Events of January 6, 2021 and November 22, 1963

 THE EVENTS OF JANUARY 6, 2021 AND JFK

Some people are looking at the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol as a Deep Political event, in Peter Dale Scott’s classical view, alongside Pearl Harbor, the assassination of President Kennedy, Watergate, Iran-Contra and 9/11.

While only time will tell, I have an example of what we have learned from the JFK assassination that can be applied to the insurrection and attack on the Capitol, specifically the photo-identification of suspects.

Not only have over 165 of the rioters been identified and arrested, two of them are being charged with conspiracy, a crime that I have never seen prosecuted before. 

The connection arises in the course of my inquiry into the story of the late Dr. Adele Edisen, who first appeared on the scene in an article she wrote from Professor Jerry Rose’s Third/Fourth Decade Journal.

She explained how she was, in the spring of 1963, a graduate research associate in New Orleans with a grant from the National Institute of Health (NIH). When she learned that her faculty adviser Dr. Jose Rivera, was to be in attendance at a NIH conference in Atlantic City, she went out of her way to meet him there.  As I had been a reporter in Atlantic City for a number of years I knew people at the Atlantic City Convention Hall (now Boardwalk Hall), and called them to confirm that there had been indeed a NIH conference there at that time.

Dr. Rivera told Edisen that he had been a professor in New Orleans for a number of years and knew some people there. He asked her to stop in Washington D.C. on her return trip home and he would show her the NIH headquarters in Bethesda and give her a tour, and she agreed. Rivera made arrangements for her to stay at a hotel, and while he had previously said she could have dinner at his home with him and his wife, they instead had reservations at a restaurant – Blackie’s House of Beef.

At first I assumed Rivera was from Cuba, but in fact he is from Lima, Peru. When I visited Blackie’s House of Beef with John Judge, we learned from our waiter that the place was popular with a number of Vice Presidents, including Nixon and LBJ, and had a special side door that they used. In walking around the restaurant I noticed pictures on the wall that indicated Blackie had served in a combat unit in Europe during World War II, and strangely, had erected a little memorial to President Kennedy in one of the back dinning rooms.

When Rivera picked her up at her hotel, they encountered an American Army Colonel who Rivera knew, and exchanged pleasantries, after which Rivera mentioned that he had been stationed with the Colonel at a base in Texas, Fort Hood, and that Rivera himself was a Colonel in the US Army Reserves. 

Rivera then told Edisen the Colonel from Texas was engaged in filming and photographing demonstrators in order to identify them.

From my interview with former Dallas TV reporter Wes Wise, the media had cooperated with the Dallas police and Secret Service in supplying them with news photos and film of the mob attack on UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson a few weeks before the association, in order to try to identify the attackers. Still head shots of some of them were made and distributed to Secret Service agents and a Denton Police Department rookie was assigned to attempt to infiltrate the group to determine their intentions for when the President arrived.

Among the photos of the Stevenson suspects distributed to the Secret Service agents at the Trade Mart on November 22, 1963 was one of John Martin, of Louisiana. No, not John Scruggs Martin, the guy who tipped off Jim Garrison about Oswald’s association with Guy Bannister and David Ferrie, but a college student from Northern Louisiana.

At the time of the assassination John W. Rice - the Special Agent in Charge (SAIC) of the New Orleans Secret Service office, was in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations at a military base near Schreveport, in Northern Louisiana, who was informed of the assassination and sent on a back ground check on John Martin, the student, who he was told was a suspect in the assassination. While Rice spent a few hours on this assignment, when he called the Secret Service office in Dallas to give his report he was told to forget it, they had Lee Harvey Oswald in custody and were no longer interested in Martin.

Adele Edisen then began to have anxiety attacks, because Dr./Col. Rivera had instructed her, when she got back to New Orleans, to call Oswald, and she did. At first she was told there was no one by that name at that number, but when she called back a week later she was told they had just arrived. She mentioned Rivera to Oswald but he said he didn’t know him, or the names of others Rivera had mentioned. Edisen thought that odd because she assumed Oswald was a medical research associate like she was.

In the course of my inquiry into Edisen’s story, everything she said checked out, I even got Rivera’s 800 page military file, everything except the fact Rivera knew Oswald’s Magazine Street address and the phone number of the apartment’s manger a few weeks before Oswald himself knew he would be living there.

According to the Warren Report, on May 9, 1963, Oswald filled out a job application at Reily Coffee Co. at 640 Magazine Street, listing three references – John Murret, his uncle, Sgt. Robert Hidell and Lieut. J. Evans, that the Warren Commission said were “both apparently fictitious names.”

