The Crux

Is the Director of the Memphis PD, the former FBI man close to J. Edgar Hoover, in on the conspiracy? The behavior of the Memphis PD on April 4, 1968 is, at the very least, racist negligence. But many see the apparent unwillingness to pursue the assassin as a necessary piece of an FBI-led scheme.

With Loyd Jowers’ revelations, the conspiracy starts to take shape. But how is James Earl Ray steered to be the fall guy? How do you get the patsy into position, into the trap? And without him suspecting anything. Enter Raoul.

The State's chief witness, a drunk who the prosecution claims can place James Earl Ray at the flop house at the time of the assassination, is a total disaster. Meanwhile, more witnesses begin to describe a mysterious hooded figure in the thicket just below the boarding house.

On April 4, 1967--exactly one year before his assassination--King gives a speech that sets him on collision course with the United States government. In a monumental address in August, King defiantly calls out the FBI’s harassment of himself and the movement, but in King’s last weeks his friends and colleagues are concerned about a new worried distraction in him. Ralph Abernathy even makes inquiries into whether or not the FBI had threatened King again.

King is collecting enemies in the government in 1967 and 1968. Both the FBI and the Pentagon are hunting King, tracking his every move and searching for ways to neutralize his radicalizing influence.

Both the Pentagon and FBI intensify their surveillance and tracking of King, as he boldly denounces the growing war in Vietnam and plans what can only be called a socialist revolution to begin in the spring of 1968. King announces a multi-racial campaign to indefinitely occupy Washington, D.C. until demands are met to end American capitalism as we know it, with the “total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty” for all Americans of all races.

Episode 1 begins the investigation into Martin Luther King's assassination, with the FBI's suspect racing from Memphis just moments after King was shot.

Who was this James Earl Ray? And why did Coretta Scott King and King's closest friends and associates suspect that the FBI itself—and not Ray—was behind the murder?