Redemption

by Joseph Rosenbloom

  It was a Sunday. Ray was working his regular shift in the prison bakery, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. A truck was to arrive that day to pick up bread for regular delivery to the honor farm beyond the prison gates. Ray contorted his five-ten frame under a false bottom of a metal breadbox that measured four feet long, three feet wide, and three feet deep. The box was meant for sixty loaves. A fellow inmate covered the false bottom with enough bread to camouflage his curled body below. When the truck arrived, two inmates rolled the breadbox into its cargo bay.

  Once the truck cleared the gates, Ray unfolded himself from the box. He had planned carefully. He wore a dyed pair of black pants and white shirt under his orange prison uniform, which he quickly stripped off. When the truck stopped at an intersection, he leaped to the ground. He did not run but instead ambled off so as not to alert the driver.20 He carried a stash of twenty candy bars, a comb, a razor and blades, a piece of mirror, soap, and a transistor radio.

  According to his own eventual testimony, Ray laid low till dark, ducked through fields to avoid houses with lights, and trekked for seven nights, covering forty-five to sixty miles, and then jumped a railroad boxcar to St. Louis.21 He had served seven years and thirty-seven days of his twenty-year sentence.

  By July he managed to reach Canada, where the border with the United States was not then hard to cross for an American. In Montreal he tried and failed in his attempt to obtain a Canadian passport under the assumed name of Eric Starvo Galt, and he returned to Birmingham. There he answered an ad in the Birmingham News for a 1966 V-8 Mustang with whitewall tires. On August 30, posing as Galt, he bought the car for $1,966 cash.22 Again using the Galt alias, he obtained an Alabama driver’s license.

  How Ray acquired the money to buy the Mustang and pay the thousands more that he spent while he was a fugitive would mystify investigators. One likely source was his hustling of drugs and other illicit goods at Jeff City, money he may have parked with his brothers while he was in prison. Another possibility was the armed $27,230 heist of the Bank of Alton, on July 13, 1967. It was an unsolved case in circumstances pointing vaguely to Ray. There were other lesser robberies for which he seemed a likely suspect, but no clear-cut evidence connected him to any of the thefts.

  With the sporty Mustang as his calling card, Ray headed south and west. He clocked two thousand miles, eventually crossing the Rio Grande and going halfway down the Pacific coast of Mexico. He wound up in Puerto Vallarta, a derelict former mining town then emerging as an upscale beach resort.

  Manuela Aguirre Medrano, a prostitute, would tell investigators that she and Ray became acquainted in Puerto Vallarta. She said that she slept with him several times while he was living high (beer during the day, gin at night). If anyone asked what he did for a living, he said he was a writer. He was calm, shy, yet prone to spew hatred against blacks, she would say of him.23

  By mid-November, Ray was on the road again, back across the border and on to Los Angeles. He hung out in bars there, posturing as a businessman who had operated and sold a tavern in Mexico and who was mulling over his next venture. He embarked on a quirky quest for self-improvement. He hired a plastic surgeon to snub his pointy nose. He booked sessions with a psychologist and a hypnotist. He took courses in bartending and ballroom dancing. It was as though he was remaking himself for a more respectable calling. He devised a murderous plot instead.

  Investigators who would inquire into Ray’s life would find abundant evidence that he hated black people, King in particular.24 Written on the back of his TV set they found the segregationist slur “Martin Luther Coon.” They reported many instances in which Ray had allegedly uttered anti-black insults.25 One of his lawyers, Percy Foreman, would say years later, “He is a racist, and has been one all his life. He could not think of anybody else not being a racist if they were white.”26

  While he was in Los Angeles, Ray’s anti-black bigotry seemed to seize him with acute insistence. He circulated a petition to place third-party presidential candidate George Wallace, the segregationist former Alabama governor, on the California ballot. In one incident at a bar, the Rabbit Foot’s Club, he had an angry exchange with a white woman, presumably over race. According to the bartender, Ray dragged the woman toward the door, hollering that he aimed to drop the woman off in Watts, the city’s African American neighborhood.27

  Just when Ray resolved to kill King remains an open question. In Los Angeles the idea stirred him into action. Perhaps not coincidentally, King was highly visible at the time, denouncing the Vietnam War and vowing massive demonstrations in Washington.