But Oswald did serve with a Hidell in the Marines and he apparently was living in New Orleans that summer. And in the very next paragraph the Warren Report notes that: “Also on May 9, Oswald obtained an apartment at 4905 Magazine Street with the help of Myrtle Evans, who had known him when he was a child.” And Myrtle had a husband, Julian Evans, so neither name was “fictitious,” as the Warren Report proclaimed.

But how did Rivera know Oswald’s Magazine Street address and manager’s phone number two weeks before Oswald himself knew where he would be living?

In retrospect, Edisen believed Rivera drugged and tried to hypnotize her, possibly as part of an MKULTRA mind control experiment, as Rivera was stationed for a time at Fort Detrick, Md., and was associated with the ubiquitious military intelligence network known as ACSI – Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, that reported directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. At one point Rivera laughed and said there were “too many chiefs and not enough Indians,” and instructed her, when she got back to New Orleans, to call Oswald and tell him to “kill the chief,” though she didn’t do that when Oswald denied knowing Rivera.

Rivera also expressed to Edisen foreknowledge of the premature death of the president’s son – Patrick, that Oswald was connected to the Walker shooting, and the assassination itself – wondering what Jackie would do when her husband was dead.

So shortly after the assassination and the arrest of Oswald, Adele Edisen went to the New Orleans office of the Secret Service and was interviewed by SAIC John W. Rice, who was with an FBI agent, Orin Bartlett, who has been described as the FBI’s liason to the Secret Service. She told them what Dr./Col. Rivera had said to her, and she believes her conversation with them was recorded, as Rice kept pushing a button on his desk. At one point Rice got on the phone, ostensibly with someone in Washington D.C., and gave them Rivera’s name. Rice and Bartlett then said they had to leave immediately for Dallas, as Oswald had been shot.

When the Warren Report was released a year later Edisen was surprised there was no mention of Dr./Col. Jose Rivera or his foreknowledge of key events, so she remained silent for a number of years until deciding to write the article for Third/Forth Decade.

Since the Stevenson incident in 1963 and the attempt to identify those involved the state-of-the-art of what they now call facial recognition and biometric identification technology has progressed immensely, and the effort to ID those involved in the attack on the Capitol is based at the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Service (CJIS) headquarters in Clarksburg, West Virginia.

As described in Architect Magazine, “A new FBI facility designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) accommodates the future of the federal agency’s largest division, Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS). The facility’s purpose is to centralize the research, development, and application of biometric identification technology to serve national security and law enforcement. Located on an existing FBI campus in Clarksburg, West Virginia, the Biometric Technology Center is the product of a joint effort with the FBI and the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). It allows the CJIS Division, which has one of the largest collections of biometric information in the world, and the U.S. Department of the Army, which has developed military biometrics database systems, to advance the next generation of identification technologies, including DNA, iris, palm print, voice pattern, and facial recognition tools.”

https://www.architectmagazine.com/project-gallery/fbi-biometric-technology-center_o

Besides the Stevenson incident, there are a number of other photo identifications that can be made in regard to the assassination of President Kennedy, including the positive ID of the man in Mexico City falsely identified as Oswald, the three tramps, the photo allegedly of Lansdale alongside the tramps, and other Dealey Plaza figures including “Badge Man” and “Prayer Man.”

One of the projects that I will be working on this year is to try to get the FBI’s Biometric Technology Center to take on this project to identify these people.

For FBI Biometric Technology Center see:

https://www.wvnews.com/news/wvnews/fbi-to-expand-iris-recognition-tech-at-clarksburg-wv-campus/article_d7d13a6d-d217-54c2-bce1-e80168c8f71b.html

https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/fingerprints-and-other-biometrics/biometric-center-of-excellence-1

For Adele Edisen and Jose Rivea, see:

http://www.namebase.net:82/edisen.html

https://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/arrb/index65.htm

https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKrivera.htm

http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2019/04/adele-edisen-and-drcol-jose-rivera.html?m=1

 

If you can please support JFKCountercoup research:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/supportjfkcountercoup

MLK IN CAMDEN - The Story Continues

 MLK in Camden

William E. Kelly, Jr.

Billkelly3@gmail.com

 

753 Walnut Street Camden, N.J.

MLK in Camden Revisited – By William E. Kelly [billkelly3@gmail.com ]

Birmingham, Selma and Memphis are all well-known places in the history of civil rights in America, but few have ever heard of Maple Shade and Camden, until now, as the story is still unfolding but one thing is for certain - the history of the civil rights movement in America and biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr.  will have to be rewritten as new details emerge of MLK's time in Camden, N.J.

