Page 36 - All About History - Issue 29-15

Death Of A King

In the

end, we will
remember not
What the words of our
ZDV 5D\nV enemies, but the

motivation? silence of our

Ray had racist friends
1 beliefs

While he was born in Illinois, Ray
and his family eventually relocated to
Bowling Green, Missouri – a city with a
considerable Ku Klux Klan presence. Drawn
in by the radical yet influential views of the
KKK, Ray reportedly embraced its racist On 19 July 1968, James Earl Ray is taken
views at a young age – it’s these views, to his cell by Sheriff William Morris upon
his arrival in Memphis Tennessee
tempered by a life of poverty and crime,
that may have driven Ray to kill one of the
most prominent African Americans in the
country’s history.
On 8 April 1968, workers listen
He was, and to the funeral of Martin Luther
2 always had been, King Jr on a portable radio
a poor man

Some believe that one of Ray’s motives for
the killing may have been purely financial.
He’d been born into poverty and had
struggled on the breadline for most of his
life. Unable to find success in education,
Ray’s youth and subsequently adulthood
spiralled into a mixture of petty crime and
prison spells. There’s a possibility that the
mysterious ‘Raoul’ character – who Ray was
adamant had hired him to carry out the
assassination – could have paid him to take
the shot.
He wanted the
3 infamy
For most of his life, Ray had lived
in inherent obscurity. Born into a life
of abject poverty with little aptitude for
education, Ray found a sense of twisted
purpose and confidence as a criminal.
There’s a possibility that Ray, knowing the
global media attention the death of King
would garner, wanted the macabre celebrity
status being an assassin would bring.

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