62. The MLK Assassination, What Is The Truth??
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Hey everyone and welcome back to the Into The Dark Podcast. I'm your host, Peyton Moreland, and I just wanted to let you know that I am so grateful that you are here watching this or listening to this. It literally means more than you know. I wake up every day just wondering how there are people who just want to listen to me. Yep. So thank you guys so much and I really, really do love you and this little community that we have made together.

All right, before we get into the episode, I'm going to start with my 10 seconds and boy, oh boy, I feel like I have a good one for you. So I was watching TikTok before this and

And if you know what the Roman Empire is, it's basically, okay, that does, okay. If you know what the Roman Empire is, the Roman Empire is the Roman Empire. But on TikTok, the Roman Empire means something that you think about daily, weekly, like it consumes your mind. It's your Roman Empire. Twilight could be considered my Roman Empire, all right? So someone said, what is the Roman Empire of your hometown? So basically, what is something that happened in your hometown that consumes your mind?

still now today. And I have a story for you. I'm going to change the names because I'm not quite sure who listens. I'm telling it on this podcast. I'm not quite sure who listens, but this is crazy. So sit back and buckle up.

So in my high school, there was two best friends. I'm going to name them Sally and Susie. And Sally and Susie did everything together. They had been like best friends since middle school. They were really best friend goals. Like if you were a girl, you knew Sally and Susie. They were ride or die. They were so close and just cool and popular and cute and just amazing.

did everything together, same sports, everything, okay? So Sally and Susie start dating Jim and John, okay? And Jim and John are best friends. So Sally and Susie best friends are dating Jim and John best friends. And it is like, now we're at best friend couple goals. They do everything together. They go camping together. Like they are living the high school dream, two best friends dating two other best friends, okay?

It doesn't get much better than that when you're in your high school because you can just go do everything and hang out with your best friends still. And it's so fun. OK, so Sally and Susie are dating Jim and John and then Sally and John break up. OK, so Sally and John break up and it's pretty big news because they've been dating for quite a while. And now it's like, what is this for? Some of friends do because one of them broke up. So do they still hang out like they were all four really good friends? So it's weird, weird, weird. OK,

And then Susie, what's his name? Jimmy, my other guy, they break up. So now the best friends have broken up. Okay. This four, this foursome that was just so fun. They've broken up. Beep, beep, beep. A couple of weeks past, we get the news that Sally

or Susie, one of them is now dating the opposite Jim or John. Okay. They switch. She did a switcheroo. She just stabbed her best friend of years in the back. And then also like she's hung out with this guy a lot and seen this guy do multiple things with her best friend. And now she's dating. So not only was this like a ginormous friend breakup, you're also having another ginormous friend breakup on the other side.

And then, you know, the story is going there because a couple more weeks pass and guess who's together? Sally and John. So these two friends, these best friends broke up from being best friends and then switched boyfriends and then continued dating and then also like shattered their friendship. Like it was a huge deal. It was this big blowout. They were not friends anymore.

Okay. So it's like, oh my, everyone's talking. Oh my gosh. They switched. They switched. Like, how could they do that? They hung out every day. Like, did they like each other before? Like, was there ever the lines ever blurred? Like it was crazy. It gets even crazier. They both go on to marry the switcheroo's.

So they are now married with their switcheroo couple. Okay. And that is my Roman empire from my hometown. Every once in a while, I will just go on, check it out, say, hey, are these people, are the switcheroos still together and going strong? Yeah, they got kids. They have started these lives and those girls never were friends again.

All right, you guys, now that you know that crazy story, I'm about to tell you something that's even crazier. Sit back. We are doing another tinfoil tell today, and it's one that has been talked about a lot. You're going to know the main characters, and there's a lot of different directions it can go. So trigger warning, this episode includes discussions of murder. Please listen with care. All right.

Martin Luther King Jr. is probably without any question the most famous civil rights activist in American history. He organized marches and boycotts and fought for racial equality. His "I Have a Dream" speech might be one of the most well-known public addresses ever. And his letter from the Birmingham jail is almost required reading for racial justice advocates, even to this day.

One reason he's so famous is because his life was cut short when he was only 39 years old. King wasn't just a leader. He was a martyr for his cause, cut down when he still had so much work left to do. In fact, to this day, King's assassination is considered wildly controversial because a lot of people don't believe that he fell to a lone gunman.

Officially, a man named James Earl Ray killed King on April 4th, 1968 during a visit to Memphis. But unofficially, some, including Dr. King's own family, think he was the victim of a tinfoil tell. One that goes all the way to the top of the FBI.

