Memphis 68

by Cosgrove, Stuart;

  The allegation relating to Tarlease Mathews was not the only one; far from it. King fended off numerous insinuations and did indeed have a string of lovers. His repellent and destructive FBI files catalogue a string of extramarital liaisons that could quite easily have been accompanied by the voices of deep southern soul. It was a life populated by other women, by mundane motel rooms and by the choral refrains of Johnnie Taylor’s ‘Who’s Making Love’. King was not naïve to the contradictions and often spoke about ‘the civil war inside him’ – the battle between honesty and deception, between promiscuity and fidelity, and between passing lovers and a devoted wife. The night before his assassination, when King returned in the early hours to his room at the Lorraine Motel, Abernathy claims that another woman, an unnamed second lover, was waiting for their return – a woman from the SCLC secretariat who had travelled with him on the delayed flight from Atlanta. She was supposedly in love with King but, feeling edged out of his life, had packed her bags and, after one last fight with Abernathy about King, left the motel early.

  And then, most significant of all, was ‘the senator’, King’s real extramarital love. Senator Georgia Davis Powers, the grandniece of a slave, was born in a two-room cabin near Springfield, Kentucky, and rose to become the state’s first black senator. She had driven north to Memphis with A.D. King and had taken up residence in Room 201 at the Lorraine Motel, where the door remained unlocked and ajar for King to discreetly enter. By 3 a.m., after leaving Mathews’ home and supposedly arguing with the second woman, King joined Davis in her room. The following day, Davis was brushing her hair at the mirror in her room when the bullet struck King down. She later confided to Ben Kamin, in his landmark book Room 306: The National Story of the Lorraine Motel, that ‘someone was pointing to the second floor. I looked up to my left and gasped. One of Dr King’s knees stuck straight up in the air, and I could make out the bottom of one foot.’ She climbed the stair and saw in another room Andy Young and Ralph Abernathy, ‘their faces grim, feverishly telephoning for an ambulance’. When the ambulance eventually arrived she instinctively went to climb in the back. It was Young who suggested that it may not be the best idea and guided her away from the vehicle. The job of ringing King’s wife back in Atlanta fell to Jesse Jackson.

  By April America’s doomed war in Vietnam had reached a point of crisis. Opposition on the home front was no longer confined to students and counterculture radicals: it was now a mainstream occupation with daily news bulletins and editorials in many of the major newspapers asking searching questions of the war effort. A familiar Vietnam training chant among black GIs ended with the taunting words ‘Jody’s got your girl and gone’. It was a primitive rap chant, part of the African-American culture of insults known as ‘the dozens’. As young men tried to undermine or unsettle their colleagues with put-downs, a new fictional character emerged from the fertile landscape of war – his name was ‘low-down Jody Ryder’ and he became one of the central figures in the story of southern soul. Jody, whose surname was a thinly veiled hint at his infamy, was a loathsome character who specialised in seducing married women. Supposedly excused military service because of a bogus disability, he prowled the ghetto streets and nightclubs in pursuit of women whose husbands or boyfriends were on active service in Vietnam. Jody was a by-product of the ‘civil war inside’ and soul music’s lyrical fascination with sexual betrayal. Jody’s greatest moment came via Johnnie Taylor, who by 1968 had secured an unwelcome reputation as soul music’s man of sexual candour. Taylor’s second major hit, ‘Jody’s Got Your Girl And Gone’, was a 1970 Stax release written by the respected Detroit producer Don Davis, who by then had relocated in Memphis. Jody songs had been percolating in the minds of soul lyricists since the late sixties. The Chicago-based duo Mel and Tim, who were later to move to Memphis to join Stax, released ‘Mail Call Time’ (1969), a song about black GIs waiting in line for letters from home, in which Jody features as a threat to lasting love. A rash of Jody songs came thick and fast, each new release characterising him as an even darker and more scheming sexual predator than before, and one to watch out for: Dallas vocalist Bobby Patterson’s ‘Right On, Jody’ (1971); Sonny Green’s ‘Jody’s On The Run’ (1971); and Skip Jackson and the Shantons’ ‘Promise That You’ll Wait’ (1970). But it was an otherwise unknown southern soul singer from Greenville, South Carolina, Ann Sexton, who was to record the most challenging variation on the Jody theme on the locally distributed Impel Records. Its message was that some self-assured women were no longer willing to wait around for their soldier-lovers to return, and for many Jody was a better option. The underground hit ‘You’ve Been Gone Too Long’, which refrained the words of Taylor’s hit ‘Jody’s Got Your Girl And Gone’, broke with the perception of women as compliant lovers twiddling their thumbs and waiting faithfully at home. Sexton, a cousin of the famous Motown artist Chuck Jackson, signed to John Richbourg’s Seventy-Seven Records label, part of the southern giant Sound Stage Seven, but her greatest record was one with no budget and no expectation. ‘You’ve Been Gone Too Long’ was an instant classic that again signalled changes in the way female singers imagined relationships. Turning her back on a boyfriend who’s been away too long, she takes off with Jody. It was the greatest song that Bettye Crutcher never wrote.

