King’s pivot to economic justice did not happen overnight. At least as early as his graduate study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania, the nineteen-year-old King identified helping poor people as a goal he aspired to pursue. In a paper during his first semester he vowed that he would be a “profound advocator” on behalf of the poor.25 Two developments in the mid-sixties had propelled him to convert the desire into action. First there was the explosion of civil strife in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965, followed by rioting in scores of other cities during the next two summers. Second was the futility of his quest, in 1966, to better the condition of Chicago’s slums.
Chicago taught him that racism was subtler and less visible in cities beyond the South. The object was not desegregating restaurants and movie theaters but improving housing, education, and employment opportunity for African Americans. In Chicago inner-city blacks were caught in a complex web of poverty. Without a radical fix, he concluded, there was no escape.
In early 1968 he announced a fully developed plan of action. He had previewed his thinking in his book published six months before, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? In the book he urged nothing less than the “radical restructuring of the architecture of American society.”26 The restructuring he proposed would end poverty simply by ending it legislatively—that is, by guaranteeing a minimum income for all Americans. For those who could work, it would provide a job. For those who could not, it would provide an income pegged to the median income nationwide.27 In his thinking, the guarantee of a minimum income or a job did not go far enough. He called, further, for massive federal spending on housing and education.
It all was part of what he termed an Economic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged. It would not be cheap. King envisioned a federal antipoverty budget of ten or twelve billion dollars.28 By contrast, President Johnson’s “war on poverty,” which he had launched in 1965, cost $2.4 billion a year (pared to $1.8 billion in later years owing to the fiscal drain of the Vietnam War).
The Poor People’s Campaign was to be King’s lever to force the government to abolish poverty. The campaign was modeled on the Depression-era march of fifteen thousand World War I veterans to Washington in 1932. The veterans, known as the Bonus Army, had flooded into the nation’s capital demanding the bonuses promised to them by the federal government but never paid. They had slapped together shantytowns—Hoovervilles, critics mockingly called them. The veterans declared their intention to remain until Congress and President Herbert Hoover approved the bonuses, but Congress had not complied. His patience at an end, Hoover summoned the army to remove two thousand veterans still refusing to budge from the shantytowns. Soldiers routed the holdouts with tear gas and drove them out of Washington.
Marian Logan suspected that the Poor People’s Campaign would end just as badly.29 King would be mustering thousands of impoverished people from around the country for weeks of protest. They would represent a racial, cultural, and geographic hodgepodge. King was threatening to close down the seat of the federal government.30 He was pledging nonviolence, but like NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, Logan doubted King could prevent violent incidents from erupting during the Washington protest. King was charting a prolonged siege of the capital, promising massive, disruptive civil disobedience. “I can’t imagine a situation more flammable,” Logan wrote in her memo.31
Even as he was preparing to besiege Washington, King’s political ideology was shifting leftward. He kept his most radical views out of the public eye, but he confided to aides and friends that he had little faith in capitalism to lift people out of poverty. In a private meeting with SCLC staff, in December 1967, he spoke about capitalism and socialism. According to historian David Garrow, King said that he “didn’t believe that capitalism, as it was constructed, could meet the needs of poor people, and that what we might need to look at was a kind of socialism, but a democratic form of socialism.”32
So strongly did he hold that view that he berated Andrew Young for lacking it. King and his close aide were attending a party at Harry Belafonte’s apartment in New York. It was March 27, two days after King’s all-night session with Marian Logan. King was in a sour mood, expressing his sympathy with the rage of inner-city youths and fuming that the “system” was to blame.
Young commented, as quoted by Belafonte in the singer’s memoir: “Well, I don’t know, Martin. It’s not the entire system. It’s only part of it, and I think we can fix that.”
