Killing King

by Stuart Wexler

  King attended a meeting at the Centenary Methodist Church that day at noon, where he announced a plan for a mass march on April 8. But upon his return to the Lorraine that afternoon, federal marshals served Dr. King and his aides with a district court injunction, temporarily preventing them from engaging in future marches.27

  On the evening of April 3, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his last sermon at the famous Mason Temple church. Referencing both the particulars of the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike and the general condition of the civil rights movement on the eve of the Poor People’s Campaign, King struck an optimistic note, in what history now refers to as his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. King described the wide arc of history from the Exodus of Egypt to the Emancipation Proclamation, marked by the common theme of mankind saying “we want to be free.” Referring to the challenges to nonviolence, he reminded the crowd of the successes it brought in places like Birmingham.

  He was equally optimistic about practical facts on the ground. Referencing the restraining order against a future march in Memphis, Rev. King was confident that his team of lawyers would defeat the “unconstitutional injunction.” Of course, King was no stranger to violating injunctions, as he reminded the crowd of their past successes in Alabama. “We aren’t going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around,” he asserted. “We aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.”

  King ended by extending the theme of the Exodus to its final denouement, when the liberator Moses, having led the Hebrews to the outskirts of the Israel, climbed to the peak of Mount Nebo and stood in awe of the promised land that he himself would never visit. King reminded the audience of the bomb threat that delayed his flight to Memphis. Prophetically, he ended his speech with the following words:

  And then I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind.

  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. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

  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!!28

  11

  zero hour

  On April 3, several hours before Martin Luther King gave his final sermon at Mason Temple, James Earl Ray arrived in Memphis in his white Mustang. He checked into the New Rebel Motor Hotel using the Galt alias. He brought the newly purchased rifle, his prison radio, and other gear. In the years that followed, Ray, again, attributed a number of his actions to the elusive Raul, but could not keep his stories straight or even sensible. It is possible he was in Memphis to meet someone, perhaps to provide the newly purchased rifle to would-be conspirators. More than likely, he was debating his own next move. Would he continue to work within a prearranged bounty plot against King’s life? Or would he try for a greater share of the bounty himself?

  Anyone wanting to observe Dr. King’s movements in Memphis did not have to work very hard—his stay there was widely covered on television and in local newspapers. Ray, who voraciously followed the news while in prison, claims he was all but oblivious to anything having to do with Martin Luther King Jr. while in Memphis. But fingerprints on a newspaper covering King’s stay, including his lodgings at the Lorraine Motel fifteen minutes away from the New Rebel Motor, suggest otherwise.1

  The following day, at 3 p.m., James Earl Ray inquired about rooms at Bessie Brewer’s rooming house across the street from the Lorraine. Initially shown Room 8, Ray turned it down, claiming it provided too much in the way of amenities—cooking facilities, among other things. But Room 8 also happened to face South Main Street, without any view of the Lorraine. Ray elected to rent another room, 5B on the second floor, facing Mulberry Street, which provided a view of Martin Luther King Jr.’s room, 306, at the Lorraine. The vantage point from the window of Room 5B, at the rear of Bessie Brewer’s, was awkward, certainly for anyone looking to try to shoot the civil rights leader across the street.2 But the rooming house bathroom provided a clear view of the Lorraine and Room 306. As the evening approached, William Anschutz, another border at Bessie Brewer’s, became frustrated: someone was occupying that bathroom for an unusually long period of time.3

  police surveillance teams monitored Martin Luther King’s every move after he arrived in the River City on April 3, 1968. Memphis mayor Henry Loeb feared another riot. Cognizant that they lacked the manpower to respond to further civil unrest, local law enforcement formed special response teams, known as police tactical units (TAC), that, according to historian Michael Honey, “consisted of three cars, each of which held four men. A commanding officer could order a unit to a location, where they would quickly form a flying wedge and charge down the street.”4 Law enforcement also used African American officers to spy on gatherings of the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike. Officer Ed Reddit and his partner Willie Richmond formed one of the surveillance teams, assigned to observe King from Fire Station 2, across the street from the Lorraine Motel, where King was staying. Labor leaders had uncovered Reddit as a mole, hence his reassignment to surveillance duty. The mutual distrust between the labor strike proponents and their adversaries in the law enforcement community carried an important implication for April 4: King’s entourage had refused police protection when King arrived in Memphis the day before.5

  Fire department officials also worried about a riot and assigned their own men to watch King. But the two fire department officials tasked with watching the Lorraine were active in supporting the sanitation workers strike, and they clashed with Reddit, whom they saw as a turncoat. Reddit arranged for both firemen to be removed from duty on April 4, since both firefighters knew about Reddit’s role as a spy within the civil rights movement and Reddit sensed their hostility toward him. Then strange events forced Reddit himself from his post.6

