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

The Real James Bond - A True Story of Identity Theft, Avian Intrigue and Ian Fleming

 The Real James Bond – A True Story of Identity Theft, Avian Intrigue and Ian Fleming, by Jim Wright (Schiffer Publishing, 2020)

Most of the people of the civilized world are familiar with James Bond – the most famous spy in history, either from the 100 million books Ian Fleming wrote that were sold, or the literally billions of people who have seen the popular movies originally based on Fleming’s stories.

But few people know about the real James Bond, the Philadelphia ornithologist and author of the book “Birds of the West Indies.”

Jim Wright comes into the real James Bond story as a birdwatcher from Philadelphia, author of birding books – “The Nature of the Meadowlands,” “Jungle of the Maya” and “Hawk Mountain,” and birding columnist for the Bergen (NJ) Record, near were he currently lives.

Although it appears he has never met the real James Bond, he did do his research and quotes extensively from the published record, especially Mrs. Bond’s books “How 007 Really Got His Name,” and “Far Afield in the Caribbean,” as well as David Contesta’s official biography of James Bond, the former curator of Birds at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences and author of the books “Birds of the West Indies” and “Field Guide to the Birds of the West Indies.”

It just so happened that English author Ian Fleming, vacationing at his Jamaican beach house he called Goldeneye, kept a copy of “Birds of the West Indies” on his breakfast table, and when it came time for him to sit down and write the “spy story to end all spy stories,” which was to be “Casino Royale,” he took the name of the author of the book in front of him – James Bond, for his spy, who also has the moniker Double-O-Seven.

While there are many real life spies who they say were used to develop the character of 007, including Dusko Popov, Canadian Sir William Stephenson (INTREPID), Ian Fleming’s brother Peter – and Fleming himself, there is only one real James Bond, whose name is James Bond, the author of the book “Birds of the West Indies.”

I came into the story from a different direction – having read a Philadelphia Magazine article on the assassination of President Kennedy written by Michael Marlow that mentioned a man named Cummins Catherwood, and his Catherwood Foundation, though his connection to the assassination was not spelled out. I did however, notice in the book “The Invisible Government” by David Wise and Thomas Ross, that Catherwood’s Foundation was listed as a footnote among other similar foundations that were used by the CIA to secretly dispurse money for its covert operations.

So I did what I usually do when I come across a new name, and went to the Philadelphia Bulletin newspaper archives, also called the morgue, and looked up Catherwood’s newspaper clips. The Bulletin paid dozens of women to clip every article of every edition of their paper, circling each name and putting the clipping that referred to that person in an envelop with his name on it and filed it away.

Catherwood’s envelope was quite thick, and as I sat and read it the CIA connections were readily apparent – the funding of the Cuban Aide Relief to assist professional Cubans who escaped Castro’s Cuba, support for the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, a trip as a tourist to Soviet Russia, and the construction of a large sailing yacht, “The Vigilant.”

Then I came across an interesting article about how Catherwood sailed the Vigilant down to the Caribbean with four scientists aboard, including James Bond, “whose main interest is birds.”

For a moment I thought it was a joke, a CIA operative with Catherwood was using the alias of James Bond, but then I looked at the date – 1948 – years before Ian Fleming began writing his 007 books. I then went over to the Bulletin file and looked under Bond, James, and came across a much thinner envelop with articles about Bond, his book “Birds of the West Indies,” and his wife Mary Wickham, who wrote the book “How 007 Really Got His Name.”

When I got a copy of “Birds of the West Indies,” I took it up to the Bond’s apartment at Hill House in Chestnut Hill, adjacent to the train station and knocked on their door. Mrs. Bond answered and when I showed her the book and asked to have it signed by Mr. Bond she called out, “Jimmy, there’s a young man here to see you.”

Jimmy? I thought. Yes, James Bond is very American, and he appeared appropriately in a tux, as the Bonds were getting ready to go to a social ball. He graciously signed my book, and asked me to come back sometime to talk, and I did return a number of times and had pleasant conversations with him, some of which I recount in my yet unpublished manuscript – “The Mystery of Goldeneye – James Bond and Ian Fleming – The Men and the Myth,” and blog – James Bond Authenticus.