And to explain where these theories come from, I need to talk a bit about King's career as a civil rights activist. Explain the goals he was working toward, which probably sounds strange, I know. Doesn't everyone already know who Martin Luther King Jr. is? Well, the truth is he did a lot more than organize marches and stage sit-ins. And this is going to be important as to why theories are going to come about. He worked hard to get to where he is today.

He wasn't only concerned with racial injustice. King was outspoken on a number of different issues. He spoke out harshly against the Vietnam War. He believed the United States would never win. And so long as the fighting continued, people would suffer needlessly.

and he advocated for economic reforms to help lower income people. He publicly said there should be laws that would either guarantee that everyone could have a well-paying job or else the government would pay unemployed people enough that they could still be financially stable. The idea being if you couldn't work because you couldn't find a job or because of a family emergency or your health or literally any other reason, that shouldn't stop you from having enough money to support yourself.

He thought there should be a universal basic income that was more expansive than what unemployment and welfare offered. He also pushed for reforms that are still hot button issues even today, like universal health care. At one point, he was planning a protest in Washington, D.C. that would have lasted a month and a half.

It was called the Poor People's March, and if it had gone forward the way he expected, it could have been the biggest organized protest in all of US history. But unfortunately, he got assassinated before his plans could come to fruition. So Dr. King wasn't just an activist for racial equality. He was outspoken about all sorts of major issues which affected people of every race.

And naturally, this made him a lot of enemies. And that's on top of the people who already hated him at this time for his racial advocacy. But this was the Cold War era where a lot of people saw economic reform as basically un-American. Even some people who supported civil rights and wanted racial justice weren't on board with King's other platforms. So just because they supported

They supported MLK in one stance didn't mean they supported him in the other. And certain federal agencies were pretty suspicious of MLK, including the FBI.

Now, that's not just my speculation, by the way. It's a documented fact that for years, the FBI surveilled and harassed Dr. King. Beginning around 1963, the agents tracked his every move. He was just having too much sway. If King checked into a hotel room, the FBI would bug it. Then they'd reserve the room right next door so they could monitor their listening devices live. If MLK talked to someone on the phone,

An agent would listen in through a tap and undercover agents pretended to be civil rights activists to try and gain access to his inner circle. So with all this constant surveillance, they eventually learned that MLK was cheating on his wife. So they used that information to blackmail him. The FBI actually sent him a letter telling him that they knew his secret. Then they encouraged him to take his own life.

They said if he didn't kill himself, they'd destroy his reputation by releasing everything they know. Again, this isn't speculation. We know that this is true. It is documented. Luckily, King and his colleagues figured out what was going on pretty quickly. They somehow realized that a government agency was trying to threaten him, so he called their bluff. And not long afterward, the Bureau leaked some of their recordings about his infidelity.

Some believe these releases came straight from the FBI's director, J. Edgar Hoover himself. After all, we know Hoover wasn't exactly a fan of Dr. King. He actually gave statements to reporters calling Martin Luther King at the time a liar.

And Hoover, and by extension, the whole FBI, weren't the only people with a vendetta against Dr. King. Reportedly, the CIA was also monitoring him and had plans to publicly discredit him with anything they could find.

That detail hasn't been proven, but there's a lot of evidence to support it, including documents straight from the CIA itself, which were released after a Freedom of Information Act request. Those records suggested the CIA monitored King's phone calls and purchases. They also seemed to include strategies the agency could use to publicly embarrass him if they had a chance.

Among other things, they wanted to make it look like King was a communist. He was just working towards something that the government at the time was not. For what it's worth, King also denied being a communist. He thought that philosophy was incompatible with his Christian faith. Plus, lots of law enforcement agencies and even the mafia were full of white supremacists. They hated King's activism and might have gone to extreme lengths to

to silence him. Again, this part isn't part of the theory. We know that this was the climate. We learn about it in history books. So all of this to say, Martin Luther King Jr. had a lot of enemies and many of them were powerful and dangerous in their own rights. Of course, King knew his life was at risk. After all, he received death threats all the time.

He knew there was a very good chance that if he kept fighting for civil rights, someone would probably murder him for it. But he kept up his advocacy anyway. He thought the cause was bigger than his life. So while he may not have realized the exact day and time he'd be killed, he did know that his assassination was a distinct possibility.

