Martin Luther King’s lesson for Obama

Martin Luther King Jr., America's best known black leader, was murdered 40 years ago today just after 6pm as he stood on a balcony of the Lorraine motel in Memphis, Tennessee. A single rifle bullet hit him in the jaw, then severed his spinal cord. James Earl Ray, a white man, was convicted of the killing and sentenced to 99 years.

There are credible theories of a conspiracy, possibly involving US Army intelligence, whose interest in the King family stretched back to 1917 when the War Department opened a file on King's maternal grandfather, first president of Atlanta's branch of the NAACP. King's father, Martin Sr., also entered Army intelligence files as a potential troublemaker, as did Martin Jr. in 1947 when he was 18.

King's famous denunciation of America's war in Vietnam came exactly a year before his murder, before a crowd of 3,000 in the Riverside Church in Manhattan. He described Vietnam's destruction at the hands of "deadly Western arrogance", insisting that "we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor... taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem."

US Army spies secretly recorded black radical Stokely Carmichael warning King, "The Man don't care you call ghettos concentration camps, but when you tell him his war machine is nothing but hired killers you got trouble." Carmichael was right.

The Army increased surveillance on King. Green Berets and other Special Forces veterans from Vietnam began making street maps and identifying sniper sites in major American cities. They also offered 30.06 sniper rifles to police departments, including that of Memphis. A Green Beret unit was operating in Memphis the day he was shot. The bullet that killed him came from a 30.06 rifle purchased in a Memphis store.

Within hours of King's murder, rioting broke out in 80 cities across the country. Dozens of people, mostly black, were killed. On April 6 the Oakland police cornered the Black Panther leadership and when one of the young leaders, Bobby Hutton, emerged with his shirt off and his hands up, shot him dead.

In contrast to Bobby Hutton, the Panthers and above all Malcolm X, slain in 1965, white liberal opinion has hailed King as a man who chose to work non-violently within the system. Near the end, King himself was haunted by a sense of failure. In his last months he was booed at a mass meeting in Chicago and, as he lay sleepless that night, he knew why: "I had urged them [his fellow blacks] to have faith in America and in white society... They were now booing because they felt we were unable to deliver on our promises... They were now hostile because they were watching the dream they had so readily accepted turn into a nightmare."

As the radical journalist Andrew Kopkind wrote shortly after King's assassination, "That he failed to change the system that brutalises his race is a profound relief to the white majority. As a reward they have now elevated his minor successes into major triumphs." The night before he was shot, King said in a speech to the striking garbage workers of Memphis: "But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land."

Forty years on, history has not vindicated King. America is still disfigured by racial injustice. Militant black leadership has all but disappeared.

To black radicals, the sedate homilies of Barack Obama are to the fierce demands for justice of Malcolm X and of King - in his more radical moments - as muzak is to Beethoven. Obama is caught, even as King was. The moment whites fear (admittedly with scant cause) he might raise the political temperature, he's savaged with every bludgeon of convenience, starting with the robust sermons of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose sin is to have reminded whites that there are black Americans who are really angry.

"God damn America," roared Wright, to white America's consternation and fury. King was just as rough at the Riverside Church in the speech that so terrified the white elites: "I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government." Honesty of this sort from a black politician in America extorts swift retribution. ·