In June 1950, when young seminary student Michael King signed his name to a legal complaint, - the first such official civil rights action he would take, he listed his legal residence as 753 Walnut Street, Camden, N.J.

Today, more than sixty-five years later, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Camden residence will be saved from demolition, restored and developed into a civil rights museum and community center in one of the city's most blighted neighborhoods, but it hasn't been easy. 

When car salesman and amateur historian Patrick Duff discovered the building's historic significance, he had a hard time convincing state preservation officers, city historians and even longtime neighbors that Martin Luther King, Jr. lived there, and the building was worth saving, as the state wanted documentation, the city historians were incredulous, and the neighbors didn't remember King walking their streets. The city ordered the building razed after Duff began to seek the historical designation that would preserve it.

Then Duff got the attention of Camden mayor Dana Redd and powerful political boss Rep. Donald Norcross, both of whom wrote letters to the state department requesting the historical designation.  Norcross then got his fellow Congressman, the late Rep. John Lewis (D. Ga.), to support the preservation effort, and all three recently spoke at a press conference in front of the house that hasn't been lived in in twenty years, calling for its preservation.

"This place of historic real estate must be saved for generations unborn," said Lewis, who was in the area to receive the Liberty Medal at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia. "Martin Luther King, Jr. didn't just help change America; he helped change the world."

With these latest developments, the history of the civil rights movement in America and biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr. will have to be rewritten, as new details emerge of MLK's time in Camden clearly indicate it was a crossroads, a turning point in his life, and the civil rights movement in America.

The two years King spent here while attending Crozer Theological Seminary go largely unrecognized in his biographies, but new evidence is continually being discovered that indicates something very special happened here, an event that radicalized King, sparked a fire in his soul, and convinced him to dedicate his ministry to civil rights.

While King's studies at Crozier, in Chester, Pennsylvania are well documented, his residency in Camden had escaped general recognition until recently, as Patrick Duff has discovered the story behind that event, one piece at a time.

In reading back issues of local newspapers while researching another issue, Duff came across an article "The Bar that Started  A Crusade,"  that related how Martin Luther King had filed a legal complaint against a Maple Shade, N.J. bar owner for refusing to serve him and three friends in 1950.

Researching the issue further Duff found other news articles that indicated that was the first time King had taken such legal action, and the event may have played a more significant role in King's life than previously believed, and his hunch has been born out.

Although the roadside cafe bar called Mary's Place, and later known as the Morristown Pub was purchased by the N.J. Department of Transportation and torn down, Duff obtained a copy of the original complaint, signed by King and three companions - fellow Crozer student Walter McCall, social worker Doris Wilson and Pearl Smith, a Philadelphia police women.

What jumped out at Duff was the address King gave as his residence - 753 Walnut Street, Camden, the same address as McCall.

When Duff tracked down the owner of the now boarded up row house, Jeanette Kill Hunt, and asked her if she had any association with Martin Luther King, she replied, "Well he used to live in my house."

She recalled King living there when she was a young girl, saying King and McCall rented a back room from her father, a relative of McCall.

"In those days, anyone was welcome in our house. It had what we called a swinging door. My cousin Walter (McCall) was King's friend, and the two of them lived in the back room upstairs on and off for two years while they were in school."

Duff then went to the Maple Shade city council with a proposal to make the clover leaf location of Mary's Place a public park, and place an historic marker on the spot, highlighting its significance. He also convinced a Morristown architecture firm to design the park pro-bono.

In Camden the owner of the house agreed to allow it to be preserved as a museum, and Duff obtained strong local allies in Father Michael Doyle, whose parish includes the house, and Rutgers Camden Law School, whose attorneys agreed to do the legal end and paperwork. Such a museum and center devoted to King and civil rights, they all agreed, could lead to the redevelopment of the whole neighborhood.

But shortly after a fund was established to restore the house the state notified Duff that they did not consider the site of Mary's Place or the house in Camden to be of historical significance, and to top it off, the owner of the house received a letter from Camden City officials ordering her to demolish the blighted building in the middle of a block of rubble and crack houses.

Undeterred, Duff went back to the archives and discovered the Philadelphia Tribune, the city's venerable black newspaper, had a reporter cover the Maple Shade incident and provided the key elements that could give it historical designation and certify the time here as a life changing crossroads for King and some of the others involved.