  The day after Martin Luther King’s death, as Memphis woke up to the carnage of overnight rioting and the stigma of being America’s most hated city, Tarlease Mathews drove to the R.S. Lewis Funeral Home, where King’s first memorial service was held. The sons of the owner – Robert Jr and Clarence Lewis – had worked diligently through the night, warding off their own tears as they groomed King’s body and rebuilt his damaged face. To give them inspiration, they played recordings of King’s greatest speeches. Mathews leaned over the coffin, kissed his forehead and whispered a few prayers to herself. She passed away in 2008 refusing to dignify gossip or in any way compromise King’s reputation, or indeed her own.

  Time magazine wrote: ‘In Memphis, before it was carried south toward home, King’s body lay in state in an open bronze casket, the black suit tidily pressed, the wound in the throat now all but invisible. Many of those who filed past could not control their tears. Some kissed King’s lips; others reverently touched his face. A few women threw their hands in the air and cried aloud in ululating agony.’ King’s widow was flown by private jet from Atlanta and, in honour of her husband’s last campaign, she walked silently through downtown Memphis with the striking sanitation workers, local ministers, loyal supporters, onlookers, mourners and a contingent of the staff of Stax Records. The author Hampton Sides described it eloquently: ‘The march was beautiful, pitch perfect, decent. It moved forward without incident, a slow river of humanity stretching more than a dozen city blocks. Arranged eight abreast, the mourners silently plodded past department store windows that had been carefully cleared of lootable items . . . and which were replaced with discreet shrines honouring King. Coretta marched at the front, with Abernathy, Young, Jackson and Belafonte. There were clergymen, black and white, and then labour leaders and garbage workers. Farther back could be found such celebrities as Sammy Davis Jr, Bill Cosby, Ossie Davis, Dr Benjamin Spock, Isaac Hayes and Sidney Poitier.’

  King’s body was then transported home to Atlanta, where a memorial service was held at the Ebenezer Baptist Church. Thirteen hundred people attended. Mahalia Jackson sang King’s favourite hymn, ‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord’ – the song he had asked Ben Branch to play for him seconds before he was shot. A private family funeral followed with King’s casket loaded onto a simple wooden farm wagon and pulled by two local mules along four miles of urban roads from Ebenezer Baptist Church to King’s old school, Morehouse College. Over 100,000 people lined the route and the symbolism was not lost. King’s final promise was that the poor would descend on Washington, led by mule trains to create a city within a city, to bring their stories of poverty and deprivation to the seat of power.

  Georgia Davis Powers was one among the many m
ourners. The secret lover of Dr Martin Luther King followed the funeral cortège quietly with a friend, outwardly grieving like those around her but inwardly agonising as she watched the dead leader’s widow at the head of the cortège. In her memoirs written many years later she finally admitted her true feelings: ‘How could I not have seized the moment,’ she said of her first romantic encounter with King, ‘no matter what my fears, no matter what the obstacle? When we were together, the rest of the world, whose problems we knew and shared, was far away . . . He trusted me, and I him, not to talk about us.’ But she was not naïve about King’s other liaisons, and, assuming one of the classic roles of southern soul – the other woman – she confronted them head on. ‘Others have speculated about Dr King’s relationships,’ she wrote. ‘I have no knowledge of affairs he might have had with other women; that was not what we talked about when we were together. I only know that our relationship began as a close friendship between two people sharing the same dream, working for the same goals, and it crossed the lines into intimacy.’ Davis, whom King elegantly referred to as ‘the senator’, was haunted the remainder of her life by his last utterance to her. As they walked to her room along the motel balcony, he whispered words that not only spoke of the fleeting preciousness of intimacy but of King’s dark foreboding about his own life: ‘Senator, our time together is so short.’