In Chapter 009, Wright notes: that John Pearson’s fictional “James Bond: The Authorized Biography of 007,” that “posited that Fleming’s real purpose in writing the 007 stories was to make his fictional Bond such a comic-book superhero that the Russians would fail to take the real Bond seriously, thereby allowing him to continue his secret work. Other theorists – notably William Kelly in his blog James Bond Authenticus – have explored that possibility, combing through Bond’s career and Mary’s memories for clues pointing to a life of espionage. Could it have been possible?” 

[ Jamesbondauthenticus  ]

Wright mentions a few of the clues – Bond attended St. Paul’s School, that provided numerous OSS agents during World War II, and Cambridge Trinity College, home of the Cambridge spy ring, and was a member of the Pitt Club, a hunting and dining club that also included Sir Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, two of the most notorious double agents of our time. He neglects to mention Bond’s voyage on a ship with Somerset Maughan, an important literary figure and British Intelligence agent, his trip with CIA bagman Cumming Catherwood, his birding tour of the Bay of Pigs shortly before the CIA invasion and numerous other cluesq.

But my hypothesis is not just to theorize on whether the real James Bond was a spy, though there’s much evidence of it, but that most if not all of the fictional characters Fleming writes about are based on real people known to Fleming – including Bond, 007’s CIA sidekick Felix Leiter, Quarrel the Cayman islander, “M” and “Q,” Pussy Galore, even Catherwood himself is parodied in one of Fleming’s short stories.

At first I was a bit leery about Wright’s book, as I was familiar with the previously published literature, and was afraid Jim Wright would have easily appropriated some of my work much as Fleming had appropriated the name for his secret agent from James Bond. But no worries, Wright puts together a very detailed and photographically illustrated biography of the real Bond, but he doesn’t appropriate any of my work, so I still have a chance of getting published some day.

The closest my manuscript came to getting published was when an editor for Turner Books in Atlanta called to say they were going to discuss publishing my manuscript at a board meeting that day, but I was later informed that when the subject came up it was dismissed because they had already agreed to publish Andrew Lycette’s second official biography of Ian Fleming (after John Pearson), and the Lycette’s book and mine would clash.

The one good thing that Jim Wright’s book “The Real James Bond” does is put to rest the false impression given by both official biographies of Ian Fleming – that the real James Bond took the whole thing as a joke, when in fact he deeply resented the invasion of his privacy and the problems that the whole 007 phenomenon caused him. 

As Wright puts it, "....The tale of Ian Fleming and the real James Bond has developed a life of its own, gradually accumulating embellishments and inaccuracies - beginning with the oft-repeated assertion that Bond gave Fleming permission to take his name and that Bond enjoyed the fame. In fact, Bond grew to hate the 007 connection even as his wife, Mary, did her best to promote it. And although the appropriation of his identity caught Bond by surprise, there is a long tradition of ornithologist spies - including at least seven of his contemporaries. Some people have even speculated that the real James Bond was a spy as well." 

When they finally met at Goldeneye, in February 1964, six months before Fleming's death, Bond told him right off, "'I don't read your books. My wife reads them, but I never do.' I didn't want to fly under false colors." To which Fleming responded, "I don't blame you." 

The problems included lonely girls finding his name in the public phone book and calling him at all hours of the night. It also made it hard getting across borders with the three main tools of his trade - shotgun for shooting bird specimens, scalpel for cleaning them, and arsenic for curing them. The 290 bird specimens he collected over the decades are now enshrined at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, where he was curator of Birds. 

