The Staple Singers were en route to Memphis to take part in the now legally permitted march in support of the strike the following day, and were just leaving their hotel room in Nashville when the news flickered onto a television screen. Walter Cronkite, the doyen of American broadcasting, delivered the tragic news that their friend and spiritual leader had been killed. The Staples had known King for years and had shaped their early career around the folk music of civil rights. Their early inspirational songs such as ‘Freedom Highway’, about the Selma marches, and ‘Why (Am I Treated So Badly)?’, a song sung from the childlike perspective of the Little Rock Nine, the black kids excluded from school in Little Rock, Arkansas, had both been directly about the freedom movement and written with King’s campaigns in mind. Jesse Jackson once described the Staple Singers as ‘unabashedly freedom fighters’, and they considered King their spiritual mentor. Pops Staples cancelled their Nashville concert and the group travelled as planned to Memphis to find the city in a state of nervous breakdown. It was not a wasted journey. They returned once again to the Lorraine Motel, which was a crime scene but still open for business. After a round of meetings with Al Bell they ended their relationship with Epic Records and signed a contract with Bell. Steve Cropper, a Stax veteran, yet remarkably only twenty-six years old, became their creative producer.
At the time the news of King’s death broke, Bell was at the Stax studios on East McLemore recording a Vietnam protest song, ‘Send Peace And Harmony Home’, by a young gospel singer Shirley Walton. According to Bell, ‘She couldn’t get into the song – the passion wasn’t there. Then, on the sixteenth take, Homer Banks came in the studio and said, “Hey, Dr King just got killed.” This was as the tape was rolling. Shirley started singing, and tears just poured from her eyes. We did a limited edition release on that and gave copies to Mrs Coretta King and the family and had it read into the Congressional Record. Afterwards we destroyed the master, because the idea wasn’t to exploit the song.’
The singer-songwriter William Bell was out driving. ‘I remember all of the lights in downtown Memphis were green in one direction, which was odd, but I didn’t know what had happened,’ he told Wax Poetics in a historically rich requiem by writer Andria Lisle. ‘When I got to Stax, they were all talking about it, and I realized that’s what was going on when I passed through downtown. We were all in shock. In the aftermath, when all the looting started, David Porter, Isaac Hayes, and I went on the radio and pleaded for calmness and for the people to not destroy the neighbourhoods. The thing that hit me the most was that Stax was one of the few buildings in the area that was left untouched. The neighbourhood held Stax Records in high esteem.’
Around 8 p.m., as tensions rose, the police received a call threatening that an explosive device had been planted at Warners Theater at 52 South Main Street. The building was evacuated, a seat-by-seat search was carried out, but no bomb was found and the incident was reported as a hoax. By 10 p.m. the theatre had opened for business again but customers were thin on the ground. Memphis producer Willie Mitchell was due to leave the city for a concert in Texas: ‘The next day I had to go to Dallas for a gig, but there were riots all over town,’ he told Andria Lisle. ‘The National Guard came in, but folks were burning up shit all over downtown! I wanted to make my gig, so I left some neighbourhood winos to take care of the place. I just picked ’em up on the street, bought ’em a case of wine, and locked ’em in the studio! Man, I was scared when I drove back across the Mississippi River after my gig – I’d heard on the news that they were burning down buildings all over Memphis. I turned on Lauderdale, and I could see the front of the building. Then I saw that the door was still locked. I went in, and everything was miraculously still here. All of the winos had passed out, except for one who was sitting in a chair making sure nothing bad happened. I gave those drunks some more wine and let ’em go home again!’
Isaac Hayes, always politically engaged on the fringes of the civil rights movement, joined a group of friends and formed the Memphis Black Knights to combat police brutality, job discrimination and inadequate housing for blacks. The organisation, like many at the time, had its origins in a North Memphis teenage street gang before garnering the support of DJs at radio station WDIA. As the gang members grew up and became more aware of local needs, they transformed into a community activist group. Hayes and other Black Knights who had studied at Manassas High School, a school with a formidable music history, were part of a delegation that lobbied the mayor against curfews. In the aftermath of the troubles, Hayes performed at a benefit concert at Hunter College in New York for the Soledad Brothers, a group of prison protestors in the California penal system. ‘I contributed my talents to that because they were political prisoners,’ he told Rolling Stone magazine. ‘This is where I’m at. I’m not the turn-the-other-cheek kind of person, no. But I believe in using tact and intelligence.’