THE INCIDENT AT MARY'S PLACE CAFE

In June 1950 Crozer seminary student Michael King had yet to become Martin Luther, Jr. King and was known as Michael King. At the time King and fellow Crozier student Walter McCall were on summer break from Crozer and working as associates of Haverford College professor Ira Reid, the first tenured black faculty member at the Philadelphia college. An Ivy League sociologist, Reid conducted seminars on oral history techniques, and then sent his students out into the field to interview old Baptist ministers in the south. Today there is a student center at Haverford named after Reid.

King's father gave him a black Cadillac when he graduated from Atlanta's Moorehouse school, where King first met Reid and McCall.  King graduated early with honors and was accepted into Crozer, a predominately white and well respected school.

It was a Sunday afternoon when King, McCall and their dates Smith and Wilson, went for a drive, destination unknown, but later in the day, around midnight, they pulled off the highway that is now Route 73, and stopped at the roadside cafe known as Mary's Place.

While the identity of Mary has yet to be determined, the cafe and liquor license were then being operated by Ernest Nichols, a big, imposing German immigrant who fought in the German army in World War I.

King and his companions entered and sat down at a table and noticed a few people at the bar, including three college students and possibly a black guy.

After being ignored for a while, King got up and approached the bar, asking for service.

Nichols refused to serve them and when it appeared that King and company were not leaving until they were served, Nichols went into the back room and emerged with a gun, saying, "I'd kill for less than this," and then opened the door and fired the gun in the air, some say more than once.

That was enough to get King and his companions to leave, but they went to the police and filed charges against Nichols.

The police went to the bar, took the weapon from Nichols, apparently got statements from the customers, including three college students at the bar, and arrested Nichols on two charges, one for violating the relatively new and untested civil rights law, and the other was for a weapons violation.

THE CASE IN COURT

The incident was not something King wanted to brag about. Getting thrown out of a bar at gunpoint at midnight on a Sunday was not something King wanted his father to know about. A year earlier when King lived in the school dorm he berated another black student for drinking beer in the dorm as it reflected on all of the other black students, a distinctive minority. Now he was living off campus with McCall, drinking beer, shooting pool and dating, and was in trouble. He would have to appear in court before a judge over somewhat embarrassing circumstances, needed legal help and couldn't call home.

As Lewis said in front of the house, “there's good trouble and bad trouble,” and in this case they were getting into good trouble.

King and McCall contacted the head of the Burlington County NAACP, who referred them to Robert Burke Johnson, a lawyer with the NAACP in Camden. Lloyd Barros, he pastor of Zion Baptist church in Camden also put them in contact with Dr. Ulysses Wiggins, the head of the local branches of the NAACP.

Like King, Dr. Wiggins was originally from Georgia, and was a respected black professional who offered them legal assistance. The NAACP attorney, Robert Burke Johnson, an assistant city prosecutor, represented King and the other complainants at the preliminary hearing in Maple Shade Municipal Court before Judge Percy Charlton.

The first Philadelphia Tribune article appears to have been based on statements King and McCall gave Dr. Wiggins, but the second Tribune account quotes Nichols’ attorney W. Thomas McCann. McCann explained to the judge that Nichols thought King and company wanted take-out liquor, which he was illegal to sell at that hour on Sunday. But as the Tribune article puts it, he was unable to explain Nichols shooting the gun, though Nichols did say that was how he called his dog.

The judge held Nichols on $500 bail.

Nichols had a good attorney in McCann, and the case is mentioned in McCann's obituary, where I first learned of the incident some years ago. Incredulous, since I was born and razed in Camden, I had never heard of King having lived there, and few others did either. 

With Dr.  Wiggins, Johnson and the NAACP behind King and McCall and McCann, a noted Morristown attorney defending Nichols, a dramatic court case was shaping up that could have rivaled the Scopes trial and make them all famous, but then the judge dismissed the case. Apparently, the parents of the three college student witnesses put pressure on them and they declined to testify, and others testified that Nichols did serve blacks.  So the civil rights charge was dismissed and Nichols pleaded guilty and paid a small fine for the weapons charge.

Other than a few newspaper articles, years apart, and a brief mention of the Maple Shade incident in one of King's biographies, Martin Luther King’s life in Camden went generally unnoticed, even under the radar of longtime residents and local historians, one of whom emphatically declared that, "Martin Luther King never set foot in Camden.” But the story is now well documented, and aspects of it are still emerging, as we learn more about the short but significant time King spent in Camden.