King snapped at him: “I don’t need to hear from you, Andy. I’ve heard enough from you. You’re a capitalist, and I’m not.”33
King objected to the capitalist economic model because he doubted that it alone would spread wealth fairly and widely. His view was not absolute. He valued a zone of private enterprise as a ladder of opportunity for African Americans. Franchising fast-food outlets he saw as one such ladder, as did his friend Judge Ben Hooks of Memphis. In 1968, Hooks and famed gospel singer Mahalia Jackson were building a chain of black-owned chicken restaurants. They had franchised more than twenty of the fast-food outlets under the name of Mahalia Jackson’s Glori-Fried Chicken. According to Hooks, King was intrigued by the Mahalia Jackson concept because he saw it as a potential form of “economic power” enabling African Americans to own franchised businesses.
By the spring of 1968 King was speaking and writing sharply, harshly, to deplore economic injustice. His manner marked a departure from what he had exhibited as a young civil rights leader. The tone of the younger King had been gentle and reassuring. He had talked of goodness as the guiding light of the movement. He had talked of Christian love, the spirit of reconciliation, and the promise of beloved communities. He had endorsed moderation. As he told students at the University of California at Berkeley, in 1957: “If moderation means moving on with wise restraint and calm reasonableness, then moderation is a great virtue.”34
Reassuring words about a commitment to wise restraint would have been welcome to Logan in 1968. King’s dispute with Logan and his caustic words for Young showed how far his center of political gravity had shifted. He and Logan seemed to turn a deaf ear to the other’s arguments. Her haggling with him over the Poor People’s Campaign was a continual burden on him. It was yet another weight on his spirits when he was already feeling crushing pressure from all sides in Memphis.
Chapter 13
The Stalker
To this day the white poor also suffer deprivation and the humiliation of poverty, if not of color.
—MLK, in his book Why We Can’t Wait, published in 1963
DESPITE THE NAME, the New Rebel Motor Hotel was not so much a hotel as a forty-two-room motel on the southern outskirts of Memphis. It stood just inside the city limits facing the road known both as Highway 78 and Lamar Avenue. Highway 78 was a main artery from the Deep South. For travelers from Birmingham (250 miles to the southeast) and Atlanta (155 miles beyond), it offered a straight shot to Memphis.
Looming over the motel was a gleaming, red-and-white sign proclaiming its name. The sign beckoned to travelers arriving from the Deep South, for whom the name must have struck a sympathetic chord. The name New Rebel evoked not just old-fashioned nostalgia but also the defiant battle cry of the old Confederacy. Lest there be any doubt about its down-in-Dixie essence, the motel created its own postcards to underscore the theme. The postcards boasted: “Home of Southern Hospitality.”
It was 7:15 in the evening of April 3, as the sky was turning black and the air blustery, when a Ford Mustang pulled off Highway 78 and halted at the New Rebel. In the dim light the Mustang, a pale yellow, looked white or off-white. On the rear of the car was a red-and-white Alabama license plate. A Mexican visa sticker labeled “Turista” adorned the windshield.
A slender, dark-haired man of medium height exited the Mustang into the chill air and entered the office of the New Rebel. He was of medium height. He had a long, sharp nose and a cleft chin. He had turned forty less than a month before, but he looked at least a few years youn
ger. He was wearing a somber business suit, white shirt, and dark, narrow knit tie.
The man asked the motel’s desk clerk, Henrietta Hagemaster, for a room. The rate was $6.24 a night. On a registration card the man scrawled the name Eric S. Galt and the address 2608 Highland Avenue, Birmingham. He was checked in to Room 34.
The roughhewn twang of the few words the man spoke to Hagemaster seemed to peg him as a Southerner of humble origins. In the months to come, the FBI would interview lots of people who had encountered the man in the months before he arrived in Memphis. Something had been puzzling about him. He did not seem to fit into an obvious occupational category. Probably an accountant, one person said. He looked “for all the world like a preacher,” another said.1
He was not an accountant, a preacher, or a Southerner. His real name was not Eric S. Galt. It was James Earl Ray. Outwardly he appeared fairly well off, but it was not so. There was a hidden side to him, even in the matter of his clothes. As an FBI report would indicate, not all of his clothes were as fine as his suit and knit tie. He had extended the life of his undershorts by mending them by hand in two places with brown thread.
