who killed Martin Luther King, Jr.?

Martin Luther King, Jr., center, on April 3, 1968

Far from the effluvia of cast-off porn stars and explosive Tweets that evaporate almost as quickly as they are written, The Washington Post offers a look back on the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and on who did or didn't pull the trigger. Conspiracies can be made of thin gruel or more substance, but the Post story at least has a whiff of substance and of an earlier time when serious men were involved in serious matters.

In the five decades since Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead by an assassin at age 39, his children have worked tirelessly to preserve his legacy, sometimes with sharply different views on how best to do that. But they are unanimous on one key point: James Earl Ray did not kill Martin Luther King.

For the King family and others in the civil rights movement, the FBI’s obsession with King in the years leading up to his slaying in Memphis on April 4, 1968 — pervasive surveillance, a malicious disinformation campaign and open denunciations by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover — laid the groundwork for their belief that he was the target of a plot.