It was late afternoon in Memphis when I said goodbye to the bartender at Pearl’s Oyster House and walked back to the Chevy. When I got to where it was parked, I looked down the street. It felt wrong to leave town without paying my respects to the site of the most significant event in Memphis history. I walked on, past my car.
There are benches on Main Street between the front of the Lorraine
Motel and the back of a building that used to be Bessie Brewer's rooming
house on Mulberry Street. The buildings
are now all part of the National Civil Rights Museum. My wife and I visited there a year before the
pandemic.
It was warm, even for Memphis, as I took a seat on one of
those benches in March of 2023. Good time
for a long sit. As I looked around, I
couldn’t help but think of what happened there just after 6:00 p.m. on April 4th,
1968.
My bench faced the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, which opened
in 1940 as a modest and economical southern inn available to black travelers in
the South. Like many white Americans I
was vaguely aware that segregation extended to hotels, but until I saw the
movie Green Book, I didn’t appreciate what that meant. That’s another way of saying I had never
stopped to consider how it must have felt for a black person to be so separated
from, pushed out of, the world enjoyed by white Americans away from home.
In 2019 the film Green Book won best picture, best screenplay,
and best lead actor. It was based on the
true story of Dr. Don Shirley, a classically trained and superbly talented New
York based African American concert pianist, played by academy award winning actor
Mahershala Ali. In the film Dr. Shirley insists
that his agent book him for a series of performances throughout the South in
1962.
His agent agrees, but only if he accepts Italian-American night
club bouncer and tough guy Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga, played by Viggo
Mortenson, as his driver and bodyguard.
When Tony Lip is hired, the agent gives him a copy of the Negro
Motorist Green Book.
“What’s this?” Tony Lip asks.
“Those a list of the only places Dr. Shirley can stay when
you’re down there. Make sure he does. If he’s not in one of those places every night,
he’s in danger.”
Over my shoulder was Bessie Brewer’s Rooming House, a flop
house built on a small rise and made up of two buildings loosely joined
together, one for whites, the other for blacks.
On April 3rd James Earl Ray, using the name John Willard, rented
a sleeping room. Across the street was
the Lorraine Motel, which was listed in the Green Book.
Bessie remembered James Earl Ray aka John Willard, who
rented Room 5-B, because he was well dressed and carried a thick roll of
bills. He peeled off a crisp new twenty
for a room that cost $8.50 a week in advance. He also insisted on a room in the
rear of the building nearest a bathroom that looked out on the front of the
Lorraine Motel. She didn’t ask him why
he came to Memphis.
Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the national leader of
the civil rights movement and co-pastor with his father of Ebenezer Baptist
Church in Atlanta, often stayed at the Lorraine Motel when he visited
Memphis. He was partial to Room 306, a
double, in front of the motel just off the balcony. He was sharing the room with another Baptist pastor,
Reverend Ralph Abernathy, founder of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference. They came to Memphis March
29th to support a strike of the Memphis Sanitation Workers, most of
whom were African American. The strike began in response to the death of
two such workers crushed to death in a garbage truck accident. 1300 sanitation workers struck for increased
safety measures, higher wages, and time and a half overtime.
Dr. King and Rev. Abernathy’s support of the Memphis strike fit
perfectly with the larger “Poor People’s Campaign” designed by Dr. King and other
civil rights leaders. The Poor People’s
Campaign was aimed at alleviating poverty regardless of race by bringing poor
Americans together as a unified group.
The War on Poverty, neglected by President Lyndon Johnson’s administration
and Congress, was widely seen as a failure.
The federal government was focused on the Vietnam War, and white America
increasingly perceived anti-poverty programs as helping only African Americans.
The Poor People’s Campaign sought to
address poverty by dramatizing the needs of the poor and providing solutions
such as full employment, a guaranteed annual income, and more low-income
housing.
In 1968, Dr. King’s speeches often contained this line “We
believe the highest patriotism demands the ending of the (Vietnam) war and the
opening of a bloodless war to final victory over racism and poverty.”
