Left-Wing Radio Host: MLK Assassinated by U.S. Government

Some Martin Luther King birthday events happened this week (the real birthday is January 15), and the official ones take place Monday. But on the 14th, wacky leftist radio host Mike Malloy charged that King was murdered by the government (then headed by Lyndon Johnson):

"The argument has been made that one of the reasons that the US government assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. was because of his speech at Riverside Church in New York, I think it was Riverside Church, where he came out fully against the war in southeast Asia and fully against the policies that were being perpetuated against the American people in general. He left his little safe niche of, oh, well, he's a spokesman for the Negroes, and stepped outside that and started taking on greater issues and so the United States government said, well, it's time to get rid of this guy."

Malloy's angry government must have been on a really slow burn, since King's Riverside speech was on April 4, 1967 -- in fact, exactly one year before he was shot in Memphis.