More than 30 years after his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. continues to make history. In December, a jury in a civil suit brought by King's family decided that a Memphis man, Loyd Jowers, was part of a conspiracy to kill the civil rights leader. One of those who testified was history professor Clayborne Carson, who told the jury about surveillance of King by military intelligence. Carson heads the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project, which will publish its fourth volume on King in March.
Stanford: What did King's family hope to achieve with this case?
Carson: The point was to get a jury to decide if there was a conspiracy. The King family was also trying to press state and federal authorities to launch their own cases. But Tennessee officials have stayed as far away from this as they can.
Even without further investigation, is there any other benefit?
My interest in the trial was that it provided an opportunity for more people to testify under oath. That's very positive. The project will be getting all the trial testimony, so that will be available for research. Still, I recognize that a definitive narrative can never be written about many important events. Historians don't write about what happened in the past; they create a story based on the documents that survive. There will be questions forever because we are always working on the basis of incomplete, insufficient documents.
King's family, especially his son Dexter, has faced criticism for not accepting that James Earl Ray alone killed King. What's your view on their actions?
I spend a lot of time answering questions about the family's motives. I don't happen to agree with everything Dexter King thinks about the assassination, but I know for a fact that he deeply believes that there was a conspiracy to kill his father, and I respect and applaud his desire to put forward that idea as vigorously as he can. It seems that he could do nothing other than that and be true to himself.
