Feds’ release of MLK files could crack open a St. Louis conspiracy

The federal government’s release Monday of 250,000 pages of records related to Martin Luther King Jr. drew pushback from King’s family—and eyerolls from critics, who believe President Trump is using a document dump to distract from the furor around his ties to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. 

But two researchers digging into an ugly chapter of St. Louis history welcomed the release. Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Nina Gilden Seavey and Washington University sociology professor David Cunningham joined forces four years ago, not long after the release of Seavey’s podcast series My Fugitive, which explored the way the FBI targeted anti-war protesters at WashU even while ignoring a conspiracy to kill King that had been hatched in a Benton Park bar. The conspiracy became the focus of media coverage (including a 2009 SLM story) and congressional hearings, but much of the testimony was taken in closed session. Seavey is hopeful that revelations in King’s file will include those transcripts—potentially cracking open the mystery behind a murder that changed America.

Seavey previously worked with former Vice President Walter Mondale, who as a senator questioned some of the key witnesses in the murder plot, to unseal the congressional testimony. “I would have thought that a former vice president might have some sway,” she says. “He and I were not able to get that material released.” 

She now has new hope, noting that the National Archives has indicated it will now be steadily releasing additional material from the files. “So for people like me, we’re going to be checking this every day.”

A Killing, a Possible Conspiracy, and Its Breeding Ground

It’s not hard to connect James Earl Ray, who was convicted of King’s murder, to the notorious white supremacist bar on Arsenal called The Grapevine Tavern: Ray’s brother owned it, and visited Ray in the Missouri State Penitentiary just one day before he escaped from prison in a breadbox. (Ray was still on the lam when he allegedly killed King.) 

A local patent attorney’s $50,000 bounty on King was the talk of the bar’s denizens. Did it inspire Ray’s act? And did other St. Louisans assist in the assassination? Those are among the questions that remain unanswered.

And while Seavey is hopeful that new information might better connect St. Louis to King’s assassination in Memphis, she and Cunningham are just as intrigued about what they might tell the world about St. Louis in the 1960s.

Cunningham’s work has long been focused on white supremacist groups. He’s found fertile ground for research in Benton Park, which housed not only The Grapevine Tavern but was also home to two key figures in segregationist George Wallace’s presidential campaign. “If you start to look at that neighborhood around the bar, you can start piecing together a broader organization of the far right during that period,” he notes. “It really is like tentacles going out.”

Working with a pair of grad students, he and Seavey are looking at that ecosystem on a granular level. “We want to recreate that world so as to understand, how did we come to Ferguson, what was this environment that took hold that is kind of the basis of Missouri politics for a long time,” says Seavey. 

She notes that while The Grapevine’s regulars were often low-level criminals and people without much power, the attorney who put the bounty on King’s head, John Sutherland, was a prominent citizen.

“Some people were generals and some people were foot soldiers,” she observes. “Those worlds were intersected and enmeshed. Would the John Birch Society or Phyllis Schlafly have consorted with people at The Grapevine Tavern? No. But did she know John Sutherland? Absolutely. Were they both involved in the John Birch Society? Of course. So let’s paint a picture of that world that lets us know what St. Louis was really all about.” 

The FBI files could aid in that. Seavey notes that not only King’s convicted killer James Earl Ray but his brother John (who owned the Grapevine Tavern), a Grapevine bartender, and others testified before Congress. And Cunningham is hopeful the records release will include reports from FBI informants.

As Seavey explored in her podcast, the FBI actively worked in the 1960s to disrupt anti-war protesters, who they saw as a threat to the established order. Cunningham, who studied the FBI’s interactions with the Ku Klux Klan around that same period, feels “fairly confident” they also monitored the white supremacists who ran the Citizens’ Councils that flourished in St. Louis and plotted at The Grapevine. 

But, he notes, that didn’t seem to lead to harassment or disruption, as it did with the left.

“What I found is that their monitoring of the Klan was just as rigorous as it was to the far left, but the lens that they interpreted their information through was totally different,” he says. “They weren’t concerned about the ideology. They were concerned about the prospect of unpredictable violence. That’s why they were monitoring them. Absent an immediate bomb threat or something like that, it was passive monitoring.” 

Research That Continues

Neither Seavey nor Cunningham is sure what form their research could ultimately take. He’s written books; she’s made films and a podcast. Regardless, both feel like they’re onto something good, something revelatory. 

They’re able to keep things open-ended for now thanks to the supporter whom Seavey refers to as her “fairy godperson”—an anonymous donor who has provided funding for their research. Seavey, who is the daughter of the late, St. Louis-based civil rights attorney Louis Gilden, says she sought to tap into local donors when working on My Fugitive. She first got interested in the idea behind the podcast through her father’s representation of the anti-war activist Howard Mechanic, who went underground after being sentenced to five years in prison for his actions at a WashU protest. 

“I have connections into the financial world in St. Louis, and asked a number of people in that world how I might connect with maybe a family foundation, or people who would be interested in the history of St. Louis,” she says. From there, the anonymous donor got in touch, and helped fund not only My Fugitive but this new work. 

“And so I have had an ongoing relationship with somebody who I don’t know,” Seavey says. “I don’t know who I love, but I love that person.” 

Both Seavey and Cunningham are sympathetic to the King family’s concerns about the records release. (King was famously among the activists the FBI surveilled). Cunningham notes the irony of the Martin Luther King Jr. files’ becoming available even as the government engages in what he calls “unprecedented censoring/erasure of many other previously-available sources of public information.” 

He says, “My hope would be that support for the release of these MLK assassination papers would also dovetail with calls for accountability around the wiping of other archival data and historical sources.” But, he adds, “I generally think it’s a good idea to have transparency around our histories and to be able to take the Freedom of Information Act seriously.” As new records are released, he and Seavey will be reading.