  Over the weekend of March 16 to 17, King was in Los Angeles to preach at the Second Baptist Church. Ray, an avid newspaper reader, might well have seen articles in the Los Angeles press reporting King’s visit and his plan to blitz the South later that week on behalf of the Poor People’s Campaign.28 Ray filled out a postal change-of-address form marked “General Delivery, Atlanta.” On March 17, he left Los Angeles in the Mustang.

  If Ray intended to head straight to Atlanta, he changed his mind. News media were reporting that King would travel to Selma, Alabama. Hot on King’s trail, Ray drove to Selma. He spent the night of March 22, a Friday, at a motel in the Alabama city. But King was not in Selma that night. A last-minute change in his schedule had him sleeping in Camden, thirty-eight miles away.

  Ray drove on to Atlanta. As was his habit on arriving in a new city, Ray looked for a cheap rooming house where he could stay. He found a room for $10.50 a week on Fourteenth Street near Piedmont Park, a Midtown area known as a hippie enclave.

  He zeroed in on King’s likely whereabouts. In pencil he circled a map of Atlanta at three points linked to King. One circle marked the SCLC headquarters, a second the Ebenezer Baptist Church, and the third a former house of King’s. A fourth circle, around the Capitol Hill Housing Project, is where Ray would abandon his Mustang on April 5.

  Ray outfitted himself in sniper mode. He shopped for a high-powered rifle, not in Atlanta but 150 miles away in Birmingham. For Ray, a felon using a fake name, Alabama was a less risky state than Georgia in which to buy a gun. In Alabama, unlike Georgia, there was no requirement that he identify himself.29 He did not have to show his counterfeit driver’s license, which would have identified him as Eric S. Galt. Keeping the transaction separate from his alias avoided creating a paper trail that might link the driver’s license to the rifle that he intended to buy.

  On Saturday, March 23, a week after his departure from Los Angeles, he drove to Birmingham to shop for the rifle. He parked the Mustang at the Aquamarine Supply Company, a sporting goods store opposite the Birmingham airport, and went inside.

  He told the store manager, Donald Wood, that he wanted a rifle for deer hunting in Wisconsin. Ray selected a .30–06, pump-action Remington Gamemaster 760. The rifle could “drop a charging bull,” according to Remington’s marketing material.30 Ray bought a Redfield 7x2 scope to attach to the Gamemaster. The scope would magnify an image to look seven times closer. He also bought a box of soft-point, military-style bullets, a kind that would mushroom on impact.31 The total cost of the three purchases, plus tax, was $265.85. Ray signed the sales slip as Harvey Lowmeyer, thus distancing the alias of Eric S. Galt from the purchase of the rifle.

  By Monday newspapers were reporting that King would return to Memphis that week to stage a nonviolent march. That same day, Ray left Atlanta for Tennessee. Where he stopped between Atlanta and Memphis is not known, although investigators would surmise that he paused somewhere, likely in a wooded area, for target practice.

  On the outskirts of Memphis he found the New Rebel Motel and checked in. No one would report seeing Ray leave Room 34. At 10:20, during his evening rounds, night clerk Ivan Well would note that lights were burning brightly in Room 34. Ray may have been watching television. If so, he might have seen the late evening news on Channel Five, which reported King’s arrival in Memphis that morning. A clip of the footage showed King entering Room 306 at the Lorraine.32

  Chapte
r 14

  Summoning Dr. King

  And so I call upon labor as the historic ally of the underprivileged and oppressed to join with us in this present struggle to redeem the soul of America.

  —MLK, speaking to the Illinois State AFL-CIO, Springfield, Illinois, October 7, 1965

  WHILE JAMES EARL RAY was holed up in the New Rebel Motel and a thunderstorm was raging outside, hundreds of strikers and their supporters were filtering into Mason Temple to hear King speak. They clustered in the front section, shedding their rain-spattered jackets as they took their seats. Looming above them was a raised platform from which King would speak. All eyes were turned expectantly toward the front. King was not yet there.