  The vicinity of the assassination. Top left: Jim’s Grill, which opens to the back of the crime scene and becomes a hive of conspiracy. Top right: the rear of the rooming house where the shots apparently come from. Bottom left: the entrance to Canipe’s Amusement Company where a police officer protects the bundle containing the murder weapon. Bottom right: the Lorraine Motel from the car park.

  GUY CANIPE’S RECORD STORE

  April

  Guy Canipe ran a struggling record store at 424 Main in the street parallel to the Lorraine Motel. A fifties jukebox obstructed the glass doorway, and although it didn’t entirely block the entrance, it was an object that had to be navigated as you made your way into the shop. Canipe sold second-hand slot machines, remaindered stock, and old deleted records from companies across the southern states for twenty-five cents a throw. If you bought an entire box he would do a deal, but in the main he sold singles and, less often, LPs which did not fit easily in the racks. He was a businessman but not a rich man; he made most of his modest income repairing old amusement machines, jukeboxes, pinball tables and slot machines. He had a pile of old one-arm bandits stored at the rear of the shop and periodically sold Antique Mill Five Centers to bar-owners or collectors. Among his stock of records was a living history of Stax’s failures: the records that might have been and the ones that never stood a chance. He sold copies of Wendy Rene’s ‘Bar-B-Q’, an infectious party record that missed out in the rush for feelgood pop like the Chiffons and the Ronettes. He had a small boxful of a 1962 record by the Canes, ‘I’ll Never Give Her Up (My Friend)’, a forgotten song written back in the dying days of doo-wop by Chips Moman and Steve Cropper that lost out to better known harmony groups like the Moonglows and the Drifters, and he had a mountain of copies of Rufus Thomas’s early records. Thomas had called in one day looking for a refurbished jukebox so Canipe had a snapshot taken of the two of them lounging by a reconditioned Wurlitzer. It was decaying now but was still stuck proudly to the cash register with a strip of Scotch tape that had parched in the sunlight. Canipe’s Amusements was a strictly cash-only store, no credit, no loans and no paying up over instalments. According to those who knew him, Canipe was a cautious man, with a distinct drawl as if he was from Texas or the southern edges of Oklahoma, but, whatever his origins, he had diverse tastes and liked any form of music as long as it made him money.

  He let his customers play the stock before buying on a small turntable at the rear of the store, but there were strictly worded notices preventing misuse; careless scratches were not good for business, and records removed from their original company sleeves sold less well, so he was fastidious about how the records should be returned to their rack. Unintentionally, Canipe had created a mausoleum of sorts, a resting place for the debris of fifties consumerism, teenage pop, primitive rockabilly and rocking blues from the days before Otis.

  It was the middle of a quiet and profitless afternoon when two African-American men, Julius Graham and Bernell Finley, came into his store to look at his new stock. Canipe knew them from previous visits and left them to rummage at the back of the store as he attended to repairing a Wurlitzer 1800. It was deathly quiet. The store darkened towards the rear, which led on to an unkempt area of overgrown bushes and wild hedgerows down onto Mulberry Street and the Lorraine Motel. He periodically glanced over at the two men, looking at the size of the pile of records they had set aside, trying to convert them into cash in his mind. They seemed to be methodically searching the crates of records – for God knows what – and Canipe knew from past experience that it was best to just let them search.