Ray was born on March 10, 1928, in Alton, Illinois. Located fifteen miles north of St. Louis along the Mississippi River, Alton was then a decaying industrial town on the brink of the Great Depression. He grew up in abject poverty in Alton and in nearby, blue-highway pockets of southeastern Illinois and eastern Missouri. His early years epitomized American poverty and family dysfunction at its worst.
Ray’s wretched background and the hardships of his youth could have been a case in point for Martin Luther King Jr. If King had known of the toxic circumstances of Ray’s youth, he might have cited them as an example of the kind of corrosive poverty that compelled him to embark on the Poor People’s Campaign.
Ray was the oldest of nine children born to Lucille and George Ray. Derisively nicknamed “Speedy” because of his sluggish speech, George never was much of a breadwinner. He had bounced from one job to another.2 He was an auto mechanic, used-car salesman, railroad brakeman, and carnival fighter, but nothing lasted long. With little or no money coming in, the family was so poor that sometimes they had only potatoes to eat.3 Lucille, who was known as Ceal, coped as best she could or, when she couldn’t anymore, turned to drink.
By the time Ray was in the first grade, the family had retreated to a dilapidated, tin-roof house on a meager farm near the rural hamlet of Ewing, Missouri, population 324. Farming on their infertile land did not pay any better than Speedy’s modest jobs. Ceal hated country life.
At the Ewing Consolidated Elementary School, James Ray was often the target of ridicule among his classmates. He was painfully shy. Often his clothes were tattered, dirty, and foul-smelling. He did poorly in his studies, though he would test with an average 108 IQ.4 Eight years of schooling was all he could stand, as he would say later.5
As Ray grew older, his life did not get better. It got worse. In his vivid biography, Gerald Posner explains that “there was no guidance in the Ray household, no family member to whom any of the children could look for inspiration, no encouragement to do well at school or to make friends, and no role model who showed it was possible to work honestly and diligently to pull oneself out of poverty.” The Rays reached a point of such desperation that they burned their house piecemeal to stay alive. As Posner describes it: “In 1940 when James was twelve, the Rays began slowly cannibalizing their decrepit house, pulling it apart plank by plank in order to use it as firewood. It gradually disintegrated until they needed a new home.”6
During that time, Ray had his first brush with the law. He was only eleven when he and his brother John grabbed a stack of newspapers deposited by a truck on a street corner for distribution. The Ray brothers were caught and briefly jailed, but the police let them off with only a warning.
In 1951, Ray’s parents separated. By then Speedy had taken up with another woman and Ceal had sunk into utter despair. In her last years she was reduced to loitering in bars or being hauled off by police for drunkenness and disorderly conduct.7 She died of acute alcoholism in 1953.
Most of her children fared no better. All the children were apart from their mother by the age of sixteen.8 One of Ray’s sisters, Marjorie, was six when she burned to death from a fire that she started while playing with matches. Max had severe mental disabilities and was placed in a special home in Aton. Suzan and Franklin were taken from Ceal by court order and placed in a Catholic home in Springfield, Missouri. Melba, who suffered from emotional distress, ended up in a mental institution.9
Ceal’s trouble with the law stemming from poverty and alcoholism paled next to the criminality of her family. When Speedy was twenty-one, before marrying Ceal, he was convicted of breaking and entering, a felony. He served two years in the Iowa State Penitentiary at Fort Madison. A long string of crimes committed by Speedy’s brother, Earl (the inspiration for James’s middle name), including rape, put him behind bars for most of his adult life.10
Two of Ray’s brothers, Jerry and John, seemed to follow in Speedy’s and Uncle Earl’s footsteps. Jerry was sent to a reformatory at fourteen for mugging drunks and snatching purses. Within a month of his release, he was back in prison for grand larceny. At nineteen, John robbed a gas station and was sentenced to two to five years in the Indiana State Penitentiary at Pendleton.11
If Ray seemed destined for a life of crime, he did try to follow a different path. When he was sixteen, he moved to Alton and found work in the dye room of the International Shoe Tannery. Laid off by the tannery, he enlisted in the army at age seventeen.