  The Memphis police received death threats against Reddit, relayed from Philip Manuel, an aide to Arkansas senator John L. McClellan. According to an informant, radical Black Nationalists in Mississippi promised to kill Reddit. Reddit’s superior, Lieutenant Eli Arkin, removed Reddit from duty on April 4 as a precaution. The story of the threat, it turned out later, was completely false, leading some to think that the entire affair was part of a wider conspiracy to kill King, to facilitate his murder by stripping the minister of local security. But Reddit did not serve any security function on April 4, and his partner continued to maintain surveillance on King.7 A more likely explanation is that Sen. McClellan, an ardent segregationist, simply planted a false story as a dirty trick to undermine King, reinforcing an effort by Mayor Loeb to stop King’s upcoming April 5 demonstration by way of a federal judge’s injunction. A threat on a police officer could become the pretext to overcome First Amendment challenges to the injunction filed by King’s friend Andrew Young. Sen. McClellan had pursued similar dirty tricks to undermine the Poor People’s Campaign in the preceding months.8

  Surveillance logs of the Lorraine Motel reveal little in the way of activity on the part of King or his entourage on April 4. King spent most of his time inside his motel room that he shared with his close friend and fellow activist, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, waiting in

  Room 306 to hear the outcome of Young’s legal efforts. The night before, Abernathy sensed his approach was not working with the congregation at Mason Temple and coaxed Rev. King (exhausted from his travels) to the church to deliver his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. The nex
t day, the mood was lighter in the King-Abernathy

  suite. When Young returned with news that the injunction had been overturned, King, Abernathy, and others surprised the young attorney. If those surveilling King could see through walls, they would have witnessed King, Abernathy, and Young engaged in a playful pillow fight.9

  The men spent the rest of the April 4 afternoon in meetings and answering phone calls, delaying them from visiting the home of local minister, Rev. Billy Kyles, for dinner. In the early evening, with Kyles trying to rush King along, and with other civil rights leaders waiting in the parking lot, King exited Room 306 and approached the railing of the second floor of the Lorraine. At 6:01 p.m. a bullet “fractured Dr. King’s jaw, exited the lower part of the face and reentered the body in the neck area . . . It then severed numerous vital arteries and fractured the spine in several places, causing severe damage to the spinal column and coming to rest on the left side of the back.”10

  Several witnesses, including Reverends Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy, pointed in the general direction of Bessie Brewer’s rooming house as the source of the shots. Witnesses at Bessie Brewer’s rooming house described a man rushing out of the building after shots were heard. He appeared to be carrying a long bundle in what looked like a blanket. The name in the registry used by the tenant who showed up at 3 p.m. was John Willard, yet another alias eventually traced to James Earl Ray. Guy Canipe, owner of Canipe Amusement Company immediately adjacent to Bessie Brewer’s front entrance, reported someone dropping a package in front of his doorway; then shortly after, a white car sped by his store.11

  Rushed to Saint Joseph’s Hospital, King was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m.

  if christian identity radicals arranged the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. with the goal of igniting a racial holy war, they never came closer to their vision than in the weeks that followed

  April 4, 1968.

  The first signs of the violence that would plague America’s cities in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination began in the place where King delivered his famous “I Have A Dream” speech about the promise of racial harmony five years before: Washington, D.C. On April 4, upon hearing of the assassination “in stunned silence and utter disbelief,” a group of young black men, soon joined by Stokely Carmichael, patrolled the 14th and U Street sections of the nation’s capital, first asking and then demanding that the local businesses close in honor of Dr. King’s memory. Carmichael’s presence drew a larger crowd, one that grew increasingly angry as the reality of the news settled in. Soon anger turned to violence, but local police pacified the crowd. Yet, this was the calm before the storm in the nation’s capital, and in the nation as a whole.12

  The civil disorder that followed has not been matched, in intensity or scope, since. By 8 p.m. riots broke out that in the course of two weeks would spread to more than one hundred American cities, the most widespread outbreak of civil disorder in the United States since the Civil War. Time magazine described it as a “shock wave of looting and arson” that would, over the next week, lead to thousands of arrests, millions of dollars’ worth of damages, and the largest intervention of federal troops on domestic soil since Reconstruction. On April 5, Carmichael called the unrest the “beginning of revolution” and for a while it seemed that way. Even nonviolent stalwarts like former SNCC leader Julian Bond asserted, “Non-violence was murdered in Memphis.”13

  In front of an audience of 1,500 people in Cincinnati, an officer for the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) “blamed white Americans for King’s death and urged blacks to retaliate.” In two days, Cincinnati experienced an estimated $3 million in damages. Similar chaos affected approximately 128 cities in twenty-eight different states. A survey of the violence by Dr. Carol E. Dietrich, in her entry in the encyclopedia Race and Racism in the United States, described the devastation in startling numbers:

  In Chicago, federal troops and national guardsmen were called to the city to quell the disorders, in which more than 500 persons sustained injuries and approximately 3,000 persons were arrested. At least 162 buildings were reported entirely destroyed by fire, and total property damage was estimated at $9 million.

