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The Execution of Martin Luther King by William F Pepper FBI FOUND GUILTY OF MURDER OF MARTIN LUTHER KING
Book Review by Kwesi Bacchra by Marika Sherwood, Donald Hinds and Colin Prescod The story of the most dynamic Black woman in Europe in the 20th century. She was the editor of West Indian Gazette and the true 'Mother' of Caribbean Carnivals in Britain. |
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Book Review
by Kwesi
Bacchra The Execution of Martin Luther King by William F Pepper FBI FOUND GUILTY OF MURDER OF MARTIN LUTHER KING
The guilty verdicts should have
reverberated around the world, but they received hardly a mention in the “free”
press of the United States, neither much on TV, nor on the radio. Where it
was reported they concentrated on the restaurant owner, Loyd Jowers, who
passed on to the actual assassin $100,000 which had originated from the head
of organised crime in Memphis. An Army sniper squad had been in place to
shoot Dr King if the Mafia failed. The posse of Black officers usually
provided by the Memphis police to guard Dr King had been replaced with white
officers, and Black fire-fighters officers on duty in the area had been sent
away for the day. Dr King’s room had been moved from the ground to an
upper floor with a balcony, on to which he would be enticed to make a
perfect target for the assassin’s bullet. An identical car to that driven
by James Earl Ray was purchased by the conspirators to drive the real
assassin away from the murder site while pretending to be Ray, and the
bushes behind which the shooting took place were cut down the following
morning to remove any evidence of the crime. Clearly the media moguls had
joined in the conspiracy continued by US governments of all colours which,
together with the leaders of global commerce and international crime
syndicates, aimed to keep the wraps on such a shocking verdict. In a world
where much of the media continues to be controlled by a few powerful men
like Robert Murdoch, information is even more manipulated now so that the
people are told only what global capitalism wants them to know. Meanwhile
the interests of the young in particular are diverted into non-dangerous
activities of celebrity worship, and their desire to participate in
influencing events is satisfied by encouraging them to vote for pop stars
and Big Brother housemates.
The world and history are indebted to Dr
Pepper for his thoroughly detailed account of the evidence and its
background, which unequivocally demonstrates that Dr King was not
assassinated by a single crazed gunman called James Earl Ray, but by the
organs of national government in Washington and those of state government
in Memphis by means of a Mafia gun. If any one man should bear the weight
of guilt for that historic crime, it must be the serial killer J. Edgar
Hoover, director of the FBI. Assassination of John F.
Kennedy linked. Johnson’s mistress and the mother of his
only son was a former stripper who had worked for Jack Ruby, the gangster
club-owner who shot Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of President
Kennedy. She told Pepper of Johnson’s confession to her the night before
of his prior knowledge that Kennedy was to be assassinated the next day. She
had attended a social gathering at the home of Cliff Murchison to honour J.
Edgar Hoover. Included among the guests were a Texas oil giant, two chairmen
of major banks, Richard Nixon, the crooked lawyer who later became US
President, and the head of a transglobal construction company to be chosen
35 years later by the usurper US President, George W. Bush, to be part of
the team of Yankee corporations to reconstruct the cities of Iraq following
their destruction by US bombs and missiles. Also present was Dallas Mayor
Earle Cabell, brother of General Charles Cabell, former deputy director of
the CIA who was fired by President Kennedy following the disastrous failure
of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Johnson’s mistress, Madeleine Brown,
told William Pepper that near the end of the party, Lyndon Johnson turned up
and joined the group in Murchison’s study behind closed doors. When the
meeting had finished, an anxious and red-faced Johnson emerged and embraced
his mistress. In a quiet, rasping whisper he told her, “After tomorrow
those goddam Kennedys will never embarrass me again – that’s no threat,
that’s a promise”. The next day the horrifying picture of the President’s
brain splattered over the dress of his wife Jacqueline graphically
illustrated what Johnson had forecast the night before. Dr William F. Pepper is an English
barrister and an American lawyer practising international human rights law
