In their Sunday edition, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution covered a roundtable discussion of figures from the Civil Rights era, recounting their days of struggle alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The session is at turns sentimental, cerebral, religious and personal and gives a genuine feel for the often dangerous work performed by Dr. King and others in the civil rights movement. But, unfortunately, to a certain degree the whole article is tainted by this statement from the eldest son of MLK, Martin King III:

“The last campaign that my father and the team worked on was called the Poor People’s Campaign, but it was really about economic rights," he said. “In fact, that’s probably the greatest reason why he was killed, quite frankly, not because he was dealing with civil and human rights, but economics.”

Martin King refers to the conspiracy theory, accepted by the King family, that Dr. King was the target of a wide-ranging, multinational, murder plot. Perhaps unwilling to believe that their family patriarch could be killed by a loser like James Earl Ray, the King family has nurtured the conspiracy, which reached its lowest point with the ridiculous 1998 Soviet show trial of Loyd Jowers – the owner of the bar next to the flophouse where Ray assassinated King on April 4, 1968. The farcical nature of Jowers trial is revealed in detail by Gerald Posner in this Washington Post article; Posner also wrote the book “Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.”

No serious historian or scholar gives the conspiracy plot an iota of credibility. So what is the motivation of the King family to perpetuate the fiction? I'd like to believe they're led by grief, or a desire to understand the tragedy of King's death, or perhaps the search for the "real killers" is a manifestation of their distrust of the American government – a government, after all, that bugged MLK's phones and had him trailed by FBI agents.

But, if I may be cynical, I can't help but feel that there's some profit motive leading the King family to make the slain leader "larger than life" with a JFK-style mythos. To that end, the family has already sold the film rights to – guess who? – Oliver Stone to make a MLK biopic. And it would appear that there's a small cottage industry that is capitalizing on King's life…and death. Here's the director of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis,TN talking about a new museum wing showcasing artifacts such as James Earl Ray's rifle and a section of the exhibit called "Lingering Questions" that alludes to the conspiracy:

Curiosity is what the exhibit is intended to spark, and the museum hopes visitors will leave wanting to study the case further, said Beverly Robertson, museum executive director. She said the museum is careful not to take any sides and has only put forth information gleaned from official investigations or court records.

She admitted that the controversy surrounding the assassination does not hurt in attracting visitors to the exhibit. The museum draws about 150,000 annually, she said. Attendance has been up, she said, since the new wing, which includes a floor addressing what happened to King's dream, opened Sept. 28. [Emphasis mine]

Doesn't the drive for a conspiracy, and the market that springs up around it, detract and trivialize the message and memory of Martin Luther King? Is this really how the King family wants Dr. King to be remembered? Isn't there another, better lesson: that even though a great man can be destroyed by hatred, his spirit, his message, and the word will live on? If we truly want to honor the memory of Martin Luther King, America would do better to focus less on the man, and more on his aspirations.