Bettye Berger, a local artists’ agent, was by then president of her own company, Continental Artists Attractions, representing Joe Tex, B.J. Thomas and the Bar-Kays. She was at home at the time and had planned to go shopping at the Whitehaven Plaza near Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion. ‘But there wasn’t a soul there,’ she remembers. ‘The city was eerily quiet. I had a plane full of artists coming in, the first big money for my agency, and everything was cancelled.’ It was a critical time for one of her best artists, Joe Tex, who was in Memphis to record a beer commercial for the San Antonio Pearl Brewery. At the time Tex, who was signed to the Nashville soul label Dial, had only recently converted to Islam and was unsure whether he should be recording a beer commercial or indeed whether he should be hanging out with the notorious Wilson Pickett and a young and reckless Bobby Womack. It was an ominous atmosphere and the session was eventually cancelled. Bettye Berger remembers: ‘Tanks were rolling down Lamar Avenue, which was scary. It was just a sad, sad day.’
The sad, sad day erupted into a violent night. Riots flared in over a hundred cities across America. In Memphis, the military and the police circled neighbourhoods on and around East McLemore, assuming it would be a likely trouble spot. Looting and wanton destruction began in earnest as thousands of young blacks took to the streets. At first the violence was low-level – windows smashed, liquor stores looted and bricks thrown at passing cars – but then the sky lit up with a satanic rage. A building supplies company on North Second Street was torched. As firemen tried to fight the blaze at O.W. Ferrell’s yard, police carrying sub-machine guns tried to ward off mobs of protestors. Flames leapt over three hundred feet into the air and as the inferno swept through reinforced roofing and a tyre store the smoke became thicker, darker and hellish. Dense pungent black clouds engulfed the skyline and jets of gasoline flames darted up into the air. Walls of boxes stored at the rear of Leone’s Liberty Cash Grocery at 485 Vance were set alight, burning through electricity cables and endangering a nearby apartment block. There were reports of theft, but by comparison with previous urban disturbances they were small in number – as if stealing property was less important than destroying it. It was a riot that was subtly different to the summer of 1967; as if a young generation had come onto the streets of the city not for material gain but to teach Memphis a lesson. The police were better organised, too, and much had been learned from previous disturbances. Rather than act as a source of antagonism, police units often hung back to allow small incidents to run their course. The city arranged for street lights to be switched off, knowing that darkness was less attractive to onlookers than the illumination of shop windows and the theatrical glare of busy intersections. They shot at neon advertising signs to discourage crowds and were instructed to refuel at commercial gasoline stations rather than waste time returning to base. Although the MPD’s despised tactical units were on the streets, they were under strict instructions not to aggravate relatively small incidents. Heavy-handed policing had been the spark that had ignited riots in Newark, Cleveland and Detroit in the previous twelve months, and the MPD, at least superficially, had l
earned its lesson. Tactical patrol units and paramilitary National Guardsmen were called and marshalled under the control of Colonel Hollis Williams of the battle-hardened 3rd Brigade of the 30th Armored Division. Again, the instructions were to be visible but to hold back and ignore smaller attacks on corner liquor stores, in order to be ready for serious rioting: pathetic drunkenness was tolerable but mass armed insurrection was not. The National Guard were rushed to Springdale and Howell in North Memphis, where police cars were shot at, and further reports came in that police officers were isolated in the Johnson and Tillman area and were at risk of serious injury. Only then were tactical units instructed to act. Unit 16 was directed to assist the isolated patrolmen, who had become separated from their vehicle by an encircling mob. As soon as the officers were rescued the tactical unit was told to retreat from the streets, take up a disguised position east of Crump Boulevard, and await further instructions. The hope was that the flames of anger would recede with the night.
