Klandestine
How a Klan Lawyer and a Checkbook Journalist Helped James Earl Ray Cover Up His Crime
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- USD 21.99
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- USD 21.99
Descripción editorial
James Earl Ray, an escaped convict from Missouri, was punished for the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. despite the fact that he did not fit the caricature of a hangdog racist thirsty for blood. The media has often portrayed him as hapless and apolitical, someone who must have been paid by clandestine forces, and it's a narrative that Ray himself put in motion upon his June 1968 arrest in London, then continued from jail until his death in 1998. Klandestine documents the evolution of Ray's alibi from 1968 to 1999—the year Dr. King's own family declared him an innocent man—yet argues that he was indeed motivated by racial hatred and did in fact pull the trigger. It closes the book on the conspiracy that Ray and his defense team created, which asserted that Raoul, a mysterious seaman with deep connections to the criminal grapevine, framed Ray as part of a complicated New Orleans–based conspiracy. Ray brought Raoul to life by forging a lucrative publishing partnership with two very strange bedfellows: a slick Klan lawyer named Arthur J. Hanes, the de facto "Klonsel" for the United Klans of America, and checkbook journalist William Bradford Huie, the darling of Look magazine and a longtime menace of the KKK. Despite polar opposite views on race, Hanes and Huie found common cause in the lucrative world of conspiracy; together, they thought they could make Memphis the new Dallas. Told chronologically through Hanes and Huie's key perspectives, this unique vantage shows how a legacy of unpunished racial killings—combined with fevered interest in political assassinations—provided the perfect exigency to sell a reckless and lucrative conspiracy to a suspicious and outraged nation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist McMichael digs deep into the racial violence of mid-20th-century America with this brutal but sometimes confusing account of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. McMichael claims newly released documents and his own research definitively prove that 40-year-old escaped convict James Earl Ray singlehandedly murdered King on April 4, 1969, pulling the trigger of a Remington .243-caliber rifle from the window of a Memphis rooming house and killing King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Media reports said Ray was framed, but the author, a finalist for the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists, disagrees. McMichael argues that Ku Klux Klan lawyer Arthur Hanes and William Bradford Huie, a corrupt journalist who placed more value on money than truth, helped Ray perpetuate a conspiracy theory with links to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy five years earlier. Does McMichael prove beyond a doubt that Ray, who died in 1998, was the sole perpetrator? That's debatable. But historians will appreciate the timely connection to the 50th anniversary of Alabama's Selma to Montgomery marches, and McMichael's thorough research provides context for readers unfamiliar with how thoroughly race divided the country in the 1950s and 1960s.