One of the stand-out songs in Branch’s repertoire was an old spiritual called ‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand’, adapted by the great Thomas Dorsey, the man who first gave gospel music its name and became one of its most devoted exponents. Dorsey, from a tiny plantation town in Georgia, initially broke with his family’s ultra-Christian beliefs and toured as a juke-joint blues singer with the provocative name of ‘Barrelhouse Tommy’, singing lewd and sexually loaded songs to semi-criminal audiences. Like Branch, he moved north to Chicago where he formed the Wildcats Jazz Band, but he struggled to adapt to city life and the cut-throat demands of the early R&B music scene. Dorsey suffered a severe nervous breakdown and returned home to Georgia to convalesce, and after deep reflection on what he saw as a harmful period as a blues singer he reconnected with the church and Christian music. Dorsey reputedly wrote ‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand’ as he reached out for spiritual strength after his wife and baby son both died in childbirth. Gospel mythology tells of how he locked himself in a room for three soul-searching days, warding off another breakdown by communing directly with the Lord. It was in this painful period of self-realisation that God directed him to write the song. Branch had a rather different interpretation, though, claiming that the song had much deeper roots and was in fact an Alabama slave anthem sung as a spiritual in the cotton fields of the Deep South. Dorsey had embellished it, and with the help of his own publishing company and the mountainous support of Mahalia Jackson, turned the song into a gospel standard. Branch himself had grown up with a scratchy old 78 rpm version in his Memphis home, and could play the entire song as a virtuoso saxophone solo, with only fleeting guest vocals to support him. Having heard the old slave anthem and its numerous renditions, at times in his own Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, it had become Martin Luther King’s favourite song. Something about its legacy, its powerful history, its closeness to despair, and then its bombastic and uplifting Christian drama appealed to his senses, and at times King would weave words from the song into his sermons.
After Branch left the barbershop in North Memphis he took a cab to the Lorraine Motel, a black-owned lodgings on Mulberry Street on the fringes of the Beale Street ghetto and one of the few places in the city where blacks could book a room. He had stayed in the motel numerous times before, and even when he returned to his parental home, his band would check in there. It was also the favoured motel for the travelling entourage of the SCLC. As Branch arrived in the car park near the swimming pool and looked up at the mustard-yellow and blue walls, only a housemaid with a trolley was out on the balconies. The motel was unusually quiet. In Branch’s mind it was synonymous with bustle and noise, late-night jam sessions, visiting bands disgorging their stage gear and touring equipment from a fleet of airport taxis, or it was the loud laughter of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team clowning around the swimming pool. It was in the honeymoon suite that Eddie Floyd had written his greatest hit, ‘Knock On Wood’, and it was where Stax housed all their visiting black artists. Mable John, Eddie Floyd and Judy Clay were all regular guests, and over the years the motel had been home to Count Basie, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Sarah Vaughan. The motel’s owner, Walter Bailey, and his wife Loree, who doubled as the switchboard operator, prided themselves in knowing all the needs and preferences of the visiting stars. Loree and her janitor rearranged Ray Charles’ room furniture so that he could navigate the room easily, working to a template that they had agreed with the singer years before. Bailey and his wife tolerated the strange ways of visiting soul singers, delivering late-night liquor to the shameless, and allowing painted ladies to visit rooms long after hours. Loree had spoken of her fears for Joe Hinton, an R&B singer with a bittersweet voice and manicured hands. She took cold milk to his room, as a medical aid, and smeared it on the melanoma scars on his diseased skin. Hinton died of skin cancer later in 1968. Songwriting partners Isaac Hayes and David Porter were a daily fixture at the Lorraine Motel and throughout the humid and sweltering summers preferred to write by the pool or use an air-conditioned room at day rates, rather than bake in the furnace of the Stax studios. On one occasion they reflected on a Coca-Cola advertising sign in the motel grounds and improvised around the motto ‘Things Go Better with Coke’, which in time became ‘Things Go Better’, Eddie Floyd’s first release on Stax.