Nichols’ attorney McCann said that he heard King testify before Congress on the radio, and when a Senator asked King what sparked his interest in civil rights, he recalled the incident at Maple Shade. But in those pre-ESPN days, the details are today elusive, as Duff collects the historical documentation necessary to get state recognition and monetary grants.

The support of the politicians also apparently led to the cleanup of Walnut Street, and the clearing of the adjacent vacant lot. "It looks like a different street," said Duff, a bit bewildered at the sudden change in fortune.

Then Republican Thomas Kean, son of the former governor, introduced a bill in the New Jersey State legislature that would ensure the building’s survival and making it a bipartisan issue supported by both parties.

While Maple Shade erects an historic marker and considers a park, Camden begins to figure out how to restore the house and revive the neighborhood, making the MLK house a tourist attraction much like Walt Whitman’s house, not far away, on MLK Boulevard ends at Wiggins Park on the Delaware River waterfront.

The street named after King ends at the park named after Dr. Wiggins, just as the lives of Dr. Wiggins and King came together in Camden for that brief but significant time.

Now they should change the name of Woodrow Wilson high school in East Camden after Dr. Wiggins. 

Lewis concluded by saying, "I would love to come back here and visit, and see an historic marker at this place and this building restored, and it will be a day of jubilation."

The day of jubilation is getting closer, but it has not been easy.

$200,000 was budgeted by the State earmarked for the restoration of the house, but the money disappeared in the Camden city budget, re-appropriated to purchase fire equipment. 

For another, the State of New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection – Historic Preservation Office procrastinated on giving King’s Camden the historic certification it deserves, and instead gave Stockton University near Atlantic City a $30,000 grant to “study” the situation. Instead of giving the grant to their Black History Department, they had a half dozen professors and an official Camden historian without a college degree look into the situation. 

Stockton had previously removed a bust of Stockton, a New Jersey signer of the Declaration of Independence, because he was an attorney who owned slaves. Unlike Jefferson and other signatories who also owned slaves, Stockton lost his family, his fortune and his life after being held prisoner in a ship on the Hudson.

The Stockton “study,” after reviewing Duff’s work and evidence, concluded the Camden house was of “minimal historic signifiance," using Dr. Lewis Baldwin’s four books on King as part of their argument.

When Duff sent Dr. Baldwin the records he has compiled he got the following reply from Baldwin:

Dr. Lewis Baldwin:

1. I wholeheartedly disagree with the NJDEP's Historic Preservation Office's decision "that the incident in Maple Shade that took place to MLK is of 'minimal historic import'."  How can anyone honestly make such a claim involving such a towering historic figure, whom we happen to honor annually with a national holiday? The King monument in Washington, D. C. stands alongside those of our most celebrated U. S. presidents, and King's birthday is recognized or celebrated in some one hundred countries. I agree with your point that "New Jersey failed to protect the rights of King in 1950," but the state can make proper amends by honoring and/or protecting King's legacy today. If the NJDEP's Historic Preservation Office continues to exist and act as if the discrimination King faced in the state in 1950 is of "minimal historic import," then it would be standing in the tradition of those Mississippians who still do all in their power to either deface or destroy monuments to the memory of King, Medgar Evers, Emmett Louis Till, and other martyrs. Let me also say that much of the significance of the Maple Shade incident lies in the fact that it was King's very first sit-in or act of protest against racial discrimination.

2. I most certainly believe that "the home in Camden from which King plotted his first civil rights activity deserves to be placed in the New Jersey National Register of Historic Places." New Jersey cannot wipe away this part of its history by destroying places that should be preserved as historic landmarks. By agreeing to preserve the home in Camden as an historic place, the state would make a powerful statement about its efforts to honestly face an ugly side of its history while striving to exemplify the spirit of what King called "the beloved community."

3. Frankly, I was appalled and very disappointed to be informed and to learn that the NJDEP Historic Preservation Office had apparently used my name and words from an email in 2016 for its decision to deny the application to have the home in Camden, New Jersey placed on the register filed in 2020. Having studied and written about Dr. King for almost four decades, I could never agree to such a decision. Had I been asked, I would have made this abundantly clear.

Patrick Duff writes:  "As you can see he was not very happy about the usage of his name and once provided with the same materials available to the state his opinion on the significance of both the event and the house are very clear.  I shared these thoughts with the DEP and they just never responded."

Duff has been writing my book about the entire situation that will be available this year.  He reached out to the people at the DEP and Stockton University to let them know they will be featured in the book and asked if they wanted to explain themselves, only to receive a letter from the assistant commissioner, Ray Bukowski.  The letter stated that the DEP would now like to assist in figuring out a way to save the home as a part of a larger plan to commemorate some of the other figures involved with the event, such as Dr Wiggins and Robert Burk Johnson.  