  Suddenly, Canipe heard a loud thud and saw a man throwing something into the shop doorway. He shouted out, and the surprise of his voice attracted Graham and Finley at the back of the store. Canipe ran to the door and his two customers followed him. All three saw a man running south on Main Street. He was of ‘neat appearance, around thirty years old and wearing a dark suit’. The man climbed into a white Mustang, screeched off and disappeared before any of them could take note of the number plate. In the doorway Canipe saw what looked like a shabby old bedspread or industrial rag wrapped around what appeared to be a broom handle or, possibly, a rifle. The bundle had been dumped in a hurry and the man racing away in the white Mustang was the only man who could have thrown it there. Within less than a minute an officer from Shelby County Sheriff’s Department arrived and immediately contacted MPD headquarters, who told him to seal the area and stand sentinel, but under no circumstances to interfere with the items. Canipe returned inside his store, and since the two record hunters were required to stay for questioning, they went back into the shop to continue their search.

  The bundle contained much evidence to implicate the escaped prisoner James Earl Ray in King’s murder, including, among other items, two cans of Schlitz beer, the 8 April edition of the Memphis newspaper, The Commercial Appeal, a plastic bottle of aftershave lotion, a .30-06 rifle with a serial number matching that of the weapon James Earl Ray had purchased in Birmingham, Alabama, together with ammunition and a pair of binoculars. There was also a portable radio with an identification number scratched off it. When the FBI eventually deciphered the number, it was revealed to be Ray’s Missouri State Penitentiary inmate number.

  For nearly a year, since he had escaped from prison hidden in a bakery van, Ray had been living an erratic and peripatetic life, using different pseudonyms and seemingly stalking King. He was an obsessive racist who had developed a deranged compulsion to kill King, but the rifle provoked a grand narrative now familiar to American assassinations: was Ray a lone gunman or the patsy in a grander conspiracy? Another question remained unanswered: to what extent did local news media aid James Earl Ray by circulating details of King’s itinerary? The newspaper found in Canipe’s doorway carried a front page story about Dr King, one that placed him at the Lorraine Motel at lunchtime on 3 April. Ray’s fingerprint was found on the front page of the newspaper.

  In less than two hours of frantic calls, the bundle that was to become a major source of evidence was removed from Canipe’s doorway and taken to the downtown offices of the FBI. Special Agent Robert Jensen, a respected Danish-American officer, made an inventory of the contents and then prepared their dispatch to the FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, where a team of forensic experts awaited the evidence. Canipe, Graham and Finley were eventually allowed to leave the store and return home, on condition that they would be visited again by detectives from the MPD to give fuller official witness statements. When the investigating officers arrived at the shared home of Julius Graham (40) and Bernell Finley (24) at 804 North Fifth Street near Chips Moman’s A
merican Sound Studio, they were curious about why two men of different ages would be cohabiting. But when they inspected the premises what they found was not a domestic home but a small warehouse of records stacked neatly along the walls, and a table of dispatch materials – wrapping paper, cardboard sleeves and rolls of Sellotape. The two men were running a mail order company supplying Memphis records to dealers and collectors around the world. They had found customers far beyond Memphis that Guy Canipe could only dream of. Graham gave officers the best witness description of the fugitive, but by then James Earl Ray was long gone, travelling across state lines, dumping his white Mustang car at a housing project car park in Atlanta and then travelling north by Greyhound to Detroit and onwards to Canada, where he assumed yet another false identity and flew to London. After a two-month manhunt, Ray was arrested at Heathrow airport on 8 June and extradited to Tennessee. With powerful evidence stacked against him, he eventually pleaded guilty to the first degree murder of Dr King and was sentenced to ninety-nine years.

  According to Hampton Sides’ account of the immediate aftermath of King’s assassination, ‘the city of Memphis began to prepare for racial apocalypse’. Riot squads were on emergency alert, and across the city people were already discussing where they were when they heard the news of King’s death.

  Stax publicist Deanie Parker later told the magazine Wax Poetics: ‘I was on my way to work when I heard the news over the radio. The sky got dark and the wind picked up instantly – it looked as though the world was coming to an end . . . Driving through Memphis, it was almost as if they’d put up traffic barricades – the streets were empty and there was a stillness. Nobody wanted to talk above a certain decibel. We didn’t want to admit the unthinkable: that it happened here. By the time I got to 926 East McLemore, everybody was glued to the final news, praying and hoping that it wasn’t really true.’