Ray appeared to be performing the role of a stalker, one that presumably carried a lower payday. If Ray wanted a bigger piece of the action, it’s possible that he had to create a racist profile that would allow him to directly engage the plot’s sponsors. Such a record would have to be sufficiently controversial to earn the respect of the sponsors without looking outwardly radical to law enforcement investigators. But if Ray wanted to expand his role in hopes of making more money, he was running out of time. The purchase of the rifle would be a sure sign to Ray that whatever plan was in motion, King would be killed sooner rather than later.
On April 1, 1968, having delivered his sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., King publicly announced his return to Memphis, at the same time Ray was leaving laundry at the Piedmont Laundry under the name Eric Galt. The following day, as Ray drove his Mustang from Atlanta to Memphis, something strange happened at John’s Restaurant in Laurel, Mississippi. The restaurant–bar, owned by Deavours Nix, one of Sam Bowers’s closest aides in the WKKKKOM, was a place where senior Klan leaders frequently met. According to a report filed by Myrtis Ruth Hendricks, a black waitress at the bar, Nix received an odd phone call that evening. “I got a call on the King,” Hendricks recalled Nix saying when she was interviewed by FBI agents on April 22. But she was unable to hear the rest of the conversation. Hendricks recalled additional suspicious activity on April 3, 1968. According to her report, “two men, neatly dressed, with short stocky builds, came to Nix’s place where she started to work the evening shift at three P.M. While going to the bathroom, she observed a rifle with a telescopic sight, in a case in Nix’s office. Later, the two men took the rifle and a long box, which took three men to carry out, and put them in a sixty four maroon Dodge with a fake ‘continental kit’ on the back.”41 As we shall see, Hendricks’s story did not end there.
Despite a bomb threat delaying his flight, Martin Luther King Jr. returned to Memphis on April 3. With the Poor People’s march to Washington, D.C., less than three weeks away, King returned with the goal of proving that nonviolent protest could still work. The bad blood that had developed between civil rights activists and the local police department boiled over as King’s entourage, mindful of police informants infiltrating the ranks of the sanitation protesters, refused the security detail usually provided to the minister.
King settled at the Lorraine Motel but not at first in his usual room, 306, where he and his close friend the Reverend Ralph Abernathy often stayed. Someone was temporarily staying in Room 306, so King and Abernathy waited in a second-floor room until they got a call to reclaim 306, which they called the King–Abernathy Suite. At noon that day, King attended a meeting at the Centenary Methodist Church, where he announced a plan for a mass march on April 8. But upon his return to the Lorraine that afternoon, federal marshals served him and his aides with a district court injunction, temporarily preventing them from engaging in future marches.
James Earl Ray also arrived in Memphis on April 3. He checked into the New Rebel Motor Hotel, roughly fifteen minutes from the Lorraine, using the Galt alias. He brought the newly purchased rifle and other gear. In the years that followed, Ray again attributed a number of his actions to the elusive Raul, but he could not keep his stories straight. It is possible that 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 provide reconnaissance 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.
On the evening of April 3, King delivered his last sermon, at the 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 “The Mountaintop” speech. He described the wide arc of history from the Exodus of Egypt to the Emancipation Proclamation, marked by the common theme of mankind’s saying, “We want to be free.” Referring to the challenges to nonviolence, he reminded the crowd of the successes it had brought in places like Birmingham. 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 Israel, climbed to the peak of Mount Nebo and stood in awe of the Promised Land, which he himself would never visit. King reminded the audience of the bomb threat that had delayed his flight to Memphis and of a 1957 assassination attempt in which a deranged woman had nearly murdered King with a knife. But for a sneeze, King reminded the audience, he would not be alive; but for a sneeze, he would not have seen the triumphs of the civil rights movement. Prophetically, he ended his speech with the following words:
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!42
9
TRIBULATION
OUTRAGE and the INVESTIGATION into WHO REALLY KILLED KING
On April 4, 1968, just after 6 PM, a message went out from a Memphis police dispatcher: “We have information that King has been shot at the Lorraine. TAC-10, he has been shot.” An unidentified officer replied: “OK, TAC-10 advising, King has been shot … 6:04.” The conversation continued:
“TAC-11, you want us to pull out?”
“TAC-11, you are to pull out.”
“OK, TAC-11.”
“In the area?”
“A signal Q, A signal Q.”
“King has been shot.”