For one, I suggest that Woodrow Wilson High School in East Camden be renamed in honor of Dr. Wiggins.

Duff has since resubmitted another preliminary application with the state and is waiting for them to approve it. 

“The communication has not been great but they reached out to let me know that the DEP's new Community Collaborative Commission was reaching out to Camden officials to discuss how to commemorate the area.  I am honestly not too hopeful considering their past performance but I am not giving up.”

In the meantime, Duff  has unraveled another MLK mystery.

It is not about a famous speech MLK gave, but a sermon he heard.

In his book, Stride Toward Freedom, King wrote: “Then one Sunday afternoon I traveled to Philadelphia (from Camden) to hear a sermon by Dr. Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University. He was there to preach for the Fellowship House of Philadelphia. Dr. Johnson had just returned from a trip to India, and, to my great interest, he spoke of the life and teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. His message was so profound and electrifying that I left the meeting and bought a half-dozen books on Gandhi’s life and works.”

“For some reason historians have been misinterpreting what King wrote as him saying that Mordecai Johnson spoke ‘at Fellowship House,’” Duff writes, “when that is clearly not what he said, yet the accepted historical narrative of the event reads that the Fellowship House was the location of the event, when it was not.   BTW, the Fellowship House was torn down decades ago. The date and time of the event has only been guessed at by historians, with some biographies stating January of 1950 and others May of 1950, but these were all admitted guesses by the authors.”

While doing research for his book Duff stumbled across a newspaper clipping from November 18th of 1950 in the Philadelphia Inquirer that was quite intriguing regarding a speech by Dr. Mordecai Johnson that was being sponsored by the Fellowship House that was held at the First Unitarian Church on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. 

Duff then went a step further and started to dig through the Fellowship House archives at Temple University and came across the oral history of the founder of the Fellowship House, Marjorie Penney.  Penney talked to King directly about the Johnson speech and said that it took place at a "Fellowship Church'', which at that time was being held at the First Unitarian Church, not at the Fellowship House.

Duff contacted the Church and spoke with the pastor, who told him that a story had been passed down through the years that the speech took place at the church but it was more of a myth.  When Duff shared with her the evidence he found she was able to obtain the church calendar book for 1950-1951, which clearly shows that Mordecai Johnson was at the church speaking for the Fellowship House on November 19th of 1950 at 3:45 pm. 

“So now the myth of the church is no longer a myth, and we have a place and date to celebrate one of the most pivotal events in the life of Dr. King.  I am filing to have the property placed on the National Register of Historic Places this week with the PA Historic Preservation Office.”

Mordecai Johnson’s sermon about his travels in India and Ghandi’s use and promotion of non-violent means of protests had a profound effect on MLK, as he says he immediately went out and purchsed some books by Ghandi, and began preaching the tenants of non-violent protests for change.

A few years later MLK was asked to give a speech at a conference of Quakers at Convention Hall in Cape May, N.J., and used non-violent protests as espounded by Ghandi as his subject. A complete transcirpt of the speech was published in a Quaker magazine, and I have read references to it being tape recorded, so somewhere there is a lost speech of MLK sitting on a shelf somewhere, that should be found.

Interestingly enough, when Ghandi himself was assassinated by a gunman, he wasn’t shocked or frightened, but merely placed his hands together as if in prayer, smiled and nodded to his attacker. 

The Devil's In the Details - A Review

 

The Devil is in the Details: Alan Dale with Malcolm Blunt on the Assassination of President Kennedy by Alan Dale (Author), Malcolm Blunt (Author) 

This volume is a collection of ten transcribed conversations, recorded 2014 - 2019, between Assassination Archives and Research Center's executive director, Alan Dale, and the esteemed British intelligence analyst, Malcolm Blunt. These unscripted conversations elevate the discussion of key assassination investigation areas well beyond the well-worn paths familiar to those who choose to study President Kennedy's life, his career in public service, the Cold War context of his presidency, the true circumstances and meaning of his death, and the alleged facts associated with the U.S. government's investigations into his assassination.

Malcolm Blunt is regarded within the assassination research community as an invaluable resource on the CIA's internal systems and management authorities as they existed during the 1950s and '60s; he has invested more time and greater focus than perhaps any other individual on the JFK records held at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, MD.

