Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. assassination. King had been targeted by COINTELPRO and had also been under surveillance by military intelligence agencies during the period leading up to his assassination under the code name Operation Lantern Spike. A church minister, Ronald Denton Wilson, claimed his father, Henry Clay Wilson, assassinated Martin Luther King Jr., not James Earl Ray. He stated, "It wasn't a racist thing; he thought Martin Luther King was connected with communism, and he wanted to get him out of the way." But Wilson had reportedly previously admitted his father was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. In 2004, Jesse Jackson, who
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Dwight sculpture) vandalized with red paint. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Dwight sculpture) Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is an outdoor 2007 bronze sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr. by American artist Ed Dwight, installed at Hermann Park's McGovern Centennial Gardens in Houston, Texas, in the United States. The sculpture was vandalized with white paint in August 2017. John D. Harden, Margaret Kadifa, Mike Morris, and Brooke A. Lewis of the "Houston Chronicle" noted that the vandalism occurred around the same time that protesters demanded the removal of Confederate monuments and memorials in Houston, and the same day that the city's statue