  Almost lost in the overwhelmingly African American crowd was a sprinkling of white faces. Mike Cody, the young white lawyer assisting Lucius Burch to fight the federal injunction against King, was in the central, main-floor section near the podium. That section of the auditorium was packed with people. Cody would remember the air feeling stuffy, a sense magnified by the fury of the storm outside, its thunder and lightning stifling the crowd’s murmuring to speakers’ remarks from the podium.1

  On this Wednesday night, though, the crowd filled at most half the seats in the vastness of Mason Temple. Estimates of the turnout would range from two thousand to four thousand.2 In its edition the following morning the Commercial Appeal would term the audience “disappointingly small.”

  The sparse turnout was a setback for the garbage workers, who had little reason to believe that their strike would end with a favorable outcome anytime soon. If they were losing heart, they were not without hope. They had faith that the man they knew reverently as Dr. King might somehow shift the momentum of the strike to save the day. (The honorific recognized the doctorate in systematic theology King earned at Boston University in 1955.)

  Union leader Joe Warren would say: “We ain’t never had a man, black or white [who was the equal of Dr. King].”3 Taylor Rogers, another garbage worker in the crowd, would remember waiting eagerly to hear King speak again. Rogers had thrilled to King’s speech on March 18. “It had ignited a much needed spark,” he would later recall.4

  The March 18 speech had boosted the strikers’ spirits at a critical moment. Some workers who were initially on strike but who had returned to their jobs were so stirred by King’s words that they had rejoined the strikers’ ranks. Now Rogers was expecting another speech packed with power and emotion. He was praying that King’s return to Memphis marked a turning point that would lead to victory for the strikers.

  As the rally was getting under way, the storm bearing down on Memphis was lashing King’s motel room with torrents of rain. He could hear the roar of thunder and see fearsome lightning strikes through the motel window. Worse, the scream of sirens continued to warn of tornadoes (which would strike nearby areas in Arkansas and West Tennessee, destroying houses and leaving two people dead and many injured).

  Some Memphians were hunkered down at home. There were reasons other than the storm to stay put. For one, at 7:30 p.m., a revue of the talent acts in the upcoming Miss Memphis Pageant would be on television.

  Mayor Loeb too was at home that night. Frank McRae telephoned him to tell his pal that he ought to expect a visit on Friday morning from a biracial delegation of Memphis pastors. The clergymen would be coming to city hall to question the mayor’s unyielding attitude toward the strike. McRae asked if the mayor would receive the clergymen. “Fine,” Loeb replied. “Be glad to see you, Frank. But you’re going to waste your time, and all you’re going to do is get yourselves in trouble with your congregations, and you’re going to be misunderstood. You’re not going to change my mind one way or another.”5

  Compared to many houses, Mason Temple offered a safe haven from tornadoes. But behind its brick facade it was nothing fancy. The seats were hard, straight-back, wooden chairs arrayed in semicircular rows under a lattice of steel girders. The official capacity was seventy-five hundred. Two or three thousand more, some standing, had somehow crammed into its two levels, a ground floor and balcony, for King’s speech on March 18.

  Entering the thick of a bitter labor strike like the one in Memphis was a rare, almost unprecedented step for King to take. Once, in 1964, he had briefly joined a picket line of workers on strike against a Scripto, Inc., facility in his hometown of Atlanta.6 For years he had courted unions in other ways. In a landmark pro-labor speech at the National AFL-CIO Convention at Bal Harbour, Florida, in 1961, King had proclaimed common cause between the labor and civil rights movements. On that occasion, he heralded the potential for unions to improve the wages and working conditions of African Americans. “If the Negro Wins, Labor Wins” was the title of the speech.7

  A few unions with large black memberships had supported the SCLC financially. The United Packinghouse Workers of America had been a steady source of funds for the organization’s often-depleted coffers. Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers was a fervent backer, and his union had been a major benefactor.8

  But King’s gratitude toward the labor movement had its limits. Many unions, particularly in the South, excluded blacks from membership and denied them apprenticeship training and vocational education.9 King deplored union racism, and he condemned it in no uncertain terms. In his 1958 book Stride Toward Freedom, King faulted those unions for having contributed to blacks’ “degraded” economic circumstances.10

  By 1968, however, as he looked for support in his fight against poverty, King seemed far more intent on promoting common cause with unions than decrying the racism that pervaded many of them. In Where Do We Go from Here, his blueprint for the Poor People’s Campaign published in January 1968, King saluted unions for their increasing inclusion of African Americans.11

  The turn of events in Memphis was drawing him into a closer embrace with the labor movement. If Memphis was risky for King, at least it offered a potential benefit. The more he advanced the unions’ cause, the more likely they were to support his.

