CHAPTER 16
The Meeting
How did not just the life but also the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., my father, define not just me, my brother, sisters, cousins, and our generation, but also the whole of a generation behind us, the whole of the hip-hop nation? How can that be, when there was no hip-hop nation in 1968?
Oh, but there was a hip-hop nation in 1968. The whole continuum of fashion, music, film, videos, canvas artistry, advertising, and whatever helps define that generation after ours, was already being influenced by the actions of the children of 1968, who would become their parents.
It gleamed in the eyes of the youth of all denominations, combed up and Vaselined down, flirting with their eyes while filing down the rain-slicked street into the fortress of Mason Temple, behind the Fowler Homes housing project, south of downtown Memphis, on a rainy April night of that year. The hiphop nation, who would be in their twenties and early thirties in the year 2000, were the future children of the children then filing into Mason Temple.
Mason Temple is world headquarters of the Pentecostals—Church of God in Christ. It all comes out of the church—music, activism, social gospel, culture—all from the influence of the black church. It often takes a form of music. In Parting the Waters, author Taylor Branch sensed it: “The spirit of the songs could sweep up the crowd, and the young leaders realized that through song they could induce humble people to say and feel things that were otherwise beyond them.” On Wednesday, April 3, 1968, youth of an R&B and gospel world joined the aged, coming by bus, car, and foot to hear my father. And what he gave them was knowledge.
[If] the Almighty said to me, “Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?” I would take my mental flight by Egypt [“Yeah”], and I would watch God’s children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather, across the Red Sea, through the wilderness, on toward the Promised Land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn’t stop there. [“All right”]
I would move on by Greece, and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides, and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon [Applause], and I would watch them around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality. But I wouldn’t stop there. [“Oh yeah”]
… I would even go by the way that the man for whom I’m named had his habitat, and I would watch Martin Luther as he tacks his ninety-five theses on the door at the church of Wittenberg. But I wouldn’t stop there. [“All right”]
I would come on up even to 1863 and watch a vacillating president by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. But I wouldn’t stop there. [“Yeah.” Applause]
I would even come up to the early thirties and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation, and come with an eloquent cry that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” But I wouldn’t stop there. [“All right”]
Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty and say, “If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy.” [Applause]
… Well, I don’t know what will happen now; we’ve got some difficult days ahead. [“Amen”] But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. [“Yeah.” Applause] And I don’t mind. [Applause continues] Like anybody, I would like to live a long life—longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. [“Yeah”] And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. [“Go ahead”] And I’ve looked over [“Yes sir”], and I’ve seen the Promised Land. [“Go ahead”] I may not get there with you. [“Go ahead”] But I want you to know tonight [“Yes”], that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. [Applause, “Go ahead, go ahead”] And so I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. [Applause]
Listen to all of that speech sometime. It covered the entire social fabric of the time. Then it was over. And then… pandemonium. Fast-forward past him exiting Room 306 at the Lorraine at approximately 6 P.M. the next afternoon, standing on the balcony, about to go back in the room for his coat, past the report of a single rifle shot; then past infernos, and sirens everywhere; Bobby Kennedy shot in L.A.; Afros blooming, braiding, locking; Ali saying, “I ain’t got nothing against them Viet Congs”; Uncle A.D., an expert swimmer, drowning; Jimi Hendrix showing “The Star-Spangled Banner” could be done in amplified electric; Superfly, The Godfather, and The Mack all written, shot, or released within nine months of each other in ’72; my blessed grandmother, shot down from the pulpit of my church where I grew up; George Clinton stepping out of a silk and wool double-vented suit and tie in the mid-’60s, cutting the conk off his head, and becoming godfather of a new grooved nation—Puff Daddy’s daddy. No one has yet covered Clinton’s “(I Wanna) Testify” (1967). James Earl Ray always did say he wanted to hum along to that.
The Staple Singers and Mavis (favorites of Daddy’s) came from gospel into secular with a purpose, a cause, with “Respect Yourself,” then “I’ll Take You There” (1974). Their starchildren became the Winans, Kirk Franklin having church in “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” and “Stomp.” “The Sweeter He Is (The Longer the Pain’s Gonna Hurt),” cried the Soul Children (1970); they begat BLACKstreet, Jodeci—all out of the church. Louis Armstrong once told a videographer, “It all started in the sanctified church; how you gonna get away from it? That’s where the beat started.”
Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” A seminal question coming out of assassinations, like Daddy’s, out of conflict like the Civil Rights Movement, like the Vietnam War. Rafael Saddiq of the hiphop nation could sing “I Been Thinking of You” because Al Green, Reverend Al, sang it from the pulpit of his church in Memphis; Green sang after my father was shot, “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?” Missy Elliott broke out in ’97 with “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),” beating a rhythmic raindrop, yodeling the hook. After he was shot, a preacher’s child, Ann Peebles, all of four foot ten, kicked the same hook over the same raindrop, over the same yodel, but not as hard a bottom line. Ann sang it hard in Memphis, in ’71: “I Can’t Stand the Rain.” I did my research. I went to Memphis as a man. I saw. The Sound is what you can use. The Sound is what I shared with Memphis. The Sound was in it, and in me. Only the Sound is there. That’s all that has to be there. Just the Way. Music is the Way. It holds the message.
I can’t stand the ra-in… ’gainst my window… bringing back sweet memories…
From mountaintop into the valley. The straight-up-don’t-give-a-damn-no-more attitude of mass creativity and material confusion—all the Big Wave of hip-hop, from its saddest to its most materialistic and nihilistic forms—was born after our father Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot!
The Sound began when Afrika Bambaataa scratched it up in the Bronx in the late ’70s. I had tried to take it into deejaying. Deejaying had a purpose. The Sound was philosophy, the artists philosophers. So the Sound, it’s always there for me—for us. But the Sound was not the reason.
The reason, the stimulus, the jump-start that began all the Noise of Big Wave hip-hop, can be traced back to Memphis, where a luckless man with no skills named James Earl Ray is said to have brought down a great man who was my father. James Earl Ray, who could screw up boiling water; James Earl Ray, who was uncomfortable in the military, not a trained sharpshooter, who had never drawn down on a person before with a rifle in his life that we know of or that was ever proved; James Earl Ray, escaped con doing time in Missouri for a $150 grocery store knockover, who later said he bought a rifle on orders from a man named Raul, who supposedly had connections with the Mafia’s Memphis branch; James Earl Ray, who woke up screaming one night at age ten because he thought he’d lost his eyesight (the room was dark), whose prison warden said he was “fearful,” who fellow inmates called “Trembler.” After a lifetime of failure, you mean to tell me that completely on his own James Earl Ray pulled off a skilled expert sniper’s shot—one shot only—that blew off our father’s jawbone, severed his spinal column, and broke thirty million hearts that kept living, giving birth, making music? All that’s happened since is the same thing, over and over again—the best hooks sung, the good brothers shot, over and over again. Somebody had to try to interrupt that deadly cycle. Somebody had to say or do something. Or it would just be the same thing, over and over, until somebody confronted what happened and asked, “Why?” And maybe “How?”
It began with my initial face-to-face contact with Dr. William Pepper, which came in February of ’97, with Isaac and Phil. My first encounter via correspondence was probably ’95, when he had sent Orders to Kill to each one of my family members individually with letters saying, “I would like you to consider what I’ve written here. I really want an opportunity to bring the truth out, to bring it to life.”
At that point, I think nobody could get beyond the fact that though he’d known and worked with our father, he was still Ray’s lawyer. He’d written a book about the assassination, in that respect possibly being no different from Ray’s first lawyer, Arthur Hanes, who authorized a book called He Slew the Dreamer, by William Bradford Huie. Huie and Hanes had a deal. Huie didn’t want Ray to even testify in his own defense because it would take away from Ray’s comments in the book. This paved the way for the next lawyer, Percy Foreman, who put down Hanes and then cut his own deal with Huie after Ray dumped Hanes and brought him in. Foreman insisted that Ray plead guilty.
Later on, there were several more books about my father’s assassination. Dozens of them, actually. Mark Lane, another of Ray’s lawyers, Taylor Branch, and even Dick Gregory, wrote about it. Ray also had many lawyers over the years. All along, I don’t think we focused on it very much because we were unconsciously not ready to deal with it. Then that blue-green laser light hit me on the balcony of the Lorraine, and I had this feeling that I wanted to know. Why? How? Who?
At first, we hadn’t responded to Pepper, feeling we should “just leave it alone.”
Fast-forward to December ’96; Ray went into the hospital for liver disease and entered a coma. Immediately we started getting calls from the media. Over the years, every time something would happen with Ray, we would get some type of call from the media. Like when he was stabbed in prison and almost killed. Okay, well you’re a victim, the victimizer is in prison and something has happened to him, how does that make you feel? In this case, it was “James Earl Ray is in the hospital and there’s a chance he may die. Any comment? Do you believe Ray actually killed your father?” This question I remember being asked almost all my life.
I hadn’t been there. I was seven years old at the time. So what was I expected to say?
We took the standard approach—“No comment.” We really didn’t deal with it. Then Ray would recuperate for a time. Three weeks later he’d have a relapse and go back in. Every time that happened, we got a call—not a call, we got bombarded with calls.
