Interesting article on MuckRock

 A new article on muckock.  

They don't adequately explain where they get the documents and images they select from documents. 

They try to FOIA the NSA for records they may have on James Earl Ray.  Their response is bat-shit crazy. 

My original Memphis Miasma article as it appeared in John Kelin's "Fair Play."

Hello,  I recently rediscovered my article on the internet archive's "wayback machine" search engine.

Here it is.  This was written some years ago now. John Kelin's "Fair Play" website is no longer active. 

Fair Play was a web journal back in the very early days of the internet.  I did not know anything about websites and HTML. Back then it was more difficult and more expensive to be able to have a computer and run a website.  So, I did the traveling and research and my friend John put the info. on the web.  I'm glad to find this article again and to represent it so people can see it as it was originally presented.  

Rev. Billy Kyles dies

In early 1968, the Rev. Samuel Billy Kyles and another local minister beckoned the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis to demonstrate support for a strike by 1,300 black city sanitation workers. The strikers were demanding a minimum 10-cents-an-hour wage increase, workplace safeguards and dignity. Their placards proclaimed, “I Am a Man.”

Dr. King was reluctant at first; he was preoccupied with his Poor People’s Campaign. But he came to see that the Memphis strike converged with his national agenda for economic equality and social justice, so he accepted.

After Dr. King arrived, Mr. Kyles invited him to a home-cooked soul food dinner. Aware that Dr. King was perennially tardy, Mr. Kyles promised to pick him up promptly at 5 p.m. at the black-run Lorraine Motel, where Dr. King was staying, in Room 306. The date was April 4.

But when Dr. King later phoned the Kyles home to confirm the invitation, he learned that the dinner would actually be at 6. So when Mr. Kyles arrived around 5, Dr. King procrastinated.

He and a lieutenant, the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, remained in the room with Mr. Kyles and enjoyed almost an hour of what Mr. Kyles later described as “preacher talk.”

Before they left, Mr. Kyles picked out a necktie for Dr. King to wear to dinner.

When they finally emerged from the room, on a second-floor balcony, Dr. King was gunned down by a sniper from across the street.

Mr. Kyles died on Tuesday, at 81, in a Memphis hospital. He was the last surviving witness to that motel-room conversation (Mr. Abernathy died in 1990) and, from the balcony, to Dr. King’s assassination.

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“A lot of people claimed to have been on the balcony when Dr. King was shot down,” Mr. Kyles said.

Why had he been there? He often asked himself that question, he said.

“Over the years, God revealed to me why I was there,” he said. “Crucifixions have to have witnesses.”

Mr. Kyles vividly recalled that evening in the documentary film “The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306,” which was nominated for an Oscar in 2009, and in an interview for a publication put out by the Funders’ Network, a group of grant makers.

He remembered emerging from the room with Dr. King at about 5:45. Hoping to keep the 6 p.m. dinner appointment, Mr. Kyles was trying to hurry him to a white Cadillac, borrowed from a local funeral home, that was waiting for them in the courtyard below.

“You’re not dressed for dinner,” Dr. King yelled down to another aide, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson. From the courtyard Mr. Jackson introduced Dr. King to Ben Branch, a local bandleader. (Andrew Young and Hosea Williams were also part of the entourage.)

Dr. King was talking to Mr. Branch over the balcony railing when a single rifle shot — “kuh-PIE-yah!” was how Mr. Kyles described the sound — reverberated from across the street.

“I thought I was having a nightmare, but the nightmare was that I was awake,” Mr. Kyle said. “And then we looked, and there was blood. So much blood.”

Mr. Kyles dashed back into the room to summon an ambulance, but the motel’s telephone operator, alarmed by the shooting, had left her switchboard and run outside. The woman, who was the motel owner’s wife, had a heart attack in the courtyard and died a few days later.

Mr. Kyles covered Dr. King’s body with a bedspread, up to the knot of the necktie he had chosen. He instinctively removed a crushed Salem cigarette, mindful that Dr. King had been self-conscious about smoking and worried that young people might discover his vice.