from London. He had himself participated in the civil rights struggle in
the 1960s and had been an adviser to Dr Martin Luther King Jr. For a
quarter of a century he conducted an independent investigation into the
assassination of his friend and encouraged the King family to speak with
witnesses as slowly he built up the case against the organs of US
government. At first, convinced that James Earle Ray had been framed for
the murder of Dr King, Pepper had tried to appeal his conviction for the
murder, but the innocent man died before his case could be argued before US
judges. So Pepper changed tack and, naming the individuals involved, he
represented the King family in the civil trial of the various conspirators
led by the FBI. All of them were found guilty of the murder and ordered to
pay the full $100 compensation, all that was demanded by the King family. Pepper had proved Dr King’s own words, “The greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my own government”. In “An Act of State” he has put forward the evidence in such convincing detail that the reader is left in no more doubt than was the trial jury that the FBI, CIA, the US Army, the Mafia and the Memphis Police Department were the leading assassins in one of the most atrocious crimes ever committed. Further he indicts the media of the United States for their attempts to hide the facts from the world. Conspiracy in England to smother MLK Foundation By routing the grief and anger over Dr
King’s death in a positive direction, they were rapidly able to establish
an organisation that brought together hundreds of followers of Martin Luther
King of all colours and political persuasions. By means of seminars around
the country, members of the Foundation were able to keep alive Dr King’s
teachings that political change can be most radically and permanently
achieved by non-violent action. A visit by Coretta Scott King and her
family was arranged to London, and she gave a moving address at a memorial
service at St. Paul’s Cathedral attended by the great and the good and to
which Roussel-Milner was invited, where he was directed to sit immediately
behind the King family. Administration of the Foundation had been placed in
the hands of Pat Woodhouse, the wife of the Dean of St Paul’s, and
meetings were held at their official residence in Pater Noster Square. Many
English people had been shocked by the brutal assassination of Dr King into
the realisation that everyone had a responsibility towards the poor and
oppressed, while many of them had their first real contact with Black
people. Pat Woodhouse herself confessed to Roussel-Milner that for the first
time she had looked at a Black man and realised that he was handsome; after
a lifetime of indoctrination she had woken up to the fact that all that is
black is not bad and ugly. However the Foundation was short-lived.
Without any prior agreement with all those who had worked so hard on
creating a multi-racial organisation, which they hoped might make an impact
on the racism so evident in Britain during the 1960s, the Foundation was
handed over to Christian Action, to come under the control of Canon Collins,
a well known supporter of left wing politics in Britain. Before anyone had
woken up to what was happening, and with the help of one or two ‘ambitious’
Black people such as the Black woman who was later to be rewarded as a Dame
of the British Empire, the Martin Luther King Foundation had been subsumed
totally within Christian Action and smothered out of existence.
Roussel-Milner confesses that he was too naïve at the time to realise that,
when Black people establish anything which might be effective in achieving
its aims or represent a challenge to existing authority, it is always
necessary for them to fight to hold on to control within Black hands. Sadly
with the takeover and eventual strangulation of the Foundation, the immense
amount of goodwill gathered together from people of all races was lost and
has never been resurrected. This appalling smothering of Black
enterprise by Christian Action should have come as no surprise to older
activists. The Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD) had been
established in 1964 by Dr David Pitt and other Black leaders after they met
with Martin Luther King when he stopped off in London on his way to Oslo to
collect the Nobel Peace Prize. White liberals were welcomed particularly
because they were more able to raise funds and achieve the right kind of
publicity. Behind the scenes, however, a struggle was taking place for
control of CARD that exposed the endemic racism of those White liberals
after Black members gained a substantial majority on the executive. With
vicious comments to the press these lily-white traitors walked out of CARD.