I was traveling, on vacation, down to Negril in Jamaica. I happened to call in, and it probably was a mistake to call in and check my messages; I had a number on there. It was a New York Times reporter who said, “We’re trying to reach you because we have been contacted by the Ray family behind the scenes, off the record.” They were making a plea, they wanted to make an appeal to my family; their loved one was about to die; while they know it’s awkward that they never bothered in the past, they feel it’s now or never, but would we please consider making a statement in support of a new trial for James Earl Ray so that his guilt or his innocence could be fairly determined once and for all?
The Atlanta bureau chief of the New York Times had interviewed me in the past, which is how he got my pager number. I had to respond. Now it went beyond just “No comment.” I spoke to a woman reporter, following up. The bureau chief was out of the office. I said I’d run it by my family, but to bear with me, because I was traveling overseas. My brother and sisters were traveling; getting everybody on one call would take some doing; be patient, I’ll get back.
My brother and sisters and mother and I had a conference call and took a consensus. I went around to everybody and asked, “What do you think?” Bernice was indifferent. She said, “God will judge, brother.” But Yolanda said, “… I’ve been wanting to know, Dexter. I feel like we should know what happened. And why.” She sounded expectant. Never have I loved her more or felt more powerless to comfort her. Long ago she was exasperated with me for asking why. Now…
Ultimately the consensus was, Let’s make a statement supporting a new trial. We talked about Marcus Wayne Chenault, Big Mama’s murderer, how my grandfather forgave him and made us see the logic of it; how it was Christian; whether Ray did it or not, he deserved a trial. If Daddy was living, he would have forgiven him. He forgave the woman who stabbed him in the chest at a Harlem department store and almost took his life. We didn’t know at that point what the outcome would be. We hadn’t seen evidence, but we had heard that new evidence had come to light. We said we’d hold a press conference to announce we supported a new trial. That made the New York Times.
So when I got back, it was February. That’s when I met with Pepper—me, my cousin Isaac, and Phil. Initially I was skeptical. I didn’t know Pepper from Adam. But once he told me face-to-face about his relationship with Dad, how he had admired him, how they were friends (authenticated by Mother), and he produced photos of him and my father being friendly and cordial with each other, then told me about why he did it, represented Ray, why you never hear how dedicated Pepper was to Daddy’s cause, only that he served as Ray’s lawyer in the late ’80s; about Pepper and Ralph Abernathy visiting Ray, Uncle Ralph having asked him to meet with Ray, how they concluded he wasn’t the triggerman. They weren’t sure whether or how he was involved, but they were convinced he didn’t act alone.
Pepper made it clear he had this passion to, I don’t want to say to avenge Daddy, but he did tell me he felt guilty that he somehow contributed to my father’s death by getting him interested in the war, when Pepper wrote for Ramparts about Vietnam; he felt this led to Daddy’s interest in the war, to his making his antiwar statement on April 4, 1967, at Harlem’s Riverside Church in his “A Time to Break Silence” speech, and to Daddy’s assassination a year to the day after that.
There is no doubt that Pepper felt like he had to resolve his inner conflict. I could relate to that.
It was 1978 when Pepper first went with Ralph Abernathy to visit Ray. He said he had no intentions of representing Ray, had decided to do so only if he became convinced Ray had been unknowingly involved in the King assassination.
Jerry Ray, James Earl Ray’s brother, reached out to Pepper, saying Ray had so many lawyers because he felt he was set up. After conducting a private investigation over a ten-year period, Pepper concluded in 1988 that Ray had indeed gotten a raw deal.
“Don’t take my word,” Pepper said to me. “You have access to everything I’ve got. You have that right as family of the victim. Talk to any of the witnesses that I’ve interviewed. Read the research and the documents. Don’t take my word. Meet these people. Meet Ray. Form your own judgment.”
With my family’s blessing—particularly my mother’s and Yolanda’s—I decided to get in there and feel it for myself. There’s something about looking another person in the eyes and spending time with him and getting to know him as I did with Pepper; there were brief encounters with some of the other particulars. This was no bunch of actors to me. There are things you must intuit, feel. That was my meat, intuiting human actions. I’d done it with figuring out the music. I’d done it when I worked in an environment as a corrections officer for almost two years, where day in and day out I was around people who for a living lied, cheated, stole, robbed; I knew the con vibe.
I got the feeling Pepper was being straight with me.
I then met with Ray. I needed to see—and feel—for myself. I needed to look at it coldly, unemotionally, as a cop would, as a detective would. I tried to assume that role.