And as for how his murder actually went down, I could go on for hours about everything we know. But here's a very brief summary. And keep in mind, this is the official story. This is what is on record. Some details have been disputed since.

So in April of 1968, King was in Memphis because there was a sanitation worker strike underway. MLK wanted to support the workers and raise awareness for the upcoming Poor People's March. Meanwhile, his killer, James Earl Ray, knew that King was supposed to be in town. So he headed to Memphis as well on April 4th, 1968. He was going to take this opportunity to kill Martin Luther King.

Now, Ray had been living under the radar for about a year by this point. Until April of 1967, he was in prison on theft charges. He managed to escape on a bread truck. The vehicle brought fresh loaves to the prison, and after they unloaded some of their cargo, Ray snuck on board. From there, it was pretty simple to ride the truck back out to freedom. And afterward, he spent months wandering around from one city to the next, trying to stay low.

Ray never stayed in one place for too long out of fear that he'd get caught and then put back behind bars. And along the way, again, according to official reports, this escaped prisoner became obsessed with killing Martin Luther King Jr.

So when April 4th, 1968 came around, he booked a room in a boarding house right across the street from the hotel where Martin Luther King was staying. So Ray could see King's actual room from his place. King's room had a balcony outside it and Ray could also watch the balcony from his boarding house.

Now, Ray's rental didn't have a private bathroom. There was a shared one down the hall. And Ray realized after checking in that the bathroom had a much better view of King's balcony than his bedroom did. So he stayed nearby, his gun loaded and ready to go. All he had to do was wait.

According to the official story, sure enough, at around 6 p.m. that evening, Reverend King stepped out onto his balcony. He had no idea that Ray, this escaped prisoner who was obsessed with killing him, was watching right across the street. The gunman pulled the trigger and a single shot hit King in the jaw.

The civil rights leader collapsed to the ground. And as soon as Ray realized that he'd hit his target, he gathered up all his possessions. He wrapped the gun in a blanket and ditched it right outside his boarding house. Then Ray hopped in a car and drove away, putting as many miles between himself and Memphis as he could. This was before anyone knew who he was and he fled the country. Ray eventually got arrested three months later in London.

And as for King, the gunshot didn't kill him immediately. His friends were able to rush him to a hospital, but it wasn't enough and he died that evening.

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almost right after the shooting. All of this weird misinformation started spreading. And this is kind of where the theories begin. It all began when Walter Cronkite went on air to report on the assassination. He said that the police were looking for a person of interest who'd been spotted fleeing the scene. The authorities didn't know his identity yet, but they thought he was the shooter.

Cronkite described him as a well-dressed young white man, which was a weird way to put it.

First of all, Ray wasn't financially well off and he couldn't have afforded nice clothes. It's hard to imagine anyone would call him well-dressed. He wasn't particularly young either. He was 40 years old at the time of the assassination. So once the authorities arrested Ray, a lot of people thought it was odd that Cronkite apparently described a completely different person entirely, as though there was another shooter who still hadn't been caught.

Plus, law enforcement officers found that rifle pretty soon after the shooting, the one that Ray allegedly used to kill King before he wrapped it in a blanket and dumped it outside. The authorities matched fingerprints on the gun to Ray, but they couldn't prove this rifle was the actual murder weapon. Ballistics tests were inconclusive.

I also think it's worth mentioning, nobody realized this at the time. It didn't come out until years later, but a bunch of police officers who should have been stationed near Martin Luther King's hotel were put off duty that day. So basically King didn't have anywhere close to the amount of police protection that he should have had. They just so happened to not be working.

According to theorists, this might be because someone with the department knew an assassination was coming and did what they could to clear the way for the real killer.

So between the police being sent off duty, the weird report Walter Cronkite gave, and the inconclusive ballistics tests, it all felt like someone else could have shot Dr. King. Like, how were they so sure it was Ray, I guess, besides that fingerprint? But I mean, there had to be someone who fit Cronkite's description better from the eyewitness who apparently saw the murderer. And

and whose gun could be matched to the deadly bullet more easily. I mean, at this point we just have a random gun with Ray's fingerprint on it. We're not even sure that's the gun that was used.

It might have been simple for a second gunman to fire and then escape with so few police around. In fact, James Earl Ray insisted that he didn't kill Martin Luther King Jr. He says he's been framed, but he didn't make that claim until a little while later. At first, not long after he got arrested, he just accepted a plea deal. He pleaded guilty to Dr. King's assassination and received a sentence of 99 years in prison.