Wright’s chapter on whether the real James Bond was a spy skips over all of the evidence I had uncovered, but it does get a response from the CIA on the question. Michael Lavergne, the CIA’s information and policy coordinator, wrote a response to Wright's Freedom of Information Act request: 

“After conducting a search reasonably calculated to uncover all relevant documents, we did not locate any responsive records that would reveal an openly acknowledge CIA affiliation with the subject. To the extent your request also seeks records that would reveal a classified association between the CIA and the subject, if any exist, we can neither confirm or deny having such records, pursuant to Section 3.6(a) of Executive Order 13526, as amended. If a classified association between the subject and this organization were to exist, records revealing such a relationship would be properly classified and require continued safeguards against unauthorized disclosure.”

So if James Bond was a real CIA operative they wouldn't tell you anyway. 

Jim Wright’s book is a clear, concise, and graphic portrait of James Bond, American ornithologist, from whom Ian Fleming appropriated the name for his secret agent 007. While those billions of people who are thrilled with the stories and movies will probably not be interested in him, the real James Bond did live a life even more interesting than the fictional 007. Those naturalists interested in birds, and real 007 aficionados will find this book fascinating, especially since the other published works on the subject are out of print or hard to find.

With the recent death of Sean Connery, and the impending release of the next 007 film, this book is timed right, and I hope people read it and enjoy the story, as it gives life to the possibility of my manuscript - The Mystery of Goldeneye - James Bond and Ian Fleming - the Men and the Myth, will eventually be published someday.

William Kelly

December 31, 2020

Billkelly3@gmail.com

The Life and Deaths of Cyril Wecht

 The Life and Deaths of Cyril Wecht - Memoirs of America's Most Controversial Forensic Pathologist - by Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D. and Jeff M. Sewald (Exposit, Jefferson, N.C., 2020) 

Dr. Wecht is the best educated, smartest, wisest, passionate, and most honorable and interesting person I have known, and I've met my share of interesting personalities in my fifty years as a reporter and journalist. I have worked closely with him on the JFK case since the early 1990s, first with COPA - the Coalition on Political Assassinations, and now serving on the board of directors with CAPA - Citizens Against Political Assassinations. Along with Professor Peter Dale Scott, I consider him a primary mentor, and seek his advice on issues I think are important, and he's never let me down. After all these years I thought I knew everything about him, but this autobiography brings out the details and the best of the man I thought I knew. 

You can't know Dr. Wecht without knowing that his hometown is his beloved Pittsburgh, and he tells his story to Pittsburgh writer and filmmaker Jeff Sewald, whose films include "Gridiron and Steel," a documentary focusing on the spiritual relationship between the sport of football and the people of southwest Pennsylvania, and "We Knew What We Had: The Greatest Jazz Story Never Told," that chronicles the history of jazz music in Pittsburgh. 

After writing  45 professional books for doctors and lawyers, this is Dr. Wecht's ninth popular book, and a tenth is on the way that will deal exclusively with his role in the JFK assassination. That is one case of many, some of which are dealt with in this book, that depicts the major events of his life and career, including the deaths of a number of celebrities - Elvis Presley, Nicole Brown Simpson, JonBenet Ramsey, Laci Paterson, et al, that the readers of tabloid magazines will find fascinating. And he gives just as much attention to detail to little people, whose deaths don't make headlines. It is his life however, that intrigues me, and his role in the investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy that I am most interested. 

Now 89 years old, Dr. Wecht has not slowed down, works every day, still conducting forensic autopsies of those who have passed away, been murdered or have died suspiciously, averaging 500 a year, - that's more than one a day. He also responds to requests for interviews from students, reporters and television media, especially when a celebrity dies. He also makes presentation before various community and professional groups, invariably asked about the topic he is most known for - the assassination of President Kennedy, and he talks to any group that asks him, much to the chagrin of his associates and peers. 

In Washington D.C. a few years ago, Dr. Wecht left the Assassinations Archives and Research Center (AARC) conference in Bethesda to talk to a competing conference that included Republican dirty trickster Roger Stone, who had written a book blaming the assassination of JFK on LBJ, and disgraced professor James Fetzer, who had denied the Sandy Hook massacre ever occurred. While Dr. Wecht didn't actually share the stage with them or endorse their beliefs, and had some profane words to describe them when asked, he stuck to his policy of talking to any group who asks. He later caused a major riff in his own organization, CAPA, for which he is chairman, when he left a Dallas CAPA conference to address a competing conference run by a women who claimed to be Lee Harvey Oswald's girlfriend. "I don't care whether it is true or not," Wecht said, "it doesn't matter whose screwing around with who." So he addressed the conference without endorsing the beliefs of any of the other speakers, explaining how he became involved in the JFK case, and where it stands today. 