The sanitation worker’s strike was supported by the American
Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the NAACP. Although AFSCME was chartered by the State of
Tennessee in 1964, Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb refused to recognize the union or
the strike. There was no dialogue
between the city and the union. Garbage
piled up on Memphis streets.
James Earl Ray was born in Alton, Illinois and grew up in
Missouri. His family moved a lot. The family went by the surname of Raynes
after his father passed a bad check in Alton.
Young James Earl had a run in with the police at 15 and left
school. He joined the army after World
War II but was court martialed for drunkenness and given a general discharge
for “ineptness and lack of adaptability.”
He worked in Chicago, then California, and in 1949 was
serving a jail sentence for burglary.
That arrest and incarceration was the beginning of a string of jail
sentences across the country; 1952 for armed robbery in Chicago, 1955 for
robbing a post office in Kansas, and in 1960 an armed robbery in Missouri that earned
Ray a twenty-year sentence. In 1967, on
his third escape attempt from the Missouri State penitentiary, he succeeded by
hiding in a bread truck leaving the prison bakery. He was on the run when he came to Memphis.
In Birmingham, Ray got an Alabama driver’s license and
bought a white 1966 Ford Mustang. He headed
to Mexico. There, under the name Eric
Stravo Galt, he took up a career as a pornographic film editor. It didn’t work out. In November of 1967 he left Mexico for Los
Angeles, where he worked odd jobs and was a volunteer for Alabama Gov. George
Wallace’s presidential campaign.
Wallace ran in November of 1968 as a third-party candidate
of the “American Independent Party” against Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat
Hubert Humphrey. George Wallace’s most
notable campaign line was “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, and
segregation forever.”
Ray left L.A. and arrived in Atlanta on March 18 where he
purchased a map of the city. After King
was killed, the FBI found the map. Ray had circled the location of Ebenezer
Baptist Church, the offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
and the Rev. Dr. King’s home on Sunset Avenue.
Ray was in Atlanta only two days before he left for
Birmingham where, under the name of Harvey Lowmeyer, he bought a Remington .30-06
rifle, a Redfield scope, and a single box of twenty soft point metal jacketed bullets. He returned to Atlanta. After learning that Rev. King was in Memphis,
he packed a bag and his newly purchased rifle and drove there. He arrived on April 2nd. James Earl Ray came to Memphis to assassinate
Martin Luther King.
Fifty-five years later, I was sitting midway between the Lorraine
Motel and Bessie Brewer’s flophouse where James Earl Ray had locked himself in
a second-floor bathroom sometime between 5:45 and 6:00 p.m. He unwrapped his newly purchased rifle from a
bedspread, stood in the bathtub, and knocked out the screen covering the
window.
At 6:00 p.m. Dr. King
and Jesse Jackson appeared on the balcony.
It was a cool night. They had plans to go to dinner and a strategy
meeting that night with several other civil rights leaders at the home of Reverend
Sam “Billy” Kyles, long time participant in the movement and pastor of the
Monumental Baptist Church in Memphis.
At 6:01 p.m., as King’s driver, Solomon Jones, standing by the
white Cadillac parked below the balcony called out “Dr. King it’s getting cool.
You better get a coat,” the crack of a
rifle shot was heard.
The bullet hit Dr. King’s cheek, fractured his jaw, then entered his body in the neck area, rupturing his jugular vein and a major artery before fracturing several vertebrae and coming to rest in his left shoulder. He was rushed to St. Joseph Hospital and pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. April 4, 1968.
The bullet would have traveled diagonally over my head
between the two buildings. Not a long
shot, slightly downhill. One pull of the
trigger, a single shot in Memphis echoed across America and changed
history.
Just as the rifle shots on a street in Dallas which killed President
Kennedy on November 22, 1963, the volley of pistol shots from three gunmen in
New York that took the life of Malcolm X on February 21,1968, and the assassination
of Robert F. Kennedy by a single gunman at the crowded Ambassador Hotel in Los
Angeles on June 5th of that same year. RFK’s platform of peace in Vietnam had just
won him the California Democratic Primary, which promised to pave his way to become
the Democratic nominee for president.