"Malcolm Blunt's brilliant work in the deep caves of the National Archives has opened up new perspectives on the Kennedy case for other researchers. Alan Dale's deft questioning of him in this book will help others to emulate his achievements."  - Peter Dale Scott, author of Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Dallas ’63, and The American Deep State

"The devil is in the details -- also the light of truth. For nearly three decades, Malcolm Blunt has been digging through stacks of U.S. government documents and illuminating their meaning. It took an English citizen, working in his spare time and sidetracking his holidays, to burrow deeply into the hidden and hiding-in-plain-sight facts of the John F. Kennedy assassination -- the most earth-shaking American crime of the 20th Century. Countless Kennedy scholars, authors and independent researchers have come to depend on Blunt for eye-popping discoveries that previously eluded them. I count myself among this crowd."  - David Talbot, author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America's Secret Government and Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years

“It is the mission of the Assassination Archives and Research Center to obtain, preserve and disseminate information on political assassinations. The founding fathers of this country understood that in order to be their own governors a people must “arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.” British researcher Malcolm Blunt’s knowledge of the internal operations of Cold War intelligence agencies is peerless. To put the matter Bluntly, this collection of conversations with Alan Dale is a fascinating and groundbreaking penetration of the secrecy which warps the roles of all major players on the global stage." - James (Jim) H. Lesar, president, Assassination Archives and Research Center

America does not know that over 2 million pages of documents were declassified 22 years ago on the JFK assassination. Those pages redefined the scope and the nature of President Kennedy's murder. Malcolm Blunt is one of the few who has read and collected many of those documents. Not many people know who he is, but for those who do know, he is a hidden hero in the Kennedy case.  - James DiEugenio, author, Destiny Betrayed

Have you ever wanted to be a fly on the wall listening-in on a conversation between two incredibly intelligent, informed and knowledgeable people as they discuss the CIA, the national security state during the Cold War, how the National Archives, maintains and hides records and documents, how the government hides and keeps its secrets, and the Kennedy assassination? Here’s your chance. Don't miss it.  - Dan Hardway, Attorney; Former staff investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations

BILL KELLY: 

The Devil is certainly is in the details, and is certainly moving players around on what David Talbot calls the Devil's Chessboard, and those who say that the JFK assassination records have all been released and there's no smoking gun or evidence of conspiracy are either ignorant of the known facts or lying about them, as Alan Dale and Malcolm Blunt so eloquently describe in this book. 

 

Alan Dale is a DC based jazz drummer and serious JFK researcher who knows his stuff, while Malcolm, I call him Sir Malcolm Blunt is a an English gentleman who has spent more time pouring over the documents among the JFK Collection at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) than anyone I know. 

Don't expect to read anything about the single-bullet-theory, the Zapruder film, Badge Man or Prayer Man, as this book is beyond those things, this book as about the top researchers in the country discussing what they have discovered among the millions of documents released under the JFK Act, the law of the land that is currently being ignored. 

When Malcolm Blunt first decided to enter the Archives and review the records he first considered focusing on one specific area - much like others, such as Ian Griggs focused on the Dallas PD, have done, narrowing their field of interest.  But instead Malcolm decided to go in with a completely open mind and take it all in, skimming documents and photocopying the ones of interest to read later. 

I first got a packet of dozens of JFK documents from him a number of years ago, and when I ran into him at the Wecht conference in Pittsburgh and the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC) conference in Bethesda he handed me reams of documents - feet thick, that took me months to read and digest. And I later learned he did the same with other researchers, dealing the documents out according to interests and areas of research. 

After I gave a presentation on the Air Force One radio transmission tapes at a breakout room in Bethesda, Alan Dale and Malcolm Blunt followed me and had a sort of Question and Answer session where Alan did most of the questioning and Malcolm did the answering. And I'm glad I stuck around as it was an eye opening session even to seasoned researchers. And with a proper transcript made of that session, I think that this book is a continuation of that, as most of this book consists of published transcripts of Dale's recorded conversations with not only Blunt, but other key researchers as well, including Professors Peter Dale Scott and John Newman and Bill Simpich and others. 

After a Dallas Conference a few years ago someone posted on Facebook that at a hotel restaurant they saw Newman, Simpich, Blunt, Dale and myself having coffee and breakfast, and would have loved to just sit in and absorb the conversation. Well now you can, thanks to Alan Dale and the cooperation of Sir Malcom and the others. As Dan Hardway says, this book is like being a fly on the wall as the top JFK assassination researchers talk among themselves. 

We've been having JFKASK, COPA, LANCER, CAPA and numerous other conferences for decades now, and as far as I'm concerned it's only entertainment - videotaped talking heads that you watch and listen to, until it's transcribed and posted or published, and then it becomes real research that you can refer to and site as the source of the facts. And that's one thing this book does. 