But just three days after that, Ray went public with his new argument. He said now not only did someone set him up to take the fall for Dr. King's assassination, but he knew exactly who had done it. A man named Raul. According to Ray, at some point after he escaped prison, he met Raul for the first time. Ray didn't know much about him except that he was involved with the mafia somehow.

but over the course of ray's year on the run raul repeatedly gave him money it actually helped ray stay afloat at a time when he couldn't get a job or access his bank without drawing attention at one point raul also gave him some strange instructions he told ray to buy the gun that eventually according to police killed dr king except according to ray he

He didn't know what Raul planned to do with the firearm, and he didn't take any steps to avoid leaving his fingerprints on it. Raul also instructed Ray to go to Memphis, give him the gun, then check into this particular room at the boarding house. At a specific time later that day, Raul wanted Ray to see a movie in theaters, so that's what Ray did. To hear Ray tell it, he was at the movie at the time of the assassination.

He had no idea that anyone had shot King until after the fact. Now, according to Ray's story, Raul or someone working for him went to Ray's room to shoot King with the gun that they had made Ray buy. Then they dropped the murder weapon with Ray's fingerprints still on it outside specifically to frame him. Ray knew he was in trouble and that's why he fled. After all, he was already a prison escapee.

As for why he didn't say this immediately as soon as he got arrested, Ray said he accepted the plea deal right away because his lawyer told him to. But in agreeing to the plea, Ray never had a trial. The jury, and by extension the general public, would never get to see the evidence against him and make a decision for themselves. He felt like he'd been duped into helping the real killer cover up their crime.

Now, obviously, Ray wasn't an unbiased source. He didn't want to spend the rest of his life in prison. So he had a lot of incentive to lie if he was, in fact, an assassin who worked alone. But even though it's reasonable to take these claims with a massive grain of salt, King's family believed him. They thought that James Earl Ray was innocent, and they spent decades trying to get his conviction overturned.

After all, between the FBI harassment and all other weirdness surrounding the shooting, there was a lot of reason to believe that there might be something else going on surrounding his death. And this is especially given what happened in 1993 when another person came forward in this case. His name was Lloyd Jowers, and he owned a restaurant in the same building where Ray had rented his room that day.

More importantly, Jowers claimed that he personally hired a hitman to kill Dr. King. He said he did it after a member of the mafia paid him off.

Then on April 4th, a man named Raul came to his bar and delivered a gun to Jowers. This was the same gun that the real killer then used to kill MLK. According to Jowers, James Errol Ray had nothing to do with the assassination. The murderer was a member of law enforcement who Jowers helped.

So six years later, in November of 1999, the King family sued Martin Jowers. During the trial, MLK's widow, Coretta Scott King, took the stand. She talked about why she was bringing this case to trial a full 30 years after MLK's death.

As Coretta explained, she was still learning more about the assassination every day, and she'd only recently become aware of Jower's claims. But she figured if she could get all the witnesses' testimony on the record, the world might finally learn the truth. She just wanted everyone to understand how and why her husband really died.

During that hearing, several members of a group called the Invaders took the stand. Now, the Invaders were a Memphis area community organizing association. They worked with Martin Luther King to plan marches and rallies and other events. And this was because they all had the same goals. So in 1968, when MLK was in Memphis, the Invaders often met him at the hotel where he was assassinated. It wasn't just his room. It was a headquarters of sorts.

Everyone gathered there to discuss their agenda and work out how the trip would go. But late in the evening of April 4th, an unknown individual called the invaders. They said the group was no longer welcome in the hotel and they had to leave, which they did right around 5.50 p.m. or so. And then roughly 10 minutes later, Dr. King was shot.

So the invaders never figured out who made that phone call that asked them to leave basically Dr. King alone. But it sounded like someone wanted to get rid of anyone who might help protect King. Needless to say, James Earl Ray didn't have the resources to organize something like that himself. He was just a guy. He may not have even known the invaders existed or how to reach them with that message.

And as for Jowers, the man who was on trial, he never testified in his defense. In light of all the evidence against him, King's family actually won the lawsuit. The court ruled that Jowers had conspired with some government agencies, basically saying his story was true, although they didn't specify which specific agencies were likely involved.

So with that victory came $100. Not a huge amount of money, but the kings were trying to make a point. They were after answers, not cash. So they only sued Jowers for a very small amount.