* * *
The convicted assassin of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was running out of time. His liver was quitting, and the Tennessee courts wouldn’t give him even a single day of medical furlough from the state pen near Nashville. But before the end, Ray found some comfort. From the King family itself. Oh, it must’ve been deep for James Earl Ray to shake hands with me, with the mirror image of the man they say Ray last saw inside the crosshairs of a .30-06 caliber rifle. Ray’s rifle had been tested by the congressional investigating committee for evidence to spark a new trial. Results were “inconclusive.” That Remington rifle may have killed Ray better than it ever killed my father. The last request for testing of the rifle for evidence wound up in Judge Joe Brown’s courtroom in Memphis. Pundits would discredit Brown because he starred in one of the TV judge shows; but he was on the bench in Memphis for a long time before that, and was respected. I knew because I asked around among Memphis police. I had to see Ray to confront all of this, so it wouldn’t keep being relived, not only in my nightmares, but also in the national nightmare. For my brother and sisters. All of us. Without Ray, there might never be an answer to the question defining the work of even the youngest of the hip-hop nation-inside-a-nation.
The question is: Who shot Martin Luther King, Jr? And why?
Did Ray do it alone? Fine. Just show me how he did it alone, so I can sleep at night. Show me that nobody else had anything to do with it, so I can sleep at night. Show me, and I’ll believe.
Is that why I was so polite when I met Ray in a Nashville medical detention ward in March of 1997? No. That’s just the way I was raised. No different than my grandfather was with Marcus Wayne Chenault. “Thank you for letting me impose on your time,” I said to a desiccated Ray, and yes, some people later said I spoke to James Earl Ray like he was green-lighting movies over at Warner Bros. or something. But I would have said it that way to the Devil himself. “I just want to ask for the record—did you kill my father?” I asked.
Guess what Ray said then. “No,” claimed the sixty-nine-year-old convict.
“There’s something about looking another person in the eye and asking him a question,” I told a small contingent of press right after the meeting. “Spiritually speaking, you yourself can then say, ‘Yes… I personally feel this now… and… I think… I believe this man is innocent.’”
Then who was responsible, and why? The press asked questions that I usually liked to ask. And there was a reason I said what I did to the press. Most people think I was just humming a script I’d heard from Pepper: “Army Intelligence, CIA, FBI…” Could’ve thrown in the Klan, Memphis police, Ray. Could be any of them. Could be none of them.
When I met with Ray, this was the sense I got: he was a petty criminal who had done stupid things. He didn’t have much common sense and said as much. “Look, I ain’t gonna tell you I’m totally innocent here. I did mess up and make mistakes. But I did not shoot Dr. King.”
A guy who can take somebody out at two hundred feet with one shot is a cold-blooded marksman and killer. I saw evidence that when James Earl Ray was in the military, he couldn’t hit a target from a hundred feet with an M1 rifle. So how in the name of God did he hit a moving target in the neck from two hundred feet away in a cramped position with one shot from an uncalibrated .30-06?
When the cameras left, Ray and I spoke privately; I wanted him to know we were trying to get the new trial, get the truth out, whatever it was; we wanted him to have his day in court, and if on that day he was proven guilty or exonerated, so be it, either way. My family deserved to know and needed to know. People needed to know. I asked if he knew of any other people involved, did he have any information he wanted to share with me that was not common knowledge. He kept saying you need to open up the files, sealed FBI files and congressional records. He said he thought we’d find out a lot in them. It was a known fact that the FBI was looking to set up my father and in fact did fabricate things about him and harass him. So I don’t know how much the records would reveal the truth, because I think the real nitty-gritty is buried. That’s not the kind of stuff you’re going to put in writing. He sighed deeply. It was almost like he didn’t even care anymore. “Look, I’m tired of defending myself and saying I didn’t do it. Go look at the records and then you’ll see.” It was almost like he didn’t want to speak for himself anymore; I got the impression he wasn’t going to willingly take the fall. I felt he was telling the truth.
His thing was a liver transplant. He needed to get one done. They weren’t letting him out.
He felt if he had a little more time, health-wise, there was a good chance that he could get his trial. Another thing that struck me was that he really just seemed like almost a model prisoner in the sense that if somebody did something wrong to him, it was almost like he would just keep it to himself. I got this sense that he didn’t want to cause anybody any problems and he didn’t want any problems. I almost felt sorry for him. In a strange sort of way I really felt for the guy; I felt like we were both victims. I told him that. “We’re caught in the same web.”