King was sharing Room 306 with his colleague Ralph Abernathy. Both had slept late to recover from the thunderous drama of the previous night and the room was in a state of disarray. Open suitcases lay on the surfaces, partially unpacked. The room was strewn with personal effects and half-filled ashtrays, and overlaid by the fug of smoke and Aramis aftershave. A black telephone, which had thankfully stopped ringing since the early hours, was off the hook, and a television, its twisted rabbit-ear antennae always tuned to network news stations, was switched off. On the previous afternoon, King had been served in the forecourt of the motel with an injunction banning another rally in support of the strike. Immediately, a legal challenge cranked into action. An SCLC contingent led by Andrew Young of the SCLC and the Reverend James Lawson of the strike support group COME had gone to the federal court to overturn a restraining order banning further marches. They hoped to convince the judge to protect their right to assemble and to approve a tightly marshalled march the following day. They remained locked in courtroom dialogue for the remainder of the day, and it became clear that after the riots of the recent past, any march would have to be strictly controlled and non-violent. King was adamant that they would need the involvement of the Invaders, whom the SCLC still distrusted but knew had influence over the youth of Memphis. Later in the day, after briefing other staff members back at the Lorraine, the SCLC booked Room 315 to accommodate a cadre of the Invaders, who were due to arrive to negotiate their role if the march was given the go-ahead. A group of Invaders had arrived at the motel, armed and intimidating, in the late morning: Charles Cabbage, Coby Smith, Marrell McCollough, dressed in blue-collar denims, and Charles ‘Izzy’ Harrington, a squat and pugnacious street warrior wanted by the MPD. Furious that the Invaders had turned up with guns, King was reluctant to be seen in their company and instructed SCLC staffers to communicate with the radicals. In one exchange, Hosea Williams proposed that the articulate Cabbage be put on the SCLC payroll as a way of incorporating the group – a suggestion that was reckless in the extreme. At the time Cabbage was already compromised by the FBI and had charges against him for a string of offences that would have been seized on by the local press as proof that Martin Luther King was giving ground to violent radicalism and consorting with hoodlums. King moved around the motel, lifting the spirits of his staff and chatting with guests, and then called into his brother’s room. Alfred Daniel ‘A.D.’ King had arrived the night before in a Cadillac convertible with his girlfriend Lucretia Ward and the Kentucky state senator Georgia Davis Powers, who in the months before had become King’s secret lover.
The King brothers chatted on the phone to their parents back in Atlanta, who had not known the boys were together. They recounted well-worn stories from the past and shared jokes, skilfully avoiding the politics that lay behind the brothers’ reunion in Memphis and the violent tension that was building around the strike.
At lunchtime King and Abernathy left Room 306 and headed for the motel’s café, where they ordered fried catfish and sat devouring the heaped platefuls with their hands. Both were fans of down-home cooking and preferred the soul food of their childhood to anything more refined. In fact, that night they had been invited to a soul food banquet at the home of the Reverend Samuel ‘Billy’ Kyles, one of the vanguard of preachers who had risen up to support the strike. After the party, Ben Branch and his band were scheduled to lead an SCLC concert at the Clayborn Temple, in part to raise funds, in part as a musical show of support for the strike.
The King brothers ate heartily and speculated about the two outstanding issues of the day: would the courts overturn the restraining order and allow a peaceful march to progress, and could a deal be s
truck with the Memphis Invaders, who were holed up in a nearby room, to guarantee a march that was non-violent? Some of King’s younger staff members were unconvinced by the Invaders’ guarantees and felt they were more interested in securing financial support. They told King they were afraid that violence might rear its head again. He assured them that it was a fear they had to overcome and it was essential that they somehow accommodate the militant youths of Memphis. ‘I’d rather be dead than afraid,’ he told them.