Sadly, civil suits don't have the same weight though as criminal trials. Even though the Kings won, it didn't lead to any further police investigations or arrests. The victory was strictly symbolic. So the King's family take this guy to court. They say, hey, he says that this happened and that he helped in the death and now we're suing him for it. And the court's like, yep, we think you're right. We think he did conspire with government agencies, but

So you win, here's a hundred dollars. And the police are like, okay, case closed. We're not gonna look into it any further, even though the courts just said that this was actually what happened. And before you're like, wait, wait, wait, the court said this and the police didn't wanna relook into the case. There have been a number of official inquiries conducted by different governmental agencies.

One early one happened in 1979. A U.S. House of Representatives committee looked at the assassination from countless angles. They were trying to see if James Earl Ray had a compelling motive to shoot MLK, and if not, whether some other group might have wanted to frame him. Plus, they tried to see if they could identify Raul or prove if he really existed. Remember, if James Earl Ray did this, Raul is an important character if he's saying that, hey, you know, he kind of helped me.

and they concluded that there were in fact two conspiracies at play, at least two that were likely. They didn't go so far to say either one was definitely 100% true, but they thought James Earl Ray probably conspired with someone, but it was his brothers, John and Jerry Ray. So

So in the weeks before the assassination, James talked to his siblings a lot and they frequently met up with him in person. Again, they knew he was supposed to be in prison. So if he was free, they had to realize he'd broken out and they didn't make any effort to notify the authorities. In fact, the committee thought it seemed possible that they actually helped him escape in the first place.

It seemed really unlikely that Ray would be able to execute such a complicated plan with the bread truck and everything on his own. Plus, Ray committed several bank robberies for quick cash after his escape, and he had two accomplices who hadn't been identified. One of them could have been Raul, but the committee thought it was a lot more likely that Ray was actually just working with his brothers. In fact, if Ray was robbing banks, that made it hard to believe Raul was paying him.

Why take the risk if he didn't need the money? The committee ruled that Raul probably didn't exist. So this, you know, they do look into it and they're like, eh, he doesn't exist.

And they say that Ray's conspirators who helped him escape and joined him on those bank robberies were just his brothers, no one else. Which so far as tinfoil tales go, wasn't that exciting. It's not quite at the same level as saying the FBI or the CIA did it, you know, just saying that his brothers helped. But the House's committee's second finding was a lot more interesting. Remember I said they found two? It had to do with Ray's motives.

Why would he want to kill MLK? From what they could tell, he didn't seem to be an extreme racist or psychologically disturbed. He wasn't exactly in favor of equal rights, but from what they could tell, he didn't feel strongly enough to kill over his racist beliefs either.

There also wasn't very much reason to think Ray killed MLK to get famous. After all, he went to some lengths to hide his identity and evade arrest after the assassination. So there wasn't any clear reason for him to really want MLK dead, except money. If someone offered to pay him to kill Dr. King, Ray seemed like the sort of person who'd gladly assassinate him for cash.

Ray may not have wanted to kill King on his own, but he wasn't a fan either. He'd be willing to pull the trigger if someone else paid him to do it.

And interestingly enough, at that time, Alabama's governor was a man named George Wallace. He was a presidential candidate who was strongly in favor of segregation and just as strongly opposed to racial equality. His viewpoints were pretty much the polar opposite of Dr. King's. And some high-ranking members of his election campaign said they'd give $50,000 to anyone who killed MLK.

So, according to the House committee, the conspiracy may have gone like this. Ray and his brothers wanted money, and they knew they could get a lot of it by killing Martin Luther King Jr. They may have actually met with Wallace or his campaign staffers. It's hard to say for sure, as there's no documentation of such a meeting, but they were all in the same city at the same time.

If that meeting did happen, Ray might have offered to kill King for them. But then when he got arrested, Wallace's staffers betrayed him. Ray and his brothers apparently never got the money as there's no evidence of any major payoff. But that information cuts both ways. It's just as possible that Wallace's team knew nothing about Ray. Maybe they never paid him because there was no tinfoil towel at all.

Now, sadly, the House committee ended the report by saying they just couldn't conclude anything for sure. They had looked into it. They didn't have a solid answer. It had been a decade since the murder and too much evidence had been lost to time already. They thought the Wallace angle was a possibility, but they wouldn't even say it was the most likely situation. The ruling was frustratingly inconclusive.

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the U.S. Department of Justice specifically looked at Lloyd Jower's testimony. And not only did they look into Lloyd Jower's testimony, they also looked into an account from a former FBI agent named Donald Wilson.