Military service, however, did not suit him. He showed his contempt for military discipline by flouting the army’s rules of conduct. While stationed in Germany, he peddled cigarettes on the black market. Against army regulations he drank “in quarters”—that is, in the barracks. In a final act of defiance, he went AWOL. He was quickly apprehended and court-martialed. He did not fail at everything in the military. In basic training he qualified for the marksman’s medal, a classification of proficiency, though below the levels of sharpshooter and expert.12 On December 10, 1948, he was discharged from the army for “ineptness and lack of adaptability to military service.”13
Back in the States, Ray found work at the Dryden Rubber Company in Chicago. It was another factory job, honest work, but he was let go after three months. With little money and at loose ends, he jumped freight trains, riding the rails all the way to Los Angeles.
Alone in a city that must have seemed like another world to him, he was soon in trouble. On the night of October 7, 1949, he attempted to rob the upstairs office of a cafeteria, the Forum. The manager spotted him crouched behind a safe. Ray fled, outrunning a parking attendant. Recklessly, he returned to the same area four days later. The parking attendant called the police. Ray denied everything, but he was convicted of second-degree burglary and served ninety days in the county jail.14
He retreated to Chicago, seemingly determined to stay on the right side of the law. He took an assembly-line job in one factory, then two more in succession. He enrolled in a course for a high school equivalency degree. He kept at it for two years before his tolerance for tedious, low-wage jobs reached a limit. He went AWOL, this time not from the army but from his job in the envelope-manufacturing department at Avery Corporation.
With no means of support, on May 6, 1952, he attempted to hold up a taxi driver with a pistol. He meant to hijack the taxi. The driver foiled him by grabbing the keys. Ray fled. A bystander raced after him and alerted police, who gave chase. In the melee that followed, Ray was shot in the arm and arrested.15
He was twenty-four, a high school dropout, a flop as a soldier, a jobless loner encumbered by a criminal record and unmoored from family. It seemed to mark a moment of final surrender. He slumped into the life of a drifter and habitual outlaw. As Percy Foreman, one of Ray’s eventual lawyers, would put it: “He called his pistol his credit card and committed a robbery every time he came
into a new city.”16
For years Ray pulled off a string of petty robberies, many with impunity. At other times he bungled them. A bonehead attempt to burglarize a laundry in East Alton in 1954 ended in a comical snafu.17 As Ray hoisted himself to a window at the laundry, his shoes stuck in deep mud. In 1959, he and an accomplice robbed an IGA food market in Alton, making off with nearly $1,000. At the wheel of the getaway car, Ray failed to shut the door on the driver’s side. It swung open, and he almost fell out. With the police in hot pursuit he crashed the car into a tree.18
As his rap sheet lengthened, so did his prison terms. He served a year or more at two state prisons in Illinois and three years in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. The stickup at gunpoint of a Kroger supermarket in St. Louis in July 1959 landed him in the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City facing a twenty-year sentence.
The arc of his life story seemed complete. He was a common criminal, a habitual offender in and out of prison. He had defined a criminal life for himself, but he was not good at it. In his many ill-conceived, botched attempts at crime, he showed he was “markedly inept,” as Robert Blakey, chief counsel of the US House Select Committee on Assassinations, would observe years later.19
Doing hard time at Jeff City, as the maximum-security penitentiary was known, seemed to reshape his personality. He acquired a savvy and shrewdness that had not been evident before. That newfound capacity, combined with grit, enabled him to escape, Houdini-like, on April 23, 1967.
Redemption Page 11
