In 1976, Huie started becoming panicked with the breaking news about how the FBI had stalked Dr. King for a decade, harassing him and encouraging him to commit suicide. He had to be concerned that the pack of lies he wrote in He Slew The Dreamer would be exposed if an honest reinvestigation were done, now that the dead Hoover’s dirty deeds were being exposed. So he reissued that turgid book in June, 1977 under a new title — Did the FBI Kill Martin Luther King? — and added a new Prologue and Epilogue, even disingenuously advancing the absurd notion that Dr. King went to the balcony of the Lorraine Motel expecting, and hoping, that he would be shot dead.
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William Bradford Huie feared that the multiple lies in his 1970 book would come under intense review in 1977-78 again, by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). It was demonstrated by his decision to republish it at that point in time.
Huie must have become frantic with the thought that any serious investigation ran the risk of potentially exposing the wanton fabrication of baseless “facts” which were then used to frame James Earl Ray for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., one must consider the following factors which he was, nearly uniquely, privy to at that point in time:
- That he, alone, must act to protect the lies he had put into the official record: His principal partners, Johnson, Hoover and Tolson, were dead and only Assistant FBI Directors Cartha DeLoach and William C. Sullivan were left — the latter would soon be killed by a hunter who allegedly mistook him for a deer shortly before he was scheduled to testify at the HSCA hearings;
- Only he knew that the meme he had created at their behest — that Ray was a “hateful southern racist, stalker and murderer of MLK” — was built on lies and that Ray had none of those traits;
- He had to know that, as originally constituted, the HSCA was headed up and staffed by earnest congressmen and staffers highly motivated to thoroughly reinvestigate the murders of JFK and MLK (the fact that it would not remain so only came about months later, and it would prove to be all the protection he needed);
- That his lies, if subjected to the intense scrutiny of an honest investigation, would easily be discovered and the entire charade would quickly be exposed;
- That the FBI had used his stories — first, the 1968-69 magazine articles, then the 1970 book — as the basis of their “investigation” and final reports, since they could not risk allowing their own agents to honestly investigate a crime that they had managed and controlled over a four-year period.
Among the dozens of Huie’s lies, the HSCA merely uncovered the two that he had used to prop up his “racism” charge: the Canadian and Mexican women Huie falsely stated had confirmed Ray’s supposed racist statements were declared to be untrue. While the committee did decide that he was not the racist that Huie portrayed, everything else built around that very premise — that he hated, stalked and murdered MLK — was left intact, thus accomplishing nothing of substance, just as the new HSCA leadership dictated.
In both cases, the women firmly denied to the HSCA investigators that he had ever done anything to suggest that he was a racist. Not once did any of the people Huie had talked to (having gotten their names from Ray himself, as part of the trilateral contract he had with Huie and his original attorney Arthur Hanes) said that he was a racist with one exception: A few of the prison inmates, hoping to gain their freedom by doing so, stated otherwise. Yet at least one black man who knew Ray from prison stated that they were friends, and that he knew many others who were as well.
Yet the committee failed to deal with the 800 pound elephant they had discovered! Having first-hand witnesses tell the investigators that James Earl Ray was not a racist should have been blasted over every TV News show and front page headlines throughout the nation and the world. But it wasn’t. It was kept as quiet as a church mouse.
As it eventually happened due to the takeover of the HSCA by congressmen who were beholden to the CIA’s and FBI’s interests, the only lies that were exposed did not cause the rest of the framework to collapse. That was only because the ineffectual HSCA committee chose not to.
Most importantly, among the numerous others — as I’ve documented within Who Really Killed Martin Luther King Jr.? — Huie blatantly lied about Ray’s journey from Los Angeles to New Orleans, Birmingham, Atlanta and Memphis to falsely claim that had stalked Dr. King throughout those two weeks, even inventing an absolutely false assertion that he had stalked King in Selma, Alabama, when King had not been near there during that period.
The new Prologue is presented below in its entirety; further inspection and analysis of its content will follow.
The intensity of Huie’s determined efforts to prop up his fable is reflected within the new prologue, especially with his claims of having been a “friend” of Martin Luther King. Given all of his other lies, it is more than likely that the publisher — as is commonly the case in the publishing world — arranged for Dr. King to write the Introduction to the 1965 book Three Lives for Mississippi. Which is not so say they never met, but what kind of real “friend” would do everything that Huie did to betray Dr. King? That was done not only in his writing the myths but — even more contemptibly — the closing paragraphs of the Epilogue, which will be examined next.
An excerpt from the final paragraphs of the new 10-page Epilogue:
From pp. 215-216 of Did the FBI Kill Martin Luther King?:
” . . . perhaps we must reconsider what we thought was the meaning of the sorrowful speech Reverend King delivered during the evening before his death. Heretofore, we have interpreted that speech to mean he was foreseeing his death and that having already “gone to the mountain,” he was ready to die. But considering his obscenity and his profanity in Bimini [a story which he admitted came from the notorious Adam Clayton Powell Jr.] isn’t it possible he had lost his faith . . . that he, too [just as Powell had admitted regarding his own beliefs], had concluded that he didn’t believe anything . . . and that what he was expressing was a death wish?
“Isn’t it possible that as he stood there on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, asking a singer to sing “Precious Lord, Take My Hand and Lead Me Home,” he was welcoming what James Earl Ray was preparing [sic] to give him from the dirty bathroom in Bessie Brewer’s flophouse?”
Regardless of whether one believes Huie’s story of what Adam Clayton Powell Jr. allegedly said about Dr. King’s trip to Bimini — a man whose credibility suffered due to multiple personal and congressional scandals,* and considering the doubled nature of both of their credibility quotients — one must question whether a true friend would stoop to that level, especially the supposed “death wish” that it is intended to portray.
For what purpose, other than serving as another distraction to keep the focus away from his own multiple acts of subversion of justice, would he possibly jettison whatever “friendship” loyalties he might be expected to maintain, that he would make such appallingly cruel and disloyal assertions?
As we reflect on the execrable products of William Bradford Huie — his “lifetime achievements” that have been previously summarized here, here, here and here — it should become clear by now that nothing he said about anything should be considered credible, especially as it relates to his book(s) and magazine articles related to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Yet that is precisely what exists as the official government’s “investigation,” which can be illustrated by this single page (one of many) that the HSCA (and the FBI and DOJ before it) used as documentation of James Earl Ray’s guilt:
The multiple examples of William Bradford Huie’s questionable actions and highly damaged credibility should be sufficient to upend the FBI/DOJ/Congressional findings of the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination and force the re-opening of the investigation, and thus the long-overdue official destruction of those tainted findings.
*According to Wikipedia:
Hearings of the Select House Committee to investigate Rep. Adam Clayton Powell were held over three days in February 1967. Powell was in attendance only on the first day of these hearings, February 8. Neither he nor his legal counsel requested that the select committee summon any witnesses. According to the official Congressional report on these committee hearings, Powell and his counsel’s official position was that “the Committee had no authority to consider the misconduct charges.” The select committee found that Powell met residency requirements for Congressional representatives under the Constitution, but that Powell had asserted an unconstitutional immunity from earlier rulings against him in criminal cases tried in the New York State Supreme Court. The committee also found that Powell had committed numerous acts of financial misconduct. These included appropriation of Congressional funds for his own personal use, the use of funds meant for the House Education and Labor Committee to pay the salary of a housekeeper at his property on Bimini in The Bahamas, purchasing airline tickets for himself, family, and friends from the funds of the House Education and Labor Committee, as well as making false reports on expenditures of foreign currency while head of the House Education and Labor Committee.
LBJ: Master of Deceit 