I'm proud and honored to be mentioned a few times in a positive light, one of which deals with my follow up investigation of one of the HSCA documents that Malcolm gave me - regarding the wife and son of a government attorney who flew to Europe on a Military Air Transport (MAC) flight to Europe sitting next to a USMC soldier named Oswald, who was from New Orleans, who had been stationed in Japan and San Diego and was now on an important mission - at the same time the historic Oswald was supposed to be on a steam ship out of New Orleans heading to France with the same story. I tracked down the source of the story, and located them in Ohio but both the lady and her son had passed away before I could get to them.

JFKcountercoup: Flight From McGuire

But that was only one of a dozen documents that Malcolm gave me that I followed up on, and another one is even more significant - the Pathfinder Plan. The first Pathfinder document I got was hand written, I suspect copied from CIA documents by Dan Hardway and Ed Lopez before they were banned from the CIA document vaults, and I had to transcribe it. Then someone referred me to the original source, which just happened to be reluctantly released to the public by the JFK Act, and as the CIA noted, was accidently found among Frank Sturgis' Security File, where it should not have been. 

This CIA document is an internal CIA memo from a senior director of the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) saying that eight former NPIC employees wanted to inform the Congress, who they learned was interested in CIA plans to assassinated Fidel Castro, that they worked on the Pathfinder Plan, which was a plan - not a plot - a plan to kill Castro with high powered rifles as he rode in an open jeep. The documents on the Pathfinder Plan were kept in the NPIC section of the JMWAVE station rather than the Operational Files where they should have been kept. 

Then yet another document quotes a retired NPIC secretary as saying that RFK - the attorney general at the time - called and ordered them to have relevant Castro-JFK files boxed and sent to the Smithsonian Institute - rather than the NARA where they belonged. So the NPIC references to the Pathfinder file was apparently intentionally misfiled in the Sturgis Security file, where it was accidently found, was kept in the NPIC section of the JMWAVE station instead of the Operational Files, where it belonged, and was last known to be boxed and sent to the Smithsonian instead of NARA. So we should not be surprised that the CIA can find no Pathfinder documents or records among its files today. 

JFKcountercoup: PATHFINDER - Parts 1 - 5 The Plan to Kill Castro Redirected to JFK at Dallas

While I am sure that the other researchers who Malcolm has worked with have similar stories, it is not the gems he has found among the vast amount of documents in the haystack, but what he has found missing. 

Besides the Pathfinder file, accidently discovered in the CIA's Security File, Blunt learned that of the seven volume CIA Security File on Oswald, Lee Harvey, volume five was missing! 

Then after years of trying to get permission to get into privately held records that were said to contain interviews with those in the US Marine Corps who knew or interacted with Oswald, they opened the box and volia! Not there. 

When former New York Times reporter Phil Shenon was interviewed on National Public Radio (NPR) he was asked if there was a network of JFK assassination researchers who compared notes and shared information. And while Shenon said yes, he wasn't included because he doesn't accept any of their silly conspiracy theories. But actually it's just the opposite - none of these cooperating researchers - Scott, Newman, Dale, Blunt, Simpich, et al., know who killed JFK, but we are trying to figure it out. And Shenon is not part of this network because they refuse to believe his silly and disproved conspiracy theory that Fidel Castro was behind the Dealey Plaza Operation, certified CIA disinformation that is still an "active measure" today. 

So don't tell me that the JFK assassination is ancient history, as the records are still being destroyed and withheld and the CIA is still promoting their black propaganda, some of which is dealt with in this new and important book. 

And this is the heart of that network of JFK Assassination researchers that the NPR won't invite to have these discussions on their public airways. 

This book is certainly not for anyone knew to this story, but it is a required addition to the book shelves of those who have taken up a study of this fascinating, and still unresolved case, the case of the murdered president. 

Bart Kemp is currently scanning and posting many of Malcolm Blunt's collection of documents at: 

Malcolm Blunt - Dealey Plaza UK

You can purchase the book here: 

Amazon.com: The Devil is in the Details: Alan Dale with Malcolm Blunt on the Assassination of President Kennedy eBook: Dale, Alan, Blunt, Malcolm: Kindle Store

BILL KELLY is Research Coordinator for CAPA - Citizens Against Political Assassination - CAPA-US.org 

He can be reached at billkelly3@gamail.com 

https://www.gofundme.com/f/supportjfkcountercoup