An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King

By William F. Pepper

Was the assassination of the Civil Rights leader the act of a lone gunman or a conspiracy? “Forget everything you think you know” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
 
Martin Luther King Jr. was a powerful and eloquent champion of the poor and oppressed in the United States. At the height of his fame in the mid-sixties, he seemed to offer the real possibility of a new and radical beginning for liberal politics in America. However, in 1968, he was assassinated, halting the movement for social, racial, and economic change.
 
The murder conviction of James Earl Ray never looked safe—especially to William F. Pepper, whose investigation into the case became a twenty-five year campaign for justice. In a 1999 civil trial supported by the King family, seventy witnesses testified to the conspiracy Pepper had unearthed. The jury concluded that Ray was not responsible for the assassination, and that government agents were involved in a wide-ranging conspiracy.
 
An Act of State lays out the extraordinary facts of the King story—of the huge groundswell of radical optimism he inspired, of how plans for his execution were laid at the very heart of the US government and the military, of the disinformation and media cover-ups that followed every attempt to expose the truth. As shocking as it is tragic, An Act of State is the most authoritative account of how King’s challenge to the US establishment led inexorably to his murder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781510709201

Reviews for An Act of State

[jensenmk82 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Interesting evidence and an intriguing theory, but very poorly organized, on certain details weakly supported and lacking in sources that can be produced, and presented in a writing style that can only be described as wretched. Pepper’s garbled prose sometimes makes it hard to know what he is claiming. For a lawyer, there is a surprising sloppiness and inattention to detail (his editor and publisher share the blame) and his attempts to write narrative prose are inept. He inflates the potential of the Poor People’s Campaign that King was organizing in 1968 and ignores the many significant challenges to King’s leadership that he was facing at the end of his life in what seems to be an attempt to make his theory more plausible. His very alarmist 2008 afterword is also sloppy; e.g. it calls the 2002 Maher Arar case, which surfaced in late 2003 “the most famous recent case” of rendition and ignores the substantial pushback that has occurred. However, Pepper has pursued this case with great courage and deserves the gratitude of citizens.