“As far as white liberals were concerned the simple act of democratically
voting Blacks into the leadership of CARD was an act of extremism” (The State of Black
Britain by Dr Aaron Haynes, Hansib Publishing, London 1996) KB15.07.03 “An Act of State” by William F. Pepper published
by Verso 2003,
A life in exile by Marika Sherwood with Donald Hinds, Colin Prescod and the 1996 Claudia Jones Symposium published by Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1999 UK£13.99 US$22.50 ISBN 0 85315 882 7 Review by Kwesi Bacchra © NTP Trust MMI Friends, followers and aficionados of Claudia Jones, the mother of Carnival in Britain, have been waiting eagerly for this book since a 1996 London symposium on her life inspired the author, Marika Sherwood, to undertake an intensive period of research into the public records of Trinidad, Britain, USA and the former Soviet Union and into the archives of their various communist parties. The result is a fascinating story of the immense courage of one of the greatest Black women in the 20th century and her battles against racism, bureaucracy and sinister attempts by politicians and security forces of the East and West to silence her. And all the while she was having to cope with severe heart disease and the aftermath of TB contracted in the desperate poverty of a 1930s Harlem ghetto apartment. Claudia Jones was born in Belmont, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, in 1915 but, following the loss of the family fortunes due to the post-war cocoa price crash, she was sent at the age of eight with her three sisters to join her parents in New York. Claudia's mother died five years later and in the depression years her father was fortunate to obtain work as the janitor of a run down apartment block in Harlem. So wretched was their poverty that they could not afford the 'graduation outfit' to enable Claudia to receive the Roosevelt Award for Good Citizenship she had earned, and so damp was their apartment that her formal education was virtually ended in 1932 by the tuberculosis which irreparably damaged her lungs. The book too often assumes that the reader will have an intimate knowledge of important historical events and fails to set the political scene, forcing the interested reader to take time to search out the background elsewhere. For instance we are told that, persuaded by the spirited defence by the Communist Party of nine Negro boys falsely convicted of rape in 1935 in Scottsboro, Alabama, Claudia joined the Young Communist League where her talents as a writer and organiser were soon recognised. A more detailed description than that given in a short note of the celebrated kangaroo court trial of these unfortunate young men in the lynch-mob Deep South would have placed Claudia's experiences as a young Black woman into context and revealed the oppressive conditions under which Black people could do little more than survive. Advocate for Peace "plotted violence" By 1948 Claudia had been elected to the National Committee of the Communist Party of USA, was the Editor for Negro Affairs on the party's paper the Daily Worker and had been arrested for the first time under threat of deportation to Trinidad. A much sought after speaker and advocate for peace and civil rights, Claudia travelled widely in the United States but was arrested several times eventually being imprisoned for a year on trumped up charges of advocating the violent overthrow of the US government. While in prison her health deteriorated and in 1955 she was deported to England, much to the relief of the British colonial governor of Trinidad who had feared that she might "prove troublesome" had she been sent there. Once again the McCarran Act, under which Claudia was prosecuted in USA, and the relevance of Ellis Island, where she was imprisoned, should have been explained in the context of the vicious political persecution of large numbers of people contrary to their constitutional rights to freedom of thought and free speech. Looking forward to the support of the British Communist Party, Claudia arrived in London in December 1955, having been given an affectionate send off by 350 friends and comrades led by her closest friends, the great, Black singer/actor Paul Robeson and his wife Essie. Robeson was of course still being refused the right to travel by an American government which had the bare-faced cheek to criticise the USSR for behaving similarly towards its own dissident citizens. Claudia herself was to find that the British government was no less oppressive and antidemocratic as it refused her a full passport until 1962 in spite of representations from Trinidad's first black prime minister, Dr Eric Williams, its white colonial governor having argued for restrictions on her freedom to travel to be maintained. The author's difficulty in establishing the full facts is ominously clear as some forty years later the British authorities still refuse to release files on Claudia Jones for research purposes. What do they fear from this long dead Black woman? Racism of British Communists The reader is treated to an all too short but fascinating discussion of the warm correspondence her friends 'back home' in New York kept up with Claudia. It reveals just a glimpse of the dire financial condition she found herself in England and a flash of her grief for a lover she left behind. The deeply racist attitudes of the British Communist Party are also exposed in a well researched chapter on its relations with what they regarded as the "backward" peoples of the world. The CPGB view of this intelligent but sometimes feisty woman was clearly that, as a 'coloured' colonial subject of the British Empire, too much should not be expected of her. That racism is still evident today amongst old style British communists, most of whom now cower behind any other name. British communists, however, felt under an obligation to their American comrades to help Claudia obtain work but placed her mainly in positions which this highly