Somehow, I guess because God loves me, I missed the nonsense of state Sen. Frank Nicely’s Senate Resolution 154, in which it looks like we’re trying to make the official state position that James Earl Ray may not have killed Martin Luther King Jr.
There’s a lot going on in this resolution, and I’m not going to retype the whole thing when you can click on the link. There are three things, broadly:
1. It states that once Ray walked back his guilty plea, he always maintained his innocence in the King assassination.
2. It states that Harry Avery, commissioner of correction for the state of Tennessee, was doing his own investigation of the King assassination and that the governor at the time tried to stop him.
3. It states that the TBI made a report about Avery’s investigation, which then ended up at the TSLA until the House Select Committee on Assassinations swooped in and took it. The TSLA wants it back.
Every part of that is interesting but strange. First of all, I’ve been trying to get files from this very era out of the TBI for a year and I’ve been fed two lines of malarkey. One is that before the '90s, there wasn’t really a TBI — there was only the TBCI (Tennessee Bureau of Criminal Investigation), and though it was the precursor to the TBI, it wasn’t the same thing, and the TBI does not have the files of the TBCI because they weren’t the same thing. If that’s true, then this resolution is incorrect.
The other is that all TBI files are sealed, even if a case is closed. So why was the report on Avery ever in the Ellington Papers to begin with? And even if it were returned, if it was generated by the TBI, wouldn’t it then become sealed at the state level? At least the federal seal is going to be broken. The state seal of TBI files rarely is.
Still, of course the state should have a copy of this report, since it came from us in the first place. But so should the TBI, and I’m sure, somewhere, they probably do. (So, hey guys, holler if you find your old files and suddenly start feeling generous about opening them. I have some questions your old files could answer.)
I’m reading Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock’s Killing King: Racial Terrorists, James Earl Ray, and the Plot to Assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. right now, oddly enough, and if you have any interest in the topic, you should read it too. Wexler and Hancock go methodically through every piece of evidence available to them and show how rich racists funneled money through the Klan to pay for King’s assassination and that the plan had been in the works for years.
Wexler and Hancock were able to show a money trail coming out of Atlanta and heading toward anyone willing to take a shot at King, but the first known offer to kill King for money came when J.B. Stoner offered to do it for $1,500 in 1958, three months after he directed the bombing of the Jewish Community Center here.
If Gov. Buford Ellington was nervous about what Avery might uncover, I highly doubt it was that Ray was some patsy for whoever, but that the prominent racist assholes funneling money toward paying for King’s assassination weren’t just from Atlanta.
After all, Donald Davidson and Jack Kershaw had an established history of helping Klansmen with money and making sure they had lawyers, both over in Clinton, Tenn., and here in Nashville. I’m sure Ellington didn’t want to know if Kershaw had bought Davidson a going-away present of sorts before he died at the end of April 1968. Let’s not forget that Kershaw, for some reason, represented Ray for a little bit.
But there’s one other person in this ugly story who had the ability to step into any Klan meeting in the South, look around and know who would be willing to do violence. A person known for working with his own brothers or other close family members, so they wouldn’t narc on each other if caught. A person who was a lawyer and regularly represented the very racial terrorists he trained and directed. And a person we know Avery talked to James Earl Ray’s brother about — J.B. Stoner.
You see, MLK Document 200472 might be missing, but the footnotes written by the people who read it aren’t. So that lets us make a good guess as to what Avery was uncovering. In the House Select Committee on Assassinations report footnotes, on page 658, there’s a note:
Harry Avery, Commissioner of Corrections for the State of Tennessee in March 1969, claimed that in his official position he got to know James Earl Ray and Jerry Ray. Avery claims that while driving Jerry Ray to a meeting, Jerry told him that he (Jerry) was to meet with Stoner and that Stoner had been “our” (implying Jerry’s and James’ at least) attorney for 2 years before the assassination. The committee was not able to substantiate this claim.
Avery had been the arson investigator on all three of our integration-era bombings. And he was no dummy. He likely would have known that Stoner was behind the JCC bombing, at the least. And he certainly knew how Stoner operated. If Avery believed that Stoner had known Jerry and James for two years prior to the assassination, then he would have believed Stoner was behind the assassination.
The TBI report on the Avery investigation isn’t going to show “proof” of “Raoul” — a man Ray claimed had been involved — or substantiate Ray’s claims of innocence. It’s going to show what Wexler and Hancock found: that J.B. Stoner never lost interest in killing King over the years and the conspiracies to kill King usually involved Stoner.
We deserve to have our primary sources back, whether or not they’re boring and only tell us stuff we already know. We don’t have to continue to entertain Ray’s bullshit story in order to make our argument.
