Jesse Jackson, who was with King at the time of his death, noted:

"The fact is there were saboteurs to disrupt the march. (And) within our own organization, we found a very key person who was on the government payroll. So infiltration within, saboteurs from without and the press attacks... I will never believe that James Earl Ray had the motive, the money and the mobility to have done it himself. Our government was very involved in setting the stage for and I think the escape route for James Earl Ray."

King biographer David Garrow disagrees with William F. Pepper's claims that the government killed King. He is supported by King assassination author Gerald Posner.

In April 6, 2002, New York Times reported a church minister, Rev. Ronald Denton Wilson, claimed his father, Henry Clay Wilson, - not James Earl Ray - assassinated Rev Martin Luther King Jr. 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."

King and the FBI

John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office with various civil rights activists including Martin Luther King 

King had a mutually antagonistic relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), especially its director, J. Edgar Hoover, who felt tracking King was a waste of federal money. The FBI began tracking King and the SCLC in 1961. Its investigations were largely superficial until 1962, when it learned that one of King's most trusted advisers was New York City lawyer Stanley Levison. The Bureau of Investigation found that Levison had been involved with the Communist Party USA - to which another key King lieutenant, Hunter Pitts O'Dell, was also linked by sworn testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). The Bureau placed wiretaps on Levison and King's home and office phones, and bugged King's rooms in hotels as he traveled across the country. The Bureau also informed then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and then-President John F. Kennedy, both of whom unsuccessfully tried to persuade King to dissociate himself from Levison. For his part, King adamantly denied having any connections to communism, stating in a 1965 Playboy that "there are as many communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida "; to which Hoover responded by calling King "the most notorious liar in the country."

The attempt to prove that King was a communist was in keeping with the feeling of many segregationists that blacks in the South were happy with their lot, but had been stirred up by "communists" and "outside agitators." Lawyer-advisor Stanley D. Levinson did have ties with the Communist Party in various business dealings, but the FBI refused to believe its own intelligence bureau reports that Levinson was no longer associated in that capacity. Movement leaders countered that voter disenfranchisement, lack of education and employment opportunities, discrimination and vigilante violence were the reasons for the strength of the Civil Rights Movement, and that blacks had the intelligence and motivation to organize on their own.

HUAC later was discredited for its coercion of witnesses and the manner in which it sought to implicate individuals with vague and often sweeping accusations and assumptions of guilt by association. The committee was renamed in 1969 and eventually abolished.