competent woman found frustrating, while restricting her access to their publications and as a speaker on their platforms, even for visits of her close friend, Paul Robeson. In the USA Claudia had been used to a party which respected her, and the CPUSA had since its foundation in 1919 been the leading political group fighting for racial equality. In the absence of genuine fraternal warmth from her English party comrades, Claudia turned to the Caribbean community in London which welcomed her with affection and she soon became their undoubted leader. Race Riots in Britain In the late 1950s the social strains exerted on an English working class being forced to come to terms with the sham of their indoctrinated racial superiority culminated in attacks on Black people and rioting. In Notting Hill, west London, this resulted in the murder in May 1958 of a young Antiguan carpenter, Kelso Cochrane, by six white youths who have never been caught. This was a turning point in Black/White relations, and a committee under the chairmanship of Amy Ashwood Garvey, which included Claudia Jones, met at Trinidadian Dr (later Lord) David Pitt's surgery to organise approaches to the government. However, the Tory government seemed more interested in pushing through racist immigration control laws and refusing to ratify the ILO Convention on Racial Discrimination. From that point until her untimely death six years later, Claudia became the foremost Black leader in Britain, sought after by progressive political leaders and acknowledged internationally as a fighter for peace. A Campaigning Black Newspaper The story of the West Indian Gazette, founded in 1958 and edited by Claudia Jones, is told by Donald Hinds, a Jamaican, who joined the paper as its first young roving reporter. Like all the other staff he was unpaid and survived by working as a bus conductor while studying part time for a Bachelor's then a Master's degree, becoming in due course a history teacher. He discusses the various activities of the paper which, in spite of its unceasing financial problems, was Claudia's vanguard in her fight for a fair deal for Black people. Hinds traces the difficult relationship Claudia loyally maintained with her gentleman friend, the late Abhimanyu Manchanda, who seems to have been deeply disliked by almost everybody. This self-promoting communist from India argued with Claudia frequently about the way the paper was run and even threatened to sue her when he could not get his own way. Manchanda was not above spreading lies about colleagues especially if they had opposed him politically. One such was a well known left-wing writer who, according to a 1962 letter from Manchanda to Claudia while she was receiving medical attention in Moscow, had refused to sell the West Indian Gazette in the hairdressing salons of his Trinidadian mother because of its support for Nkrumah, Jagan and Castro. Havibg expressed his concern to the publishers that Hinds failed to check the veracity of the contents of Manchanda's letter, they have promised him to include a note in any future revisions of the book refuting the allegations . "A People's Art is the Genesis of their Freedom" In telling the story of how Claudia brought Carnival to Britain, Colin Prescod, son of Trinidadian actress Pearl Prescod, rehearses how in response to the 1958 riots Claudia began to organise Carnivals under the auspices of the West Indian Gazette, the prime purposes of which were "to present West Indian talent to the public, which at that time could not see Caribbean people as anything other than hewers of wood and drawers of water". The programme for the first show in February 1959 clearly declared Claudia's intentions, "A part of the proceeds of this brochure are to assist the payment of fines of coloured and white youths involved in the Notting Hill events". For six years, these indoor Mardi Gras celebrations, which were to evolve into Notting Hill Carnival a few months after Claudia's death, were organised in halls in west London under the slogan, "A people's art is the genesis of their freedom". These early indoor Carnival events drew a level of genuine support from famous artists, leading politicians and Commonwealth High Commissioners which was never to be seen in the outdoor Notting Hill Carnival. Rather, as the British authorities became concerned that they might not be able to control the ever growing numbers of 'freeness' loving Black people, they used every method they could to ban it or cut it down to the catatonic insipidity of an English garden fete. After decades of scheming opposition, in 1989 the English authorities succeeded in wrenching out of the hands of Black administrators control of the carnival they could not stop but, in doing so, they destroyed its spirit of Kaiso. Only Black people chosen by government are now allowed to run the heavily restricted Carnival of today. The book is completed with four chapters of selected transcripts of how participators in the 1996 Symposium remembered Claudia as friend, political activist, newspaper woman and carnivalist. It is copiously annotated, which will be a useful guide for future researchers, but it is a great pity that the publishers cut out so much of the manuscript, about one eighth, without consulting the author; and why did they refuse to publish any of the Carnival pictures? This reviewer challenged them to explain, but the anger they expressed at his questions would suggest that the charge that their actions were racist might well have been valid. However the author, an Hungarian brought up in Australia, must be commended on having produced an important historical work which will prove a valuable academic resource in future. Hopefully it will inspire students and writers to investigate the life of a great daughter of Trinidad further, and maybe one of them may be moved to write a biography with more appeal to the mass of the public. © NTP Trust April MMI
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