If he didn’t do it and he’s been in jail for almost thirty years for a crime he didn’t commit, that’s victimhood. The general reaction of people afterward was: “You mean to tell me he went all the way up there and met with this guy and came out convinced he was innocent? What a sucker.” This was around the same time of the California mass suicide that coincided with the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet, where everyone was wearing black clothes and Nike sneakers, out near San Diego. Because of that incident, CNN broke away from me and was going back and forth between the reporting on the mass suicide and me; CNN covered it live, then they broke to California; so they caught me meeting with Ray live, but they didn’t do the pre–press conference, so what the average person saw was me coming out of this meeting and saying I thought he didn’t do it. Commentators, out of context, were giving this impression, “Well, isn’t that amazing?” Just go in and meet this guy for lunch and suddenly he’s innocent. Snide. But in the press conference after the meeting, I explained I’d already seen evidence I couldn’t really discuss in detail, but that I was convinced not just by the encounter. I was convinced before I met him.
I felt the guy got a bum rap. I felt he was a patsy.
My mother and I went to Memphis in February of 1997 to testify before Judge Joe Brown in an attempt to bring a rifle testing procedure into court, in hopes of sparking a new trial for Ray; Ray was hoping to spark his own release from prison so he could get a liver transplant. I did some walking around and thinking in Memphis. I had always hated going there, ever since I was twelve and thirteen and going to the sleep disorder clinic at Baptist Memorial Hospital, all the way until I visited the Lorraine Motel in the early ’90s.
Judge Joe Brown was pushing for the rifle test to happen, but there were a lot of appeals, and the DA was fighting it, the state was fighting it, but my mother and I went anyway, and testified why we believed this should happen; essentially, if there was a possibility of finding out the truth, it was worth doing. For a minute it had people on pins and needles because it was looking like those tests might prove something. Then there was a glitch in the system; instructions the judge gave about cleaning the rifle and prepping it were not followed to a tee, therefore they had to request another testing. That’s where everything derailed, because the state fought the new test to the point where the higher court overruled Brown and would not allow a second round of testing at a site in Rhode Island. Every time you fire a rifle, a metal residue is left in the barrel. Grooved markings make each bullet like a fingerprint. Each barrel and each bullet has a certain “fingerprint,” and leave a certain fingerprint on each other, altered slightly each time the gun is fired, altered to the extent that the next bullet you fire in succession is not getting the same print because residue is getting thicker so grooves are less pronounced. Judge Brown’s remedy: a liquid solution you can use that will actually remove residue and allow you to get an accurate reading. With all of that intrigue, Brown, with all his experience, felt that this was not the rifle that killed our father. I don’t know all the reasons, but he had informed data that would come out in trial.
To be honest, we felt very awkward this whole time, but that was a snowball effect. I’d gotten letters from people. One began, “I’ve been a silent supporter for almost thirty years. I’ve been in silent sympathy with your family and I’ve been wanting to say these things and get them off my chest.” This person happened to be ex-CIA. “I’ve been there and done that, and I just want you to know you’re on the right track. I can tell you for a fact, Ray did not do it.”
On and on. Letters. Notes. Phone calls explaining how the process works in terms of setting someone up, how a person can be moved around the country, not know he’s being controlled; movements documented, so a person can be framed. When you start getting information like that, what do you do? I’m not an investigator, yet when we talked to the Justice Department, they didn’t want to deal with it. What do you do? All we could do was try to get the authorities to give it a hearing. I never heard of a case where the authorities say, “We don’t want it because the case is thirty years old and it would open a can of worms.” I thought there was no statute of limitations on murder. But the assistant district attorney in Memphis told me, “We don’t need to open this; it’s messy.” But I believe that until you deal with it, it’ll stay messy. I was walking around feeling, “We’re the victim’s family, you’re the DA, representing our rights, and you’re going against us?”
The assistant DA and I went on Nightline. Ted Koppel asked him, “Why don’t you just give the man a new trial? If you’re so sure that he did it, why are you denying him a trial?” The DA said this much to me, off camera: “If we open this back up, we would have to let Ray walk.”
Television hurt as much as it helped. Pepper appeared on the ABC show Turning Point and was ambushed by host Forrest Sawyer. In Orders to Kill, based on information he received from former Green Berets, Pepper offered a scenario of the involvement of military personnel in the killing of my father. This account concerned a leader of a special unit that was supposedly in Memphis the day of the assassination. Pepper’s investigators told him that this guy was dead. In fact, he had been convicted of negligent homicide, served time, and then he relocated to Central America, which is apparently why Pepper’s investigators could not find him. But he turned up live on Turning Point, and Forrest Sawyer asked Pepper what he had to say to that, and Pepper could only say what he had been told by his investigators. The guy denied all. But of course he would.
