50 Years Later

Fifty years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. noted political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson, in his new book, 50 Years Later: Why the Murder of Dr. King Still Hurts (Middle Passage Press), March 2018, takes an in-depth look at the lingering doubts and disbelief about the official version of the murder of Dr. King and how that shaped events of the next fifty years.Hutchinson presents14 pages of FBI memos, files, notes, minutes of meetings, and letters from the final report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations in 1976 that have rarely been fully presented and cited in their entirety. It’s entitled, “The FBI Plans Its Campaign to Discredit Dr. King.” This includes the FBI’s 21 proposals to obliterate King as an African-American leader. The materials are the FBI’s own words detailing the full scope of its plan to destroy King. Many of the details in the campaign have never been presented in complete detail for the general public—the break ins, forgeries, SCLC plants, inspection of IRS tax filings, bank account seizures, poison pen letters, instigating police raids on King’s hotel and motel rooms, calls to universities, congresspersons to discredit him, and even the Nobel Prize Committee to reject King. Hutchinson details how the FBI stopped at nothing in its relentless, ruthless, no-holds barred campaign to destroy King even considering trying to turn his wife, Coretta Scott King, into an informer against him.Hutchinson notes, “There was a clear method to the FBI’s diabolical obsession with King. It understood the monumental affect the King led movement had on civil rights, politics, heightened awareness of poverty, his crucial relationship with Democratic Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and the influence he had on other change movements globally and in America, that of Hispanics, Women, and Gays. Hutchinson poses and tackles the poignant question King raised, “Where Do We Go from Here.”50 Years Later: Why the Murder of Dr. King Still Hurts draws from King’s writings, letters, declassified government files, and documents and essays that focus on King’s murder and the half century of change after King’s murder. This includes an assessment of " King Versus Trump" and “What if King Had Lived?”