James Earl Ray
James Earl Ray was an American criminal known primarily for the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968. Born into a poor family in 1928, Ray experienced a troubled upbringing, marked by a lack of supervision and early delinquency. After serving in the military during World War II, he became involved in a series of criminal activities, leading to multiple arrests for offenses such as burglary and armed robbery. His life took a pivotal turn when he escaped from prison in 1967, shortly before King's assassination.
Ray was identified as the primary suspect shortly after the shooting and managed to evade authorities for two months before being captured in London. He eventually pleaded guilty to King's murder in 1969, although he later claimed he was part of a conspiracy involving another individual named Raoul. Ray spent the rest of his life asserting his innocence, even after being sentenced to 99 years in prison. The impact of King's assassination sparked widespread riots across the United States and left a lasting legacy on the fight against racism and the civil rights movement, with many Americans believing in a broader conspiracy behind the event.
James Earl Ray
- Born: March 10, 1928
- Birthplace: Alton, Illinois
- Died: April 23, 1998
- Place of death: Nashville, Tennessee
American assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Major offense: First-degree murder
Active: April 4, 1968
Locale: Memphis, Tennessee
Sentence: Ninety-nine years’ imprisonment
Early Life
James Earl Ray, the son of George Ellis and Lucille Ray, was the oldest of seven siblings. The Ray family was poor and moved often because of Ellis’s frequent legal problems. James had very little supervision, and by the age of fourteen he was spending most of his time in the local brothel. Like most men during World War II, Ray served in the military. He left the army with a general discharge in December, 1949. Ray soon served his first jail term in California for a burglary charge. Following this period, Ray would be in and out of prison, living the life of a failed petty criminal.
Criminal Career
Ray was charged with and convicted of a bevy of crimes in his lifetime, including armed robbery, burglary, forgery, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, and escaping from prison. Nevertheless, Ray would be merely a statistic in the National Bureau of Prisons’ archives were it not for the events of April 4, 1968. On that night, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was gunned down while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. King was shot one time and died later in a Memphis hospital. Almost one year earlier, on April 23, 1967, Ray had escaped from the Missouri State Prison.
Legal Action and Outcome
On April 19, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced that Ray was the primary suspect in the assassination of King. Ray, a man of little means and less education, managed to elude the authorities for two months while traveling from Atlanta to Canada, Portugal, and London under the names Ramon Sneyd and Eric S. Galt. Finally, on June 8, 1968, immigration authorities in London took Ray into custody as he attempted to board a plane for Brussels, Belgium. When Ray protested the extradition to the United States, the British authorities were presented with the evidence. Ray was extradited to the United States and returned to Memphis, Tennessee.
A few days after his return, Ray’s legal advisers released the following statement:
From August, 1967, when he met Raoul in Montreal, down to King’s death, he moved at Raoul’s direction. . . . He delivered the rifle to Raoul, and then from about 4:30 to nearly 6 he sat downstairs in Jim’s Grill drinking beer, waiting for Raoul. He says it was Raoul who fired the shot, and ran down the stairs, and threw down the rifle, zipper bag, and jumped in the Mustang where Ray was waiting, and the two drove off together.
Raoul, according to Ray, was the mastermind behind the assassination. After investigating Ray’s story, his legal counsel advised him to plead guilty to the charges in order to avoid the death penalty. Ray fired his initial counsel; however, his new counsel advised him to do the same. In an issued statement, Ray said that he “fired a shot from the second floor bathroom of the rooming house and fatally wounded Dr. Martin Luther King who was standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.”
On May 10, 1969, Ray pleaded guilty to the assassination of King. However, Ray added to the judge that he “was not saying there had been no conspiracy, because there had been.” Ray was sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison for the first-degree murder of King.
Ray later recanted his admission of guilt and claimed that it was his brother and Raoul who carried out the assassination. He spent the remainder of his years attempting to prove his innocence. On June 10, 1977, Ray escaped from Brushy Mountain State Prison but was soon recaptured.
On August 16, 1978, Ray testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The committee concluded that the evidence pointed to Ray as the killer but that it was also likely that a white-supremacist group in St. Louis was involved. The group reportedly had a fifty-thousand-dollar bounty for the killing of King and may have had the connections and finances necessary for Ray’s escape.
Impact
The impact of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., on American society was immeasurable. The nation’s cities, simmering with racial tension at the time, exploded in violence. Immediately following King’s assassination, there were riots in more than one hundred American cities. Perhaps more than at any time since the American Civil War one hundred years earlier, the nation seem on the brink of being torn apart.
While the riots would eventually die down, the controversy of the assassination did not. Decades later, a solid majority of Americans believed that King was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy (poll numbers range between 60 percent and 80 percent). Like the conspiracy theories surrounding the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, such conspiracies are likely never to be proven or disproven.
In death as in life, Dr. King has become an icon of the ongoing struggle against racism in the United States. His principle of nonviolent resistance and a steadfast stand against racial prejudice continues in his name, and a holiday dedicated to his memory is observed annually in January within the United States.
Bibliography
Posner, Gerald. Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Random House, 1998. Posner brings forth new evidence to assess the case against Ray.
Ray, James Earl. Who Killed Martin Luther King, Jr.? The True Story by the Alleged Assassin. New York: Marlowe, 1992. Ray’s own version of the crime.
U.S. Congress. House. Select Committee on Assassinations. Compilation of the Statements of James Earl Ray. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2001. Details the information uncovered during the 1978 investigations of Ray.