It is how Dr. Wecht got to where he is today that I found most interesting. It was while a full-time resident in pathology at Pitt 1957-1959 when he also began to study law, and became involved in Committee for the Medical Examiner System that he began to compile information on new developments in forensic pathology and examined the inner workings of the Allegheney County Coroner's office, "which we found incredibly backward, and said so - publicly." 

The office, run by those incompetent to do so professionally, didn't have a proper autopsy table or even a microscope. But that was before he could do anything about it. In the meantime, he was called for military service, and was enlisted in the Air Force. 

"As a man in uniform," Wecht explains, "I caught a break by being stationed at the Air Force's largest hospital, Maxwell Air Force Base, in Montgomery, Alabama. Comprising more than 400 beds and staffed with specialists in a variety of medical fields, it was the Air Force's hub when it came to pathology. Approximately 28 Air Force bases throughout the Southeast regularly sent us specimens for study, and the workload kept me and my military colleague plenty busy - yet, typically not busy enough for me. But before long, the full-court press of my professional life and personal ambition was tamed ever so slightly by a young, attractive Norwegian-born women: Sigrid Ronsdal, Airman First Class." 

After meeting on a double-date, they were married in Pittsburgh, have three sons and a daughter, each successful in their professions.

As I was reading Dr. Wecht's service at Maxwell Air Force Base, where he met his wife Sigrid, I was working on another story, one about how Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay led a two day conference of Air Force generals at Maxwell a week before President Kennedy was killed. I was corresponding with a Maxwell base historian, which I thought was another of those interesting and quirky coincidences. 

In 1964 Dr. Wecht was asked to address the 1965 AAFS meeting on the Warren Report conclusions from the perspectives of pathology, toxicology, psychiatry, criminalistics, anthropology, etc., so he went to the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh to review the Warren Report and accompanying 26 volumes. "To my astonishment," he says, "I found that, other than a small and incomplete one at the tail end of Volume 15, it had no index. My contention has always been that the Feds had done this deliberately so that neither the American public nor the news media would bother to read let alone research the report. But no matter. Eventually, I was able to pull together the information that I needed, prepare my presentation and deliver it at the annual conference of the AAFS, in February 1965. And I've been up to my eyeballs with the JFK assassination ever since." 

In 1978 Dr. Wecht served on the forensic-pathology panel for the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), reviewing and analyzing the Warren Commission Report regarding the assassination of President Kennedy, in which he filed a minority report, disagreeing with the majority of those on the panel. He was also granted the opportunity to be the first non-governmental forensic scientist to review the autopsy materials of John F. Kennedy. 

Dr. Wecht was known to be honest and truthful about his analysis, and couldn't be paid to say something he didn't believe, and that is the reason I think he was intentionally excluded from key meetings and interviews the rest of the panel kept him ignorant of, just like the two primary autopsy doctors Humes and Boswell, kept Dr. Pierre Finck from a post autopsy review of what was left of JFK's brain. Neither Humes nor Boswell, US Navy doctors, had never conducted an autopsy of a gunshot wound before, and while Army doctor Finck had, he was late and arrived at the autopsy after the brain had been removed. Dr. Wecht thinks his exclusion from the HSCA meetings and Finck's exclusion from the brain exam and subsequent exile were intentional. When Wecht was given permission to examine the autopsy material, he found that the remnants of the brain were missing, and unaccounted for. 