In 1968, the Lorraine Motel was a black-owned establishment, operated by Walter and Lorraine Bailey. This was where my father at times took a room for meeting local people in Memphis. He’d already been to town twice that March, but he stayed at the Holiday Inn Rivermont. Though there is some controversy about this, as it appears that he never stayed overnight at the Lorraine before April 13, 1968, on that occasion he was at the Lorraine. Mrs. Bailey bragged about it. A freak snowstorm then rain rescheduled plans. Radio got the word out. Although he was originally scheduled to take Room 202—a protected room on a lower level—his room was changed apparently per an SCLC official’s request. He was given Room 306. Daddy had only visited during the day and had reservations at the Peabody Hotel downtown but was diverted to the Rivermont Holiday Inn, where his suite was electronically surveilled. He was on his second trip that March, when he led the march toward City Hall. That march was derailed by rock-wielding youths busting out windows; could have been wild youths, it could have been the Invaders, a “gang” infiltrated by provocateurs, undercover police, and federal agents, including Marrell McCollough, who ended up kneeling over my father’s body at the Lorraine. Some people think there were hardly any actual gang members in the Invaders at all, except those recruited by law enforcement infiltrators.
My father had stayed at the Rivermont hotel by the river after the first march had not ended well on March 28. But he stayed at the Lorraine on April 3 and 4. Daddy wanted to put “Negroes” into economic play (as well as focus on where integration really counted), and he knew this was most needed in the cities, where economic and educational segregation was obviously blatant, especially at that time in Atlanta, Birmingham, and Memphis. He had planned the Poor People’s March on Washington for the summer of ’68. He’d just taken Martin and me with him on a trip through rural Georgia, handshaking, preparing poor people. Higher-ups weren’t happy. J. Edgar Hoover called Daddy “the most notorious liar in the country.” My father’s FBI code name: Zorro. The Vatican hosted him, TIME magazine made him Man of the Year in 1963; the Nobel committee awarded him its Peace Prize in 1964. And yet authorities feared violence from him? Guilt transference, is all. In Birmingham, four little girls were bombed out of existence inside the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in ’63. New Orleans? Different world. Miami? That wasn’t Miami. That was They-ami. Atlanta was home to the Kings, the Atlanta University Center of five United Negro College Fund schools. Atlanta was the Head. In Memphis, reflection of ancient Egypt atop the Mississippi Delta, most blacks went uneducated. One UNCF school. Yet the people there in Memphis wanted their children educated as much as anybody. More. They were almost uniformly poor. But they were also many. Memphis was the Body. They say kill the Head and the Body will die.
It was for sanitation workers that Daddy went to Memphis. The men had already done the work. They moved 2,500 cubic tons of garbage a week. Hard to find any litter on the tree-lined parkways—as hard as finding up-to-date materials in the segregated schools. It is always the dollars that are most rigidly segregated. Memphis had won an “America’s Cleanest City” award ten years running. Retired it. The men had done it, for $1.27 an hour, up to $1.65 if you proved yourself quiet and reliable over a ten-year career. They took it. They took it to educate you, fool. In February 1968, in twenty-two-degree weather, two workers, Echol Cole, thirty-five, and Robert Walker, twenty-nine, were crushed to death inside a garbage packer. The city gave their families a month’s salary, and $500 for burial. The union tiptoed in. Wanted $2.35 for laborers, $3.00 for drivers. City wouldn’t deal. Laughed, basically. So the Body looked to Atlanta. Most of the Body came up, over and down from the Delta; so they knew well that when somebody slaps a book out of your hand, it’s not because you’re “acting white”; it’s because you’re getting ahead. That makes them angry.
Daddy came to Memphis rapping hard. When he finished, 930 of 1,100 garbage men wore signs reading I AM A MAN as they picketed for $2.35 an hour for their children’s education.
On March 18, before 13,000 people at Mason Temple, Daddy said, “Y’all know what? We may have to escalate this struggle a little bit.” He urged a work stoppage, called for “all Negro public school students to miss class,” and suggested a sit-in at the Board of Education.
He came back and gave the “Mountaintop” speech April 3 at Mason Temple before 5,000.
Mayor Henry Loeb, Police Chief J. C. Macdonald, Fire and Police Director Frank Holliman, Public Works commissioners Pete Sisson and Charles Blackburn all realized how much my father knew about how Memphis operated, knew the enterprise of Memphis was based on the poor working for low or no wage, and not being educated enough to do anything about it. Friday, April 5, students were to stay home. Those who could would walk to the Board of Education. Sit on the grass. Adults not in lifesaving jobs were to stay home from work. My father gave the word, Wednesday, April 3. It was to be Friday. The day after tomorrow.