Then a number of strange and barely believable things began to happen around the motel. An SCLC staffer discovered that the Invaders, armed and brazenly confident, had been charging room service to the SCLC account. They were asked to leave the motel, which they did grudgingly. Ben Branch travelled back to the motel from his mother’s home, and the MPD withdrew one of their most senior black detectives, Ed Redditt, from surveillance at the motel. Redditt was notorious among the strikers and their supporters, and was seen by many as betraying his race. There had been threats on Redditt’s life from anonymous calls within the African-American community, and so the police withdrew him from tailing King. Meanwhile, and independently, the only two black firemen in the Butler Street Station near the Lorraine Motel were also withdrawn and suddenly given new assignments. One of the firemen, Floyd Newsum, was a vociferous supporter of the strike and had been at the Mason Temple Rally where King had given this tumultuous ‘Mountaintop’ speech. Newsum argued against his new assignment but was forced to accede. The outcome – planned or coincidental – was that the only black officers representing public services in the immediate vicinity of the Lorraine Motel had been withdrawn. Around 4.30 p.m., King’s attorney Chauncey Eskridge, by then more famous for his court battles trying to keep Muhammad Ali from a jail term for draft evasion, returned from court. The SCLC legal team were ecstatic about a small but significant victory: the march could go ahead but with a route and a set of conditions that would allow the police to contain any potential trouble. A free march had been curtailed but the ban was overturned.
A new energy surged through the motel. King and Abernathy were in Room 306 preparing to go to dinner at the home of the Reverend Kyles. King, who had dry and sensitive skin, took an age to shave and everyone else was assembling in the car park below. Jesse Jackson was there, Ben Branch had arrived with his instruments in tow. King’s driver Solomon Jones, who had been provided to him courtesy of a local funeral home, hung out by the open door of his Cadillac, waiting for King’s party to descend the stairs. Back in Room 306, King slapped Aramis on his face and headed out to the landing, allowing Ralph Abernathy to use the mirror. The sink was still peppered with King’s shaven hairs.
Emerging from the room, King spoke to the throng below. He chatted buoyantly to Jesse Jackson and Ben Branch, who was due to go to an early evening soundcheck for an SCLC fundraising concert later that night (King and his party were scheduled to attend the fundraiser after supper). The driver shouted that it was getting cold and that they should bring overcoats. King agreed and joked about Jackson’s new casual hipster look. Jackson had recently abandoned the traditional dark suit for a suede jacket and fawn turtle-neck sweater, and his hair was growing into an afro. Seeing Branch down below in the courtyard, King asked him if he had his saxophone with him: ‘I want you to play “Take My Hand Precious Lord”, Ben,’ he said. ‘Play it real pretty, sweeter than you’ve ever played it before.’ King knew by heart the despondent yet hopeful words at the heart of the song: ‘When the darkness appears and the night draws near/And the day is past and gone/At the river I stand/Guide my feet, hold my hand.’ As King shared his last words with the saxophonist, a single bullet from a Remington Gamesmaster .30-06 rifle tore through the right side of his face and exited beneath his jaw. He fell backwards against the cinder wall of the Lorraine Motel’s balcony, blood pooling around his head.
Dr Martin Luther King Jr was pronounced dead at 7.05 p.m. on 4 April 1968 at St Joseph’s Hospital. An autopsy performed by Dr Jerry T. Francisco, the Shelby County medical examiner, concluded that death was the result of a single ‘gunshot wound to the chin and neck with a total transaction of the lower cervical and upper thoracic spinal cord and other structures of the neck’. It was later established by a panel of forensic experts that the wounds were caused by the bullet recovered from his body – ‘a Remington-Peters, soft-point, metal-jacketed bullet fired from a distance by a high-velocity rifle’ – and they concluded that Dr King ‘died as a result of one shot fired from in front of him’.
As Father Coleman Bergard, a local priest who had been called to administer the last rites, closed King’s eyelids, there was a long peaceful silence. And then the inner cities erupted.
The balcony photograph. Dr King’s supporters point in the direction of the shooting. The mysterious Agent 500 is kneeling beside King.
© Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo
AGENT 500’S BUSY AFTERNOON
4 April
The first person to reach the slain body of Martin Luther King was neither a member of his staff nor a motel employee, and was a man who had many reasons not to be caught in the headlights of history. Agent 500, a twenty-four-year-old African-American secret agent, colloquially known as ‘Max’, was at the time working as an undercover agent for the MPD, on attachment from US Military Intelligence. Agent 500 grabbed a towel from a nearby laundry basket and tried to stem the gush of blood from King’s neck. Two young girls from a gospel choir, who had gone towards King’s room in the hope of getting an autograph or a souvenir photograph, stood frozen in shock at the sight of the crumpled body sprawled in front of them. Within seconds, King’s closest aides had rushed to the scene and Agent 500 had vanished, taking off down the stairway and out through the courtyard, hidden by the chaos. Ralph Abernathy had been in the bathroom of Room 306 slapping aftershave on his face when he heard the shot. Andrew Young, the SCLC’s executive director, had arrived at the scene after his day of intense courtroom wrangling to secure the right for another march. Hosea Williams, another SCLC executive, was with him, and Jesse Jackson, then the SCLC’s man in Chicago, was nearby, already climbing the external stairs. On the balcony itself, the Reverend ‘Billy’ Kyles stepped back in disbelief, and so it came to pass that King’s faithful deputy Ralph Abernathy pushed his way through the scrum of bodies. Senator Georgia Davis Powers, who had driven through the night from Kentucky to be with her lover, was alone in a downstairs room; so, too, was King’s younger brother A.D. In another room were the scattered clothes of Detroit soul singer Mable John, then recording an album track at the Stax Records studio. She has since claimed that she had been asked to vacate the fated Room 306 at the request of the management to allow King to have his favourite room. It was just one of innumerable claims, counter-claims and coincidences that surrounded the shooting. Either conscious of the status of those gathering around the dying King, or more likely anxious about his visibility at the scene of the assassination, Agent 500 handed the now blood-soaked towel to Ralph Abernathy, shielded the two young girls from the trauma of the dying man, and quietly faded into the background.
Agent 500 was a short, stocky African-American man known as Marrell McCollough, who had grown up in brutal poverty in Sugar Ditch Alley, a shanty town blighted by open sewers in Tunica, Mississippi. He had served as a military policeman in Vietnam where his tours of duty overlapped with Stax singer William Bell and the Mad Lads vocalist John Gary Williams, the singer whose commitment to social change had taken him into the inner sanctum of the Memphis Invaders. McCollough had arrived in Memphis in February as part of the multi-agency operation called ‘Lantern Spike’, a top secret endeavour to monitor, infiltrate and disrupt the Sanitation Workers Strike. After his service in Vietnam he was identified as someone with skills that could be used by the secret state, and he was recruited to the 111th Military Intelligence Brigade, then based at Fort McPherson, Georgia. He had three towering advantages: he was young, black and streetwise. At the time, Military Intelligence
employed nearly 800 army officers and over 1,500 civilians in a bewildering array of clandestine or semiofficial roles. McCollough was one of only sixty-seven black undercover officers, most of whom had been recruited with the express purpose of deployment on secret projects monitoring civil rights or infiltrating emergent Black Power groups.
As the Sanitation Workers Strike intensified, McCollough was assigned to a top secret unit of four hand-picked officers working for the Domestic Intelligence Unit (DIU) of the MPD. His first assignment was to infiltrate the inner circle of the Invaders and insinuate his way into the social lives of the city’s young militants. It was a role he took to with alarming success, and within a matter of weeks, as previously mentioned, he had been promoted to the grandiose role of Minister of Transport of the Black Organizing Project/Memphis Invaders, on the grounds that he was one of the few young men with a car in a sprawling city notoriously difficult to navigate by public transport. Coby Smith, an Invader who befriended McCollough, claims he was a very ‘accessible person’ who did him favours and picked him up most mornings. ‘We’re talking about some poor youngsters in a very poor town,’ Smith later told a Congressional Assassinations Committee. He testified that he had come to know McCollough after an introduction by the Riverside faction of the Invaders, who rated him highly. ‘We didn’t have anything. We didn’t have any money. We got around the best we could, which was usually to bum a ride. In fact, the police would sometimes have to give us a ride. The ones that were watching us would sometimes give us a ride.’
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