I’ve long thought that, under normal circumstances, Hollywood would have already made a movie out of William Pepper’s first meeting with Dr. Martin Luther King. Pepper, then a photojournalist, had gone to Vietnam in 1966 and taken some of the most horrific pictures in human history - Vietnamese civilians, most of them children, burned by white phosphorus. Those photos were subsequently published in Ramparts magazine, with a foreword by Dr. Benjamin Spock, in an article called “The Children of Vietnam.” (A few years ago I helped Dave Ratcliffe obtain a physical copy of that magazine, which he then put up on Ratical. You can find that here, although I should warn you that the photos are nightmarish.)
That magazine found its way into the hands of Dr. Martin Luther King. Going through his mail, he opened the magazine sitting down to breakfast one morning. Moments later he said he was no longer hungry. He soon announced that he wanted to meet that photojournalist, and wound up calling him on the phone. As Pepper tells the story, he was both amazed and dubious to get the call, not less so when King asked him to speak at his church. “Why did he want this honky to address his congregation?” he thought. He had no idea what to say. Nonetheless, he did so, and he and King became friends.
Pepper’s article was the last straw in a line that MLK had been pondering for some time. King had wanted to address the war, but that it was futile to try and address the ravages of racism and poverty without dealing with the military industrial complex. His decision to speak about it not only increased the vitriol of his enemies but alienated many of his supporters. The major newspapers, never his friend, ran open attacks on him. His brilliant speech, “A Time to Break Silence,” given on April 4, 1967, provided a political and empathetic analysis of the situation:
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe?
On April 4, 1968, precisely one year to the day after Dr. King gave that speech, he was state executed in Memphis, TN. Needless to say, Hollywood has chosen not to dramatize this final episode of the great man’s life, or the role played by William Pepper in it.
Into this void has stepped John Barbour with a new film, A Tribute to William Pepper. Barbour is the creator of the 1970s reality series Real People, as well as two films containing important interviews with Kennedy assassination investigator Jim Garrison, The JFK Assassination: The Jim Garrison Tapes (1992), and; American Media & The Second Assassination of John F. Kennedy (2017), the latter of which I was able to see at the Texas Theatre in Dallas with a number of other researchers in a screening hosted by Barbour. Aiding Barbour on this film is Black Op Radio’s Len Osanic, who had been a good friend of Pepper.
This new film consists essentially of two extended interviews of Pepper, conducted by Barbour, along with an introduction by Barbour as well as cutaways for additional information and clarification on Pepper’s statements. The approach is no-frills but effective: with the first interview exploring in the main how Pepper got involved in the case; while the second interview goes through many of the details captured in Pepper’s third book on the case, The Plot to Kill King.
One thing that comes through is how remarkably well-connected Pepper was in his life. He had worked in the Bobby Kennedy senatorial campaign as his citizens’ chairman in Westchester County beginning in 1964. Then, as noted earlier, he found himself in 1966 in Vietnam, taking the photos for what would become his 1967 Ramparts article. Pepper fills in the background in response to Barbour’s questions, relating that the article was also considered for Look magazine. At that time, Look was a huge magazine, with a massively greater circulation than Ramparts, a radical leftist publication that ran articles from the Black Panthers, among others.
The editor at Look was William Attwood, who was sympathetic to Pepper and wanted to run the piece. Unfortunately, Attwood received a personal visit from Averill Harriman, carrying a message from Lyndon Johnson. The message? “Don’t ever publish anything by William Pepper.” Needless to say, the article was not published in Look.
Pepper also notes that he received an opposite opinion from Attood when going out to lunch with journalist Mike Wallace, who would eventually be the face of CBS’s flagship program 60 Minutes. as I’ve had related elsewhere, Wallace was partly responsible for a film called The Hate that Hate Produced, back in 1959, which both popularized and demonized Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam. Pepper says that Wallace called him a traitor for his Ramparts piece. “I almost put him through the wall,’ Pepper notes dryly.
***
Following Dr. King’s assassination in April 1968, and then Bobby’s assassination two months later, Pepper found himself exhausted and understandably unwilling to continue pursuing the case. A few years later, however, around the time the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was getting started, Mark Lane asked Pepper to look into the MLK case and represent the accused assassin James Earl Ray. Pepper met with Ray. After a ten-year deep dive into the case, Pepper was finally willing to represent Ray in 1988. In the course of his representation, he managed to arrange for Dexter King to meet with Ray. Since this was broadcast live on TV, it caused a stir when Dexter stated he did not believe Ray had killed his father.
Pepper first arranged for a mock trial of Ray for HBO television in 1993. This was a well-produced and objective proceeding. This is much better than the earlier mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald broadcast in America by Showtime. Pepper won that mock trial. Pepper’s second major achievement in representing Ray was getting a civil trial against a man named Lloyd Jowers, who was an active participant in the assassination, in 1999. The jury in that civil trial found that Jowers was responsible, along with other unnamed parties, including the U.S. government, for the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King. Naturally, of course, the media failed to report in any substantive way, on what should have been seen as an Earth-shaking outcome. In fact, they sent Gerald Posner on a media tour to try and belittle and discount the result of the trial. But yet, no less than Coretta Scott King stated: "There is abundant evidence of a major, high-level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband." Did that make any headway? Nope. Institutional media didn’t want the story.
John Barbour and Len Osanic have made this a fine tribute to an accomplished and driven man. Pepper didn’t stop after Ray died. When Larry Teeter died, he later took over as Sirhan Sirhan’s attorney, the accused assassin of Robert Kennedy. The energy that kept Pepper on track is clearly evident in his exchanges with Barbour as they explore some of the details of the conspiracy that Pepper uncovered, involving both state and federal military authorities. As with his films with Jim Garrison, the conversation is the star, and it is an invaluable contribution to history. The film will be of interest to anyone looking for the truth.
One last note.
A few days ago, as this is written, RFK Jr. made the decision to back Donald Trump for President. I don’t wish to unpack that here, but as a result of this, his former friend Greg Palast wrote an essay blasting him. It is a startling essay for several reasons, but one paragraph stood out to me.
Palast writes:
His father was murdered by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian who assassinated Bobby Senior because of RFK’s vociferous, militant support of Israel. Sirhan committed the killing on television. The murder is right there on film. Yet, Bobby Jr. could not believe his own eyes and that of a million horrified witnesses. To this day, he insists Sirhan did not kill his dad. Maybe it’s some kind of denial mechanism—having to watch your own father’s head blown apart. I don’t know, I’m a scribbler, not a shrink.
Palast has done some good work in the past. His books The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse are both worthwhile, and he wrote well about voter fraud and the Bush v Gore case. This isn’t Gerald Posner or Malcolm Gladwell or something. But for an otherwise seemingly cogent journalist to write a paragraph as uninformed and frankly idiotic as that should be impossible.
It points to Barbour’s frequent theme of his films: the continued failure of virtually all the media to deal with its skeletons. Palast is an American who allegedly moved to England to work for the BBC so he could write honestly about the U.S. And this is his level of insight?
When people ask “Why are you guys still going on about JFK? Or MLK? Or RFK?” This is why. Even the reporters who are supposed to be worth a damn often aren’t. Good on John Barbour and Len Osanic for continuing the fight.
John Barbour's film may be viewed by clicking here.