The compromised mayor, Henry Loeb, was driving to a speaking engagement at Ole Miss, the famed University of Mississippi. His car was heading south on Highway 51 when he saw a car occupied by Sheriff William Morris and stopped to ask him about a phone call he had made to the mayor earlier in the day. Thus it was by sheer chance that he found out that King had been shot. He instantly made the decision to cancel his speaking engagement. Loeb was now at the very heart of a darkening drama. Death threats had flooded into his office and into the editorial teams at most of the major newspapers. By refusing to settle with the sanitation workers and encouraging scab labour to take to the streets of the city, Loeb had made himself one the most despised men in the city. Although he had played no part in the death of Martin Luther King and has never featured even in the most outlandish conspiracy theories, many felt that he had created the circumstances that made the assassination possible. Seriously at risk, Loeb agreed with the police that his family should be moved from their suburban home to a secret safe house. Tables from around his office were turned over by staff and used as makeshift shields by the windows. Anxiety greeted every phone call and every knock on the exterior doors. A heavily armed Praetorian Guard made up of police officers and private security encircled the beleaguered mayor and shadowed his every move. The name Loeb was dirt. Throughout the night, anyone who shared his surname, including distant relatives, were threatened on the phone, and his brother’s chain of laundry stores, which had been targeted by strikers earlier in the year, were laid to waste. The Invaders put out instructions through their grapevine of supporters that Loeb laundries were a legitimate target, more valuable to the cause than attacking convenience stores and stealing packs of cigarettes.
Mayor Loeb, aware of his toxic reputation, felt it was his moral duty to go on live television to make public service announcements. Driven more by a misplaced sense of civic duty, rather than ego, he was taken by police guard around Memphis’s local television stations, fully cognisant of the fact that for many he was the problem not the solution. Loeb had not eaten all day, and when the tour of television stations was over he suggested a late-night meal. But every café, bar and restaurant in the city was closed under the terms of curfew he himself had ordered. Loeb ended his night of hell curled up in his bunkered office eating a dry salami sandwich bought from a police station vending machine. The power he had once craved was now reduced to pathetic ineffectualness. Within a matter of days Loeb’s trademark forcefulness capitulated and his opposition to the Sanitation Workers Strike crumbled. The union branch Local 1733, unbeaten and unbowed, had won, and jubilant members ratified the agreement with the city at a meeting held on 16 April in Clayborn Temple. The strikers cheered, stamped their feet, and hugged one another in a prolonged victory demonstration. The celebration, however, was tinged with sadness as it was recalled how Martin Luther King was assassinated while in Memphis to aid the strike. ‘Let us never forget that Martin Luther King, on a mission for us, was killed in this city,’ Jerry Wurf, the international president of the strikers’ union the AFSCME told the hushed meeting. ‘He helped bring us this victory.’
John Gaston Hospital had its busiest night ever as minor casualties from the riots and the gravely ill lined the crowded corridors. Many companies, even those geared to night work, had closed, and very few openly disobeyed the curfew, which was scheduled to last until 5 a.m. the following morning. Isaac Hayes told local Memphis journalist Andria Lisle, in her impeccable oral history of the night I Know a Place, that Stax staff had called city hall and the local police to get permission to work through the curfew. ‘The National Guard was lined up and down every street, because there was rioting all over town. He said, “One of them almost shot my buddy Benny Mabone when he opened the studio door. This soldier levelled on him – he was a young kid, and he didn’t know any better. [Benny] was like, “No, no, we’re in the studio, man. We got permission. Drop your rifle.” Deanie Parker worked on, as did many other staff members. She told Lisle that she was furious about the curfew. “I thought it was overkill,” she said. “Of all the places in the community, Stax was an integrated organization . . . The curfew interfered with the lifestyle we enjoyed here, which was so atypical of Memphis. The National Guard set up their bivouac right on the corner, but Bettye Crutcher and I decided to defy them, so we stayed in the studio. We did take some things seriously – we carted out all of the master tapes, because we were afraid of looters. Someone torched Jones’ Big Star right across the street, where David Porter used to sack groceries. Later that night we got scared, because we didn’t know how we were gonna get out of there and go home.”’
Mrs Loree Bailey, the fifty-two-year-old wife of Walter Bailey, the owner of the Lorraine Motel, had collapsed in the immediate aftermath of King’s assassination. She knew King well and had prepared his room on countless occasions. On hearing the fatal shot and seeing his crumpled body, she retreated back into the motel’s staff living quarters and collapsed with what was a suspected cerebral haemorrhage. A doctor claimed that ‘the shock had been too much for her’. Unconscious, she was rushed to the Baptist Hospital where she died having never regained consciousness, the second and forgotten fatality at the Lorraine Motel that night. She was buried a few days later at the city’s New Park Cemetery.
