, but it makes me sad and angry at the same time.
I guess that's what I'm tryng to say here. Martin Luther King gets a certain amount of remembrance, a national holiday - though like a lot of other days of remembering it's been Reaganized into a 3-day weekend, and separated from the actual day of anniversary - his face on stamps and in text books, but the lies and smokescreens around his assassination are still mostly under the rug and out of sight.
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The Alleged Murder Weapon in the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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King Family Statement On The Justice Department "Limited Investigation" Of The MLK Assassination
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DoJ King Report