Taken together, those political assassinations in the span
of five years dealt a crippling blow to the national leadership of both the
civil rights and anti-war movements in America.
Martin Luther King’s death sparked protests that boiled over
into riots in 110 cities across the country.
The King Assassination riots, also known as the Holy Week Uprising, were
particularly destructive in Washington D.C.. Angry crowds of 20,000 or more protestors overwhelmed
D.C.’s 3,100-member police force. President
Lyndon Johnson ordered 13,600 federal troops and national guardsmen to the
capitol. Marines mounted machine guns on the steps of
the Capitol building and the 3rd infantry guarded the White
House. On April 5th rioting took
place within two blocks of the White House before rioters retreated. It was said to have been the largest occupation
of any American city since the Civil War.
By the time D.C. was considered safe three days later, 1200 buildings in
that city had been burned, including 900 stores. Damage was estimated at $27 million dollars.
In Chicago, violence centered on the West side. It eventually expanded to consume a 28-block
stretch of West Madison Street with additional violence on Roosevelt Road. The neighborhoods of Lawndale and East
Garfield Park on the West Side and Woodlawn on the South Side suffered the most
chaos and destruction. 36 major fires
were reported between 4:00 and 10:00 p.m. on April 5th alone.
Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley ordered 10,500 police sent into
those areas, and by April 6th 6,700 National Guard members sent by
LBJ joined with 5,000 regular army troops from the 1st Armored and 5th
Infantry divisions. Mayor Daley ordered
police “to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand…and
…to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting any stores in the city.” He
would issue similar orders to his police force in late August 1968 in the wake
of demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention held in his city.
Similar scenarios played out in Baltimore, Kansas City,
Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Trenton N.J., Wilmington, Delaware, and
Louisville, Kentucky. Such prompt deployment of troops by the
military was later attributed to advance planning following the Watts riots in
L.A. in 1965 and the Detroit riot of 1967.
The pentagon called it their plan
to contain “black insurrection.”
To liberals and civil rights advocates, the riots were a
turning point. The MLK assassination and
riots radicalized many, helping to fuel the Black Power movement.
The riots also increased an already strong trend toward
racial segregation and white flight in America’s cities, strengthening racial
barriers that once looked as if they might weaken. The riots were political fodder for the
Republican party, which used fears of black urban crime to garner support for
law and order. Richard Nixon’s campaign
platform solidified following the riots.
Some contend the riots sealed his victory in November of 68.
As a 71-year-old sitting on a park bench near the Lorrainne
Hotel in Memphis this spring, as the sun set and the sky turned orange, I recalled
how I felt in 1968 as a teen aged kid on a farm in Illinois. I turned 17 in August of that year.
The Vietnam War was mired in the violence of the Tet
offensive. 16,592 American soldiers died
in Vietnam during 1968 alone, an average of 319 per week. Walter Cronkite announced a weekly tally of deaths
in Vietnam as anchor of the CBS Evening News.
I would register for the draft on August 13, 1969. I felt my country was being ripped apart by forces
I never knew existed; some phantom evil I couldn’t identify let alone
understand.
I had a friend a year older who joined the Marines and was
in Vietnam. He wrote me letters about villagers
in Vietnam fleeing their homes after napalm lit up the grass roofs on their
huts. He sounded like someone else. Someone I didn’t know.
My brother was an officer in the Air Force and a back seater
in an F-4 fighter jet. He would soon be
stationed at an air base in Thailand. I wouldn’t
know the extent of the missions he flew and the danger he faced until he came
home.
When Martin Luther King was killed, and the riots raged it
felt as if the violence and death of the war in Asia had come home to America. I could feel the fear in my stomach. 1968 was set on fire by a bullet from a flop
house bathroom in Memphis that burned away the hope of America. I thought we outlived that fear. Turns out it never left.