In Memphis, Friday never got there.
Just before 6:00 P.M. on April 4, 1968, Daddy came onto the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel, outside Room 306, facing the rear of the buildings fronting the east side of South Main. A sniper was lining up from an angle in a camouflage of bushes two hundred feet away, straight on. In the parking lot two aides shadowboxed. Solomon Jones, Daddy’s driver, said it was cool for April; he suggested Daddy bring a topcoat. Looking down, Daddy asked Ben Branch to play “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” that night. “Play it real pretty,” he asked of Ben Branch.
My father’s last request was for music!
Then, just after he answered Jones’s request that he get a coat, a shot resounded. Daddy was down. “I saw a man jump out of the thicket across the street,” Jones said afterward. “He ran. I climbed up to the balcony. There was a white man there. I don’t know who he was. They say he lived there… he covered [Daddy’s] face with a cloth.” Earl Caldwell, then of the New York Times, also confirmed seeing a figure in the bushes, and Rev. James Orange confirmed seeing smoke rising from the same bushes. Though Caldwell told the police he saw a man, the police never questioned him. The bushes were cut down and that area was swept clean the next morning, only hours later.
A man named Marrell McCollough had infiltrated that “gang” in Memphis called the Invaders; they’d been held responsible for a rock-throwing incident that broke up a peaceful demonstration on my father’s last trip to town on March 28. McCollough had been in military intelligence, had been discharged, and was called back. He appeared on the scene seconds after the shot, and was the first person to reach my father. He came running up to the balcony, was photographed checking my father’s vital signs, and attempted to establish the flophouse as the scene of the shooting. He’s disappeared from the scene now. A black cop, E. E. “Ed” Redditt, was one of a two-man surveillance team on duty in the fire station. He was pulled off the detail an hour and a half before the shooting— and escorted home.
Mrs. Bailey, manager of the Lorraine motel, upon learning of the assassination, ran to her room, locked the door, and collapsed, having suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. She was rushed to the same hospital as my father—Saint Joseph’s—where she laid in a coma until her death on April 9. My father’s autopsy report was filed April 11, 1968, a week after he was killed.
From Autopsy Report #A68-252, county medical examiner, J. T. Francisco:
Gunshot wound to the chin and neck, fracture of mandible, laceration of vertebral artery, jugular vein and sub-laceration of spinal cord… intrapulmonary hematoma, apex, right upper lobe… Death was result of a gunshot wound to the chin and neck with a total transection of the lower cervical and upper thoracic spinal cord and other structures… direction of the wounding was from front to back, above downward and from right to left… The severing of the spinal cord at this level and to this extent was a wound that was fatal very shortly after its occurrence… an extensive excvating lesion… beginning one inch lateral to the right corner of the mouth and ½ inch inferior to right corner of the mouth; measures approximately 3 inches in length… angle of the penetrating wound is approximately 45 degrees from a sagittal plane at an angle right to left.
For a conspiracy all you need is two. One was in the bag with J. Edgar Hoover, who died in 1972 after forty-eight years as FBI director. Hoover, a notorious megalomaniac, was not above pushing a button on a guy. He’d posed smiling with bullet-riddled corpses before, like Machine Gun Kelly, a small-time armed robber also killed in Memphis. Hoover stood by his corpse, smiling. He had my father under surveillance, tried to blackmail him over alleged sex tapes, not for profit but to tempt him to commit suicide. Hoover even sent audiotapes to my mother, but my father said they’d have to come up with something better than that. He wasn’t going to respond to blackmail. Then there was the operator of Jim’s Grill, Loyd Jowers. The grill was located beneath the rooming house from where the shot supposedly was fired.
Jim’s Grill was behind the bushes from where the shot was most likely to have been fired.
Surveillance of our family wasn’t new. My grandfather, even my great-grandfather, were surveilled by the army. “Conspiracy” doesn’t mean the Joint Chiefs convened or Aunt Inez in the secretarial pool knew. But, suspiciously, at the last minute Ed Redditt was deemed untrustworthy and was pulled off the surveillance detail. The bushes directly across from the Lorraine and Room 306 were cut down and the area swept and cleared the morning after the assassination, before any search of that area. Loyd Jowers would eventually confirm that Ray wasn’t the assassin, that another man, a policeman, had given him a smoking rifle right after the assassination. There was a reported “car chase” on police radio of a white Mustang like Ray’s out of north Memphis minutes after the shot, while Ray was in fact going east-southeast out of town, on either Lamar or Summer Avenue. Somebody leaked the fake chase confusion to the local papers—maybe a decent cop. The papers displayed it like news. The police disavowed it, saying there was no chase. There was the rifle left in the doorway of Canipe’s Amusements at 424 South Main. If that’s the murder weapon, if Ray shot it then left it, he is the all-time idiot.
