Unique look MLK's assassination

Unique look MLK's assassination

Unique look at MLK's assassination, The Smithsonian Network plans to show news footage in February surrounding Martin Luther King’s assassination in Memphis, Tenn. Professors saved the footage from the time of King's visit. The New York Times gave Gerald Posner’s MLK assassination book two Judith Millers WAY up, praising the serial-plagiarist for “a first-rate detective story”

Whether Ray was or wasn’t the shooter, the clearest example of Posner’s dishonesty in this book was the complete erasing from history of the existence of one Frank Holloman, the Memphis Police Chief & Fire Director at the time of King’s assassination. No matter what anyone on either side of the case says, you cannot purport to honestly tell the story of the MLK assassination in any shape or form without at least noting that Holloman was a major player in the great American-Shakespearean drama of the 20th century. Holloman retired from the FBI, after having spent 25 years in the Bureau, during that time acting as Special Agent in charge of the Atlanta, Cincinnati, Jackson, Mississippi and Memphis offices. But from 1949 to 1959 his primary responsibility was managing the Washington Bureau office for Chez Hoover and his buddy Clyde Tolson. His specific duties there are a huge can of worms still waiting to be opened, but he “officially retired” from the Bureau in 1964, after purportedly helping organize COINTELPRO’s ugly dirty tricks and smear campaign against MLK for #3 Hoover honcho William “Dead Deer” Sullivan to run, then moved back to the Bluff City to become Director of Development for Memphis State University, and then Executive Director of the Mid-South Medical Center.


Mayor Henry Loeb appointed Holloman to be the first person ever to head both the Police and Fire Departments at the same time–just in time to provide support for Loeb’s irrationally stubborn opposition to the sanitation workers’ strike, by laying down the hard-line law-of-the-land to the sanitation workers group attempting to negotiate with the Mayor against the inhuman conditions of their job, conditions so blatantly oppressive there couldn’t have been a more magnetic setup to lure Dr. King to meet his fate on April 4, 1968 at the Lorraine Motel. This hard-line stance ended negotiations with the City before they could ever actually start, and sent the workers out on strike. After the Marchers supporting the Workers “rioted” on Beale Street, Holloman was effusively praised as a new kind of police chief, for using Mace on the marchers, instead billyclubs and guns. As absurd as that praise seems now, it probably said more about the mood of the country in the spring of 1968 than it actually did about the virtually-invisible-from-history Holloman.


In Killing The Dream, Posner echoed Memphis Assistant District Attorney General John Campbell’s one-sided narrative that has James Earl Ray being solely responsible for assassinating Dr. King in Memphis. Posner did not bother to explain away the natural suspicion that a former FBI honcho like Chief Holloman might have had anything to do with all those orders given to all those supervisors under him who, in turn, gave all those orders to all those employees under them, to namely, remove Dr. King’s black police bodyguards (one hour before the assassination, Holloman himself called in black Detective Ed Redditt, a community relations officer assigned to intelligence duty at the rear of the firehouse across from the Lorraine, and against Redditt’s protests, ordered him to go home because there had been an alleged threat to his life – a threat that was later described as “a mistake”). Then there was the last minute transfer of the two black firemen at the firehouse behind the Lorraine to different firehouses.

And the most suspicious order of all, to the Parks Department, to cut down the thick high brush in the back yard of the rooming house at 7 a.m. the morning directly after the assassination, before the terrain could be examined for evidence; an order which was given despite the fact that most all of Dr. King’s supporters claimed the shot that killed him came from the jungle growth in the back yard (and not from the bathroom window of the rooming house, as the “lone gunman” version has consistently insisted against all logistical reason).
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