As Dr. Wecht concludes: "For me, when it comes to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the arrow on the dial of guilt keeps pointing to the CIA, for a host of reasons. The CIA was at loggerheads with Kennedy about his approach to handling Fidel Castro and Cuba, which the agency saw as appeasement, or being 'soft on communism.' The CIA also resented the President's refusal to provide (air) cover for the Cuban exiles brigade, which had been trained and funded by the U.S. government and the CIA for the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961...." 

When he gets annoyed or passionate about something, Dr. Wecht's profanity explodes, and he doesn't hide it in this book, as he says, "I'll tell you another thing: JFK was not killed by the Mafia. They wouldn't have had the balls to knock off a sitting President...." 

"My adversarial attitude toward government - and, at times, the press - is what always made me appear dangerous to the establishment (and sometimes to myself). In my opinion, the level of paranoia in America knows no bounds, and this includes the criminal justice system and corporate media. When you're a professional person considering the murder of a sitting president - I'm talking about my colleagues in forensic science and the press - and you chose to stand by the official government version of events, how can you reverse that later on, even when new evidence accrues against it? You can't. You're stuck, and so are they." 

As he quotes Joseph Conrad saying, "You shall judge a man by his enemies as well as his friends," and they they have certainly retaliated. As the newly released JFK assassination records reveal, he was intentionally kept out of key interviews and meetings of the House Select Committee on Assassination (HSCA) pathology panel, undoubtedly because they knew he would not just agree to go along with their cover up. 

Those who hire Dr. Wecht as a special witness on a case know going in he will not just say what they want him to say but what his analysis concludes after a detailed review of the evidence. 

In 2008 those his enemies with the power to do so went after him with a vengeance, accusing him of abusing the office he had been repeatedly elected to, including, among other things, of having his secretary attend to non-official business, something every CEO could be accused of. 

As Jeff Sewald puts it in his introduction: "At an age when many American men have either already left us or are spending their time playing golf or sunning themselves in Florida,... Cyril Wecht found himself confronting a ginned-up 84-count federal indictment for 'abuse of public office.' The trial that followed had an undercurrent of local political skullduggery and a gallery of colorful supporting players, including a hard-nosed defense attorney; a kindly Catholic nun who described the government agents who were seated in the courtroom during the trial as a 'pack of mad dogs'" Mephistophelian federal prosecutors; a discredited FBI agent; and a conniving and soulless district attorney. Had our protagonist been caught in a vast and sticky web of dirty politics, professional opportunism and personal revenge? We'll present Cyril's case." 

And he does. As did the Republican governor of Pennsylvania who came to his aide at the time, and even Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania senator who remained friends with Dr. Wecht over the years, despite their very public and heated arguments over the single-bullet-theory. Specter even attended and made a presentation at a JFK assassination Conference hosted by the Wecht Center for Forensic Science and Law at Duquesne University. 

"I have been speaking about the JFK assassination for decades, on TV and in the press, and at many venues including the Cyril H. Wecht Institute  of Forensic Science and Law, and at conferences sponsored by Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA), an organization for which I am Chairman. Through CAPA, my colleague and I remain in pursuit of the release of the remaining records related to the assassination. Our goal is to find the truth, once and for, and to seek justice." 

As the Research Coordinator for CAPA and serving on the board of directors, I have been participating in twice monthly conference calls with Dr. Wecht, who runs the meetings smoothly, confidently and occasionally spiced with humor, getting things done and not beating around the bush. 

From my research into the historical and detailed circumstances of the assassination, and his extensive analysis of the forensic pathology aspects, we have both come to the same conclusion, while we don't know exactly who killed the President, what occurred at Dealey Plaza at 12:30 pm on November 22, 1963 was a covert intelligence operation designed to deceive and a coup d'etat, the violent change in government power. 

And I believe we will soon obtain the remaining sealed government records and we will obtain our goal of finding the truth, though at this point in time, justice will be fleeting. 

Bill Kelly Billkelly3@gmail.com 

The Life and Deaths of Cyril Wecht: Memoirs of America's Most Controversial Forensic Pathologist: J.D., Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., Jeff Sewald: 9781476684246: Amazon.com: Books

Citizens Against Political Assassination

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