  Now, at the rally in Mason Temple, King had the opportunity to lift the morale of one union, Local 1733 of AFSCME. With still no sight of King, other speakers bided time by warming up the crowd. They led them in prayer and song. They solicited strike-support donations. Jim Lawson took the podium and denounced the pending injunction against King, declaring, “Mace cannot stop us, gas cannot stop us, and we are going to march.”12

  Lawson reprised strike-related events of the previous few days. He denounced the police for employing what he regarded as brutally excessive force to quell the rioting on March 28. His voice ringing with indignation, Lawson accused one police officer of having fatally shot sixteen-year-old Larry Payne in cold blood.13 Payne allegedly had looted a television from a Sears, Roebuck store before fleeing. A police department review would conclude later that in the aftermath of the riot Payne had pulled a knife on the patrolman, who shot in self-defense. The officer was exonerated. A number of witnesses, however, disputed the department’s account.14 According to historian Michael Honey, a dozen eyewitnesses said Payne had no knife but had his hands up and was killed by a blast from a shotgun poked into his stomach.15

  Lawson was still addressing the crowd when Abernathy, Jackson, and Young entered through a side door of the temple. At the sight of them there was a great eruption of cheers and applause. They might have been rock stars leaping onto a stage. But as soon as it dawned on the crowd that King was not among them, the uproar fizzled as abruptly as it had begun. The crowd’s message was unmistakable. “We said, ‘It’s not us they’re cheering for.’ We laughed about it, and we said he had to come,” Jackson would recall.16

  Years later, Abernathy would recap his thoughts at that moment. He would write in his memoir that the people “who had driven through rainy, windswept streets” to Mason Temple “had done so because they expected to see Martin Luther King, Jr., not Ralph D. Abernathy. I knew that better than anybody, and I was overwhelmed by the fact as I walked down the aisle and onto the stage. Nobody
shouted or applauded. Clearly they were all waiting for the evening’s attraction.”17

  With their cameras, tripods, and lights set up in front of the podium, seven or eight TV film crews were waiting in anticipation of King’s arrival. Several were covering the event for the major television networks. As Abernathy would recollect: “That meant the audience would be national, so the event was much more important than a poorly attended local rally.”18 Abernathy told Jackson that he intended to telephone King and urge him to come to Mason Temple at once to speak. According to Abernathy, Jackson replied, “Don’t call him. If you don’t want to speak, then I’ll speak.”

  Ignoring Jackson, Abernathy hurried to the temple vestibule where there was a telephone and called the Lorraine. King answered.

  “Martin,” Abernathy said, “all the television networks are lined up waiting for you. This speech will be broadcast nationwide. You need to deliver it. Besides, the people who are here want you. Not me.”

  “I’ll do whatever you say. If you say come, I’ll be there,” King said.

  Abernathy replied, “Come.”19

  Moments later, King left the motel. He arrived at Mason Temple about nine o’clock. The crowd had been waiting an hour and a half for King. The sight of him striding toward the podium set off another deafening cacophony of shouts and applause. As the crowd’s excitement washed over him, King grinned widely and took a seat on the podium.

  Abernathy was no longer the main event. But he was wound up to talk. He would recall feeling an impulse, a powerful desire to exalt King’s greatness to this audience on this night.20 Abernathy offered to introduce his friend.

  King and Abernathy had a friendship like no other. They had stood shoulder to shoulder during King’s civil rights campaigns since the earliest days of the Montgomery bus boycott. With Abernathy bravely accompanying King as moral support and for the safety of numbers, they had gone to jail together time and again. More weeks than not, they were on the road together. They had preached in each other’s churches, vacationed together, eaten in each other’s homes on countless occasions, and become enmeshed in the lives of each other’s families.