Question

Do you think James Earl Ray was innocent in the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? Was he set up by the government?

Answer 1

Ans) James Earl Ray is infamous for assassinating civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

- Innocent or Guilty:

In the years following Ray's arrest, questions arose about his exact involvement in King's murder. Ray himself countered that he was not the only one involved in the crime. He insisted that a man he'd met in Canada, who went by the name of Raoul, had orchestrated the murder and ultimately shot King.

Later, in the early 1990s, he suggested a conspiracy involving the government had been behind the assassination. Even a 1978 special congressional committee said there was the "likelihood" that Ray did not act alone.

Toward the end of his life, Ray, whose sentence had been extended to 100 years after he escaped from prison in 1977, had the support of an unexpected ally: the King family. Not long before Ray's death, Dexter King, Dr. King's son, visited the man presumed to be his father's killer. Ray, who was feeble and sick from hepatitis C, was asked by King about his involvement in the assassination. "I had nothing to do with killing your father," Ray said. "I believe you," Dexter King responded, and shook his hand.

Early Years
Born on March 10, 1928, in Alton, Illinois, James Earl Ray was the eldest of George and Lucille Ray's nine children. The Rays struggled to make ends meet, and as a consequence the family moved several times during the early part of Ray's childhood.

A part of his life was shaped by tragedy. In 1935 the family suddenly left Alton and relocated to Ewing, Missouri, after police had started looking for Ray's father on a forgery charge. Two years later, his young sister Marjorie, died in a fire after playing with matches and accidentally catching herself on fire.

At the age of 16, Ray left his parents and returned to Alton, where he moved in with his grandmother and landed work in the dye room of the International Shoe Tannery.

After getting laid off in 1945, Ray enlisted in the Army, eventually getting stationed in West Germany. But he found it difficult to adapt to the military's strict codes of conduct. He was charged with drunkenness and breaking arrest, before getting discharged for ineptness and lack of adaptability in 1948.

Ray's life outside the Army proved even less stable. After returning to Alton and moving back in with his grandmother, he blazed through a number of odd jobs. In 1949 he left for Los Angeles, where in October of that year police arrested him for robbing a cafe. He was sentenced to 90 days in prison, but the lockup did little to reform him.

Over the next several years, Ray embarked on a number of small crimes, serving various jail times. The most serious of those came in 1959, when Ray, on parole for an earlier theft, robbed two St. Louis grocery stores, as well as another in Alton. In March 1960 Ray started a 20-year sentence for the crimes.

Housed at the Missouri State Penitentiary, Ray managed to escape the facility in 1967. He at first fled to Canada but, unable to get on a ship and flee overseas, he returned to the U.S. and made his way to first Alabama, then Mexico, and later Los Angeles.