“All TAC units on the call, you are to form a ring around the Lorraine Motel. You are to form a ring around the Lorraine Motel. No one is to enter or leave.”1
The police had more than just “information” that King had been shot. Police surveillance teams had monitored the civil rights leader’s every movement since King had arrived in the River City on April 3, 1968. Memphis mayor Henry Loeb feared another riot. Cognizant that it lacked the manpower to respond to further civil unrest, local law enforcement formed special response teams, known as police tactical units (TAC), consisting of, according to historian Michael Honey, “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.”2
Law enforcement also used African American officers to spy on gatherings of striking sanitation workers. One such officer, Ed Redditt, 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 soon uncovered Redditt 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.
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. They clashed with Redditt, who they saw as a turncoat. Redditt arranged for both firemen to be removed from duty on April 4, as they occupied the same space in Fire Station 2. Then strange events also forced Redditt from his post.
The Memphis police received death threats
against Redditt, relayed from an aide to Arkansas senator John L. McClellan. According to an informant, radical black nationalists in Mississippi promised to kill Redditt. Reddit’s superior, Lieutenant Eli Arkin, removed Redditt 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 Redditt did not serve any security function on April 4, and his partner continued to maintain surveillance on King.
A more likely explanation is that 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 April 5 demonstration by way of a federal judge’s injunction. A threat on a police officer could become a pretext to overcome First Amendment challenges by King’s friend and attorney Andrew Young aimed at stopping the injunction. In fact McClellan had pursued similar dirty tricks to undermine the Poor People’s Campaign in the preceding months.3
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 the room that he shared with his close friend and fellow activist the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, waiting in room 306 to hear the outcome of Young’s legal efforts. The two men formed a formidable duo in their pursuit of civil rights, appealing to different constituencies in the black community through their different preaching styles. King’s oratory style resonated more with highly educated and middle-class black elites, while Abernathy’s “country” delivery style appealed to working-class and rural audiences.
The night before, Abernathy had sensed that his approach was not working with the congregation at the Mason Temple Church and had coaxed King (exhausted from his travels) to the church to deliver what would become “The Mountaintop” speech. The next day, the mood was lighter in the so-called 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.
The men spent the rest of April 4 in meetings and answering phone calls, which delayed a visit to the home of a local minister, the Reverend 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 balcony of the Lorraine. At 6:01 PM 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.” Rushed to Saint Joseph’s Hospital, King was pronounced dead at 7:05 PM.
If Christian Identity radicals had 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 had delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech about the promise of racial harmony five years before: Washington, D.C. Upon hearing of the assassination, “in stunned silence and utter disbelief,” a group of young black men, soon joined by Stokely Carmichael, patrolled the Fourteenth and U Street sections of the nation’s capital, first asking and then demanding that 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 law enforcement pacified the crowd. Yet this was the calm before the storm in the nation’s capital and in the nation as a whole.4
The civil disorder that followed has not been matched, in intensity or scope, since 1968. By 8 PM riots had broken out. In the course of two weeks they would spread to more than one hundred American cities, the most widespread outbreak of civil disorder in the nation since the Civil War. Time magazine described the situation as a “shock wave of looting and arson” that would, over the next week, lead to thousands of arrests, millions of dollars in 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, “Nonviolence was murdered in Memphis.”5
In front of an audience of fifteen hundred people in Cincinnati, an officer for 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 states. Dr. Carol E. Dietrich 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 damaged 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.6
The hardest-hit city was Washington, D.C., where the rioting had begun. “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,” 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. Along with members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, Stoner famously danced in the streets of Meridian, Mississippi, at the news of King’s murder. 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, “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.”7
Sam Bowers and his colleagues celebrated the onslaught of rioting in America at John’s Restaurant in Laurel, Mississippi (where, on April 3, waitress Myrtis Hendricks had observed mysterious men take a rifle from White Knights lieutenant Deavours Nix and leave in a maroon truck). A low-level White Knight—unidentified in tape recordings—told Jack Nelson in 1969 that Bowers and others expected a race war.
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.
In Pennsylvania, the Reverend Roy Frankhouser, leader 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, 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 and 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 India
n 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.”8
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 clearly was evidence that white supremacists were preparing to kill King in Memphis. Myrtis Hendricks, the waitress at John’s Restaurant, 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” [emphasis added]. Congress found additional information suggesting that at John’s Restaurant, a frequent hangout for the WKKKKOM, Sam Bowers in particular shared insider information about a plot in Memphis.9
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 witnessed 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 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 counter-protests by racist groups.
Unfortunately, rather than consider Stoner’s pattern of establishing an out-of-town alibi in his previous racial crimes, in its investigation into the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (code-named MURKIN), the FBI immediately eliminated Stoner as its number-one suspect because he was in Meridian. 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 philosophy that allowed it to eliminate everyone from Sam Bowers to Sidney Barnes from consideration as conspirators.
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