Dr. King’s murder shocked the world, provoked riots in many of the nation’s cities and devastated Memphis emotionally. It also galvanized the sanitation workers and their supporters. On April 8, tens of thousands of demonstrators silently marched to honor Dr. King’s memory.

A week later, the city agreed to certify the union, safeguard sanitation workers and guarantee higher pay.

That May, caravans of protesters converged on Washington for Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign for economic justice.

“That’s where the witness comes in,” Mr. Kyles said. “Yes, you can kill the dreamer. Absolutely, you can kill the dreamer. But you cannot kill the dream.”

Mr. Kyles was born in Shelby, Miss., a Delta town, on Sept. 26, 1934, to the Rev. Joseph Henry Kyles and the former Ludie Cameron. He was named for the prophet Samuel, but after his mother saw him baptizing neighborhood pets and memorializing dead birds, she began calling him Billy, after the evangelist Billy Sunday.

The family moved to Chicago when he was 6, and he attended Northern Seminary. He started preaching when he was 17 and singing even before that. (Aretha Franklin once said that her version of the gospel song “Never Grow Old” was inspired by Mr. Kyles’s.)

When he decided to return to the South, his brothers scoffed.

“You’re in the promised land,” he recalled them saying.

“Here you are going back to Egypt, to Memphis.”

He settled in Memphis, a segregated city, in 1959 and became the founding pastor of Monumental Baptist Church. In perhaps a foreshadowing of Dr. King’s visit in 1968, he met with the civil rights leader Medgar Evers five years earlier at Evers’s Mississippi home shortly before Evers was murdered in his front yard.

Mr. Kyles became a central figure in Memphis’s struggle for civil rights. In 1961, his daughter Dwania was one of 13 black first graders to integrate Memphis public schools. “We did not want to make the mistake that Little Rock had made and send high schoolers,” he said, referring to the hostile reaction to a similar integration effort in Arkansas in 1957 that compelled President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send in federal troops .

He was later arrested for refusing to sit in the back of a segregated city bus. Faced with the threat of a bus boycott, the city desegregated its buses in 1964.

Mr. Kyles was instrumental in the largely peaceful integration of restaurants and other public places in Memphis and the elimination of a system of runoff elections, which impeded minority candidates. (Eliminating the runoff helped elect the city’s first black mayor, Willie W. Herenton, in 1991.) He also formed a chapter of Mr. Jackson’s civil rights organization Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) and was later a board member of the National Civil Rights Museum, established at the site of Dr. King’s assassination.

“He was a founding father of the New Memphis and the New South,” Mr. Jackson said at a tribute to Mr. Kyles this month at the church he led for 55 years until he retired in 2014.

In addition to his wife, the former Aurelia Kennedy, who confirmed his death, Mr. Kyles is survived by their daughter, Epernay; four children from a previous marriage, to the former Gwendolyn Hart — his daughters Dwania and Drusheena and sons Dwain and Devin — and five grandchildren.

Mr. Kyles recalled that Dr. King, during his final hours in Memphis, had left a deep impression.

The night before his assassination, at a local church, Dr. King delivered his ringing “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech, in which he expressed premonitions of his death.

“I’ve seen the Promised Land,” he said. “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”

Dr. King had predicted that he would not live past 40. When he died the next evening, he was 39.

“I look at Martin’s picture, and he’s the only one who didn’t get old,” Mr. Kyles said. “But what a price to pay for not getting old.”

So, the CIA has this LNERGO person who reported on Ray's aliases

This is document #104-10072-10034. Some material, like this document got released with the JFK material. So, my question for now is who or what is an LNERGO official? LNERGO may have been a CIA cryptonym for the FBI. If you click on this image you should be able to see it better. I found a few interesting documents relating to the Dr. King assassination and will post more this week.

Democracy Now segment on the unredacted FBI to MLK "Suicide" letter and the Prof who found it

CNN has more on the FBI's hatred of Dr. King

CNN has another article on the FBI's tactics and hatred of Dr. King

The have some links to several very disturbing FBI documents.

I recommend Tavis Smiley's "Death of a King"

Tavis Smiley examines the last year of Dr. King's life.