High School Teacher Pens Book on Martin Luther King Assassination Plot

teacher and author Stuart Wexler had chills when he was in Jackson, Mississippi. Although his fear wasn’t deep rooted, he said being in the same city as a major criminal whose network you’re researching is unnerving.

The 1994 Hightstown High School graduate and teacher for the past eight years co-authored the book The Awful Grace of God with Larry Hancock, which dives deep into the civil rights-era South and connects the dots in a multi-year plot to assassinate Martin Luther King Jr.

The book’s real life villains come in the form of the White Knights, the most militant of the Ku Klux Klan’s resurgences. According to Wexler, one of the book’s most significant contributions to the understanding of the King assassination was an unearthing of two very serious plots against Martin Luther King.

Wexler said the plots emanated from white supremacists and took the form of high dollar bounties offered to dangerous criminals. Before research on the book began, no one had put enough pieces together to see the plots existed, much less were connected to each other, Wexler said. 

“In that sense, the biggest single piece of data we uncovered was a living witness who was actually offered the bounty,” Wexler said in an email. “His story, heavily corroborated by outside sources, may be the key to unraveling what happened on April 4, 1968 [the date of King’s assassination].”

It took more than six to seven years to research the book and was released on April 1, according to Wexler. “Most of it took place during summers but I also used weekends and downtime like vacations,” he said.

One of the most noteworthy people Wexler and Hancock contacted during the course of their research was the Reverend Ed King, a white minister from Mississippi who, while not a relation of Martin Luther King, was a major figure in the civil rights movement.

“Ed was especially active with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and many of the civil rights era violence we explored was targeted against his friends and groups that he was a part of,” Wexler said. “In fact, we dedicated the book to him.”

The co-authors also had ongoing contact with the reporter Jerry Mitchell, who is one of the leading investigative reporters in the country on the issue of civil rights, Wexler said. 

“He featured our work on a number of occasions in his paper and on his blog and was a tremendous resource for us,” Wexler said.

To research the book, Wexler and Hancock had to sift through thousands of declassified files.

“I’m actually kind of a nerd if it is a topic that interests me,” Wexler said. “There are long periods of monotony but eventually you hit pay dirt and it focuses your research for the rest of the day. In my case, the main source of files was online in a fully searchable database, so when you find a potentially interesting lead, you can trace it through the file stream in a much quicker fashion.”

Wexler also noted that although the Ku Klux Klan and the National States Rights Party certainly fit the definition of terrorist organizations in that they used violence and fear to accomplish a political goal, what was surprising to find was the goal itself.

“At least at the top of some of these organizations were a group of people motivated by a distorted version of Christianity rather than just the hope of resisting integration,” he said. 

He observed that if there was something unnerving about writing the book it was the degree to which those people could manipulate their rank-and-file members for their religious aims of creating a race war.

“More than that, the way in which their religious ideology allowed for cooperation and coordination between those leaders was scary,” he said.