Now, they weren't evaluating every theory out there, just these particular ones. So FBI agent Wilson said he investigated the MLK assassination pretty soon after it happened. He had actually searched James Earl Ray's car and he said in that search, he found a bunch of paperwork that proved the Raul story was true. So this foreshadowed

Former FBI agent comes out as a little whistleblower and says, hey, so I actually searched his car. And yeah, I found paperwork that basically says he was hired to do this. Unfortunately, he couldn't show these documents to anyone. Wilson claimed someone else with ties to the White House had stole them from him. Naturally, this meant Wilson had no way of proving if he was telling the truth.

But before the inquiry, some investigators asked James Earl Ray what he thought of that story. And Ray said he never had any documents like what Wilson described. So they go to him, who's now serving time in prison. They say, hey, Ray, you know, this FBI agent has come forward and said maybe your story is true because he saw this paperwork. And Ray's like, hey, you know, that would be great for me, except I didn't have any paperwork.

So the committee decided that former FBI agent Wilson was lying. And as for Jowers, who said the mafia asked him to hire Hitman, they didn't find him to be very compelling either. First, he mostly talked about the alleged theory in news interviews.

I mean, a handful of times he had been called to court for one reason or another. And each time he testified under oath that he denied having any knowledge of any kind of plot against King. So when it comes to news interviews and in the public eye, he changes his story and is like, oh yeah, this is a big tinfoil tell. But then when he actually testifies under oath, he says, no, no, no, that's not true. It's like he was going with whatever sounded best in the moment.

And these accounts brought lots of attention. In fact, Jowers sister eventually claimed that he was lying for money. He could pretend to be part of the conspiracy and he might be able to sell books, maybe make paid appearances, whatever he wanted.

The Department of Justice concluded that Jowers' story just wasn't true. There was no mafia plan to hire a hitman. Or at least, if there was, Jowers didn't have anything to do with it. Interestingly, this whole inquiry was one year before King's family actually won their suit against Jowers where the court said, oh yeah, this was true. So it seems like different groups came to wildly different conclusions in this case.

Plus again, the Department of Justice acknowledged that there were a lot of other theories out there and they could still be true even if Jowers wasn't.

So once more, their findings were mostly inconclusive. And if you want to believe in a theory, you still can. But if you want to believe James Earl Ray acted alone, all these official reports won't stand in your way. Of course, there's also the possibility that these investigations weren't conducted in good faith either. That's actually what Dr. King's family suggested.

Coretta Scott King noted that these were largely government bodies evaluating allegations against other government bodies. Basically, every time the Department of Justice or the House of Representatives conducted an investigation, we had to take their word that they were looking at their buddies in the CIA and the FBI with an unbiased eye. So like when the government's like, oh yeah, we'll look into this. They then have to look at their good old bestie friends over there and say, yep, they were telling the truth.

So that's a lot to take on faith, which may be why to this day, even with all the evidence of a tinfoil tell, the official story is that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by James Earl Ray, who may have worked with his brothers, but no one else. And when Ray died of natural causes in 1998, he took any knowledge of what really happened with him.

Now, some people have said it wouldn't make any sense for the government agencies to assassinate Dr. King. In fact, some CIA records suggested they were afraid he'd get murdered. It would turn him into a martyr and then help spread his message. Like they argued that his popularity might rise, which honestly did happen after his death to an extent. But on the other hand, when King was killed, he lost the chance to keep pushing for change.

Like I mentioned before, most people don't even know about the economic reforms he wanted. If King had lived, he might have fought for and won legislation on those fronts too. So I really don't think it's fair to completely rule out the possibility that the CIA or the FBI might have wanted him eliminated to prevent these programs from ever passing. I mean, it feels very similar to what politics has always been.

So one of the biggest ironies of all of this is that Dr. King's life was so well documented. All that FBI surveillance helped in that regard.

There are endless hours of recordings revealing his conversations with his fellow civil rights activists. We know how MLK's personal values evolved over time and how he decided which causes to champion at which points. A reporter with Time Magazine noted that we'd know so much less about Dr. King if not for the FBI's surveillance. Not that this means it's okay, but it is an interesting silver lining to all their harassment.

But the specifics of how and why King died are still so muddy. It's one massive moment in his life that's chock full of question marks.

We don't know who really killed him or if they were part of some grand tinfoil tell. And it's possible that we never will. And you guys, that is our episode for today. Please give this video a thumbs up and comment on it. Or if you're listening on audio, leave a review. I love you guys so, so much. And I will see you next time where we dive further into the dark together.