The UK Prison Experience of James Earl Ray and National Security

What is it about?

James Earl Ray was arrested in the UK. The US government had to seek his extradition and given the death of Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963, they feared Ray might be murdered before he could be tried for the assassination of Martin Luther King. As a result, exceptional security measures were taken to protect Ray. His notoriety as a racist diminished concern for his rights as a defendant as the UK did not want to inflame domestic racial tensions nor antagonize a powerful ally.

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Why is it important?

Fifty years after the King assassination, Ray's time in UK prisons is a relatively unknown part of the story and illustrates how the event had a foreign policy dimension. The UK Labour government was trying to pass a Race Relations bill and deal with deteriorating public opinion on immigration. It also contained critics of US foreign policy. Hence complying with US demands to keep Ray safe and return him to the US for trial became entangled in these discussions. While subsequently, the UK's behavior has been seen as complicit with a US government conspiracy that was "setting up" Ray as the assassin to conceal who really did it, the evidence suggests that they were focused on handling an unexpected problem in a way that provoked the least criticism, domestic or international.

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