In Washington, wearied by the war in Vietnam, President Johnson called an emergency meeting of his key staff. He had only recently announced his intention to retire and not seek re-election. Although he privately despised King for opposing the war and publicly opposing his policies, he was astute enough to know that the assassination had potentially catastrophic repercussions that could damage race relations for decades to come. LBJ stood solemnly on the White House lawn broadcasting to the nation and beyond to the international community. He invited all Americans to search their hearts and to abandon the path of racial division, to ‘reject the blind violence that had struck down Dr King’. His words fell on deaf ears. Within walking distance of the White House, rioting was already encroaching on Capitol Hill. According to local newspaper The Washingtonian, the riot had its epicentre in DC’s downtown ghetto areas. ‘At the busy intersection of 14th and U streets in Northwest DC – the heart of the District’s black community – the news arrived on teenagers’ transistor radios.’ This was the area of the city where soul music had thrived. It was the home of the famous Howard Theater; the neighborhood that had once housed DC’s most gifted vocalists, from Marvin Gaye to Sam Moultrie; the neighborhood where Al Bell and Eddie Floyd had set up their independent soul label before they were drawn inexorably to Memphis; and the ghetto which had once been the creative hub of the doomed Shrine Records, an independent soul label whose inventory perished in the riots. According to reports, ‘people began to gather at the intersection, which was near the Washington office of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Rioters, many of them teenagers, smashed windows, looted stores, and started fires. They tossed Molotov cocktails into buildings and threw bottles, bricks, and rocks at firefighters who
tried to put out the blazes. The mood was part anger, part exhilaration.’
The crime writer George Pelecanos, a child witness to the DC riots, watched the exhilaration morph into a self-destructive loss. ‘The people who lost the most,’ he claimed, ‘were the people who lived in those neighborhoods. H Street was black Washington’s shopping corridor. You had Sears, Morton’s, Woolworth, and they employed thousands of black Washingtonians. All those jobs were gone, and people had no place to shop. Nobody went downtown any more. They were afraid.’
Back in Memphis, on the morning after King’s assassination, Frank R. Ahlgren, editor of The Commercial Appeal, announced a $25,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the killer. It came with the veneer of public service but was at best opportunistic, at worst guilt money. The paper had pilloried King in editorials and published scathing cartoons prior to his death. The editor was an unwavering supporter of Mayor Loeb in his opposition to the strike and complied with FBI and police requests to place stories critical of civil rights. But, in fairness to the paper, it published a strident front-page editorial that raged against violence and described the killing as ‘a tragedy for Memphis’.
Meanwhile, the hunt for James Earl Ray intensified. Within days the FBI were focusing a strand of their investigation on a bar called the Grapevine Tavern on Arsenal Street, St Louis, owned by Ray’s brother John Larry Ray. The bar had opened recently, on New Year’s Day 1968, and had quickly become a magnet for criminals, disaffected Ku Klux Klan members and supporters of George Wallace, the segregationist politician and American Independent Party candidate, whose headquarters were on the same block. James Earl Ray had been an ardent supporter of Wallace’s presidential campaign, and the presence of Klan members hanging out at the Grapevine gave the investigation team serious pause for thought. There was a bitter irony in this line of enquiry. Although the FBI had always kept a close eye on Klan activity, much of their recent focus via the COINTELPRO programme and the Memphis-based Operation Lantern Spike focused on black militant groups like the Panthers, the Blackstone Rangers and the Memphis Invaders. The files on Martin Luther King held in Atlanta under his code name ‘Zorro’ far outweighed those on local Klan activity. In a desperate bid to bring balance to their efforts, the FBI targeted Klansmen everywhere, heaping intense pressure on the Mississippi Klan especially, who had a history of bomb-making and were active in blowing up synagogues and killing black activists. A Georgia lawyer, Jesse Stoner, the founder of the National States Right Party (NSRP) and publisher of the fascist newspaper The Thunderbolt, was an early Klan suspect (later he was to become James Earl Ray’s attorney). Stoner, who ran for governor in Georgia in 1970 and once described Hitler as ‘too moderate’, had often called for King’s assassination, but he had an airtight alibi on the night of the murder: he was being shadowed by FBI agents as he addressed an NSRP chapter at a Klansman’s barbershop in Meridian, Mississippi.
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