  In Baltimore, the National Guard and federal troops were called to curb the violence. More than 700 persons were reported injured from April 6 to 9, more than 5,000 arrests were made, and more than 1,000 fires were reported. Gov. Spiro T. Agnew declared a state of emergency and crisis on April 6, calling in 6,000 national guardsmen and the state police to aid the city’s 1,100-man police force.14

  The hardest-hit city was Washington, D.C., where the rioting began. “The District of Columbia government reported on May 1, 1968, that the April rioting had resulted in 9 deaths, 1,202 injuries, and 6,306 arrests,” Dr. Dietrich noted. Swift and Stoner could not have been more pleased that the heart of the “Jew-controlled” government lay smoldering alongside so much of America.

  The jubilant reaction by far-right white supremacists was widespread.

  Stoner, in fact, famously danced in the streets of Meridian, Mississippi at the news of King’s murder—with members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi! According to the FBI, Stoner predicted “the death of Martin Luther King would bring more Negro demonstrations and violence than anything since the Civil War.” Stoner added that, “the Black Power niggers will say that nonviolence has failed and that violence is the only answer.” The Swift follower “welcomed the riots which are expected to follow” and asserted that the NSRP was “glad to see others encouraging Negroes to protest.”15

  Sam Bowers and his colleagues celebrated the onslaught of rioting in America at John’s Café in Laurel, Mississippi. A low-level White Knight—unidentified in tape recordings—told Jack Nelson in 1969 that Bowers and others expected a race war.16

  Tommy Tarrants told Nelson, years later, that he celebrated the news of King’s murder while hiding out at a paramilitary training compound run by Swift followers in North Carolina, waiting to launch his guerrilla campaign against the United States.17

  In Pennsylvania, Rev. Roy Frankenhouser, of the Minutemen, defied a city ordinance and marched with white supremacists through the heart of his town. Stoner promised his own marches in May.

  Wesley Swift, while on an unexplained sabbatical from his routine sermons, nonetheless led a Bible study on April 24, the first one since King’s murder. He commented:

  The U.S. News & World Report had pictures of these Negroes looting the stores and coming out laughing. This article said there is no end to the rioting because Negroes are having a ball. They like this . . . these people shoot one another for excitement. They burn their own houses down just to see the fire. They loot everything. So how can you call them equal to the white man? . . . For the Negro has taken the place of the Indian as your enemy. The African Negroes are coming in, so the white man is going back to carrying a gun again . . . I think everyone should be armed today. The more of this rioting I see, I think you need . . . weapons.18

  But a closer analysis of the events in Memphis, and the reaction of white supremacists in the wake of the assassination suggests that not everything went according to plan or expectation on April 4.

  Without question, there was evidence that white supremacists

  were preparing to kill King in Memphis. Myrtis Hendricks, the waitress at John’s Café, overheard Deavours Nix, Bowers’s friend, “receive a telephone call on his phone which is close to the kitchen. After this call, Nix said, ‘Martin Luther King Jr. is dead.’ This was before the news came over the radio about the murder.”19 [Emphasis added.] Congress found additional information suggesting that Sam Bowers, in particular, shared insider information about a plot in Memphis while at John’s Café, a frequent hangout for the White Knights.20

  Additionally, J. B. Stoner’s very presence in Meridian, Mississippi, raises suspicions of foreknowledge. FBI agents who had the radical white supremacist under constant surveillance wi
tnessed Stoner’s celebratory dance. Law enforcement fully expected Stoner to follow his modus operandi—to go to Memphis in a counter-rally against King—and they placed him under watch fearing such rabble-rousing in Memphis. But on April 4, for reasons unknown, Stoner broke type. In fact, the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike was notable for its utter lack of counterprotests by racist groups. Unfortunately, rather than consider Stoner’s pattern of establishing an out-of-town alibi in his previous racial crimes, the FBI’s investigation into the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. immediately eliminated Stoner as their number one suspect in a King plot because he was in Meridian.21 In a practice condemned by a later congressional inquiry, the FBI assumed that anyone who wasn’t in Memphis could not have taken part in a conspiracy against King—the same logic allowed them to eliminate everyone from Sam Bowers to Sidney Barnes from consideration as conspirators.

  The Jackson field office spent a considerable amount of time trying to verify the whereabouts of KKK members on April 4, looking to see if their cars were in driveways or if the light in their homes were on. One member made it rather easy for the FBI to establish his alibi: on the evening of April 4, 1968, Meridian police ticketed Danny Joe Hawkins, one of Bowers’s 1968 covert hit squad, for speeding the wrong way down a one-way street.22

  Yet if Hawkins was attempting to establish some kind of alibi for the murder, he clearly could have found better ways if he expected the King murder to materialize as it did on April 4. For all his jubilation over the riots that followed the King murder, and for all the suspicious activity suggesting that Sam Bowers knew about a Memphis plot in advance, other informant reports suggest that the Imperial Wizard did not, at first, like the timing of the death. Something may have been expected in Memphis, but was it the shooting at the Lorraine?23