Sunset in Memphis

 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 4^th, 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 3^rd 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 29^th 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 2^nd.  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 5^th 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 3^rd infantry guarded the White House.  On April 5^th 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 5^th alone.

Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley ordered 10,500 police sent into those areas, and by April 6^th 6,700 National Guard members sent by LBJ joined with 5,000 regular army troops from the 1^st Armored and 5^th 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.