The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds.
Sergeant and Edginton spoke to several people who had been involved in the case, including U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark and Ray himself. Their story was filled with details like this:
The authorities certainly couldn’t be accused of a lack of vigilance regarding King’s visit to Memphis. But only recently has the true nature of that vigilance begun to come out.
Retired Memphis police officer Sam Evans said in an interview last summer that a member of King’s personal entourage and an employee of the Lorraine were both in the pay of the police. Also, it was confirmed during the [House Select Committee on Assassinations] investigation that Marrell McCullough, one of the first to reach King’s fallen body—the man holding the towel around King’s head in the famous photograph taken from a neighboring balcony seconds after the shot was fired—was, though ostensibly a member of the radical black group the Invaders, an undercover agent of the Memphis police department (MPD).
In a fire station located across the street from the Lorraine Motel, two black police officers had set up a surveillance post and were monitoring King’s every move. But by the time of the shooting, one of the two—along with the two black fire fighters assigned to the station—had been transferred elsewhere.
The MPD’s intelligence unit had planted bugs and agents at all the striking sanitation workers’ strategy meetings as well as at Invaders meetings. A senior police officer told a journalist in the 70s that military intelligence and the U.S. Secret Service also had agents throughout Memphis.