Then there was the presence of two white Mustangs, less than one hundred feet apart, in front of the boarding house. One being Ray’s, with Alabama license plates, which was parked in front of Jim’s Grill and in which two eyewitnesses said they saw him driving away some fifteen to twenty minutes before the shooting. The other car had Arkansas plates and sped away after the shooting.
Back in the early ’80s, a yokel lounging up on South Main cackled at Jeff Prugh, then a journalist with the Los Angeles Times, “A man left it there—only that was before the shootin’.”
Who was in the bushes? Who had them cut down? Pepper produced a statement under oath from the deputy public works director, Maynard Stiles, who said that the cleanup was ordered by MPD inspector Sam Evans.
Ray drove to Atlanta on main interstate and state highways. Troopers may have even waved to him. Then he went to London. Portugal. Thought he was off to Africa—Nigeria, Angola, or Mozambique—destinations that would never have entered his mind without suggestion. It was like he was on tour. Yeah, he was financed. By whoever had that end of the job. Probably by whoever gave him up. A combination of somebodies, actively or tacitly. Two months after the assassination, Ray got a surprise at London’s Heathrow Airport. He was arrested, coerced into pleading guilty, was convicted, and filed a motion for a new trial three days after the plea. Even if Ray would have done it, did he have the skill to make the shot, a single fatal perfect shot from two hundred feet away from a cramped position with a secondhand rifle? He never was that good. Who actually knew Ray? Harold Swenson was warden of the prison in Jefferson City, Missouri, where Ray spent nearly two years doing time, and from which he escaped by hiding in a breadbox truck a year before Daddy’s murder. “Odd,” Harold Swenson said two weeks after Ray’s arrest in ’68. “I won’t believe [Ray] did it until it’s proved. Didn’t seem to be the desperado type, compared to some real bad ones we’ve got. He couldn’t join the team. Not in here.”
Judge Joe Brown had the hearing—what was left of it—in Memphis court through August of 1996. Ray’s rifle was shot into a barrel in Rhode Island: “Inconclusive,” of course. Brown couldn’t move forward. Came to Memphis from California years ago on a “Reggie”—a Reginald Huber Fellowship—one of the things my father’s death set in motion, things that are slowly being rescinded now. Brown came to serve the underserved. Judge Joe Brown was authentically trying to do justice.
In mid-August of ’97, Judge Brown had asked that a special prosecutor be assigned. “The state is not really interested in finding out the truth,” he said in frustration. Brown was then lampooned in a scathing editorial cartoon in the Memphis Commercial Appeal.
Memphis. I still feel awkward there. Yolanda says the same thing. People in Memphis, black and white, are very warm and hospitable, giving. People genuinely wanted to help us. I felt wrong for disliking Memphis. If I went shopping, if I went out to the drugstore, people were taking pictures. It was just warm, hospitable; people bent over backward. It was almost like they were going out of their way, white and black, to be accommodating; you didn’t get the impression it was phony. They were still sensitive to the tragedy, and they were sorry, and they didn’t want to carry the burden of it forever. I thought about the fact I had two young black police officers as my security detail, Memphis police officers, and how they seemed honored to have the detail, and the fact that one of them in particular said he was born three months after my father got killed. So here’s a thirty-one-year-old entrusted with protecting me in this city; he and his partner were assigned to this tactical unit whose same name had come up in testimony in the court about the involvement of the Memphis police on April 4, 1968. It was weird leaving the courtroom and then getting in this unmarked car; the irony of being embraced by the Establishment on the one hand, but on the other hand, here we were trying to resolve this injustice, even though I knew this detail had nothing to do with it.
My dad—some people called him a communist, a rabble-rouser, an unfaithful husband: all false, but after he’s gone they say, “Aw, what a good man he was, how sincere he was, how tragically he died, how sad it is, how noble (now that he’s no threat to our comfort)—he deserves a holiday! He’s great now because he’s no longer a threat. Keep him as a dreamer rather than as a realist and he’s great.”
But the minute you start dealing with what he was talking about before he died—some people don’t want to hear that. They don’t want to see that. So I’ve got to say it the way I find it. I have to say it. A last full measure of devotion. If somebody tells me I can’t offer him that, all the more reason I must. The more people try to keep me from it, the more I must do it. Why? Something pulled me back to it. I’m still trying to figure that part out. I still don’t have all the answers.
The meetings with Pepper, with Ray, with Memphis, were important.
They weren’t the only important meetings I took during that time.