The occupants of Room 6B, next to Ray’s, were Charles Stephens and his bedridden, common-law wife, Grace.7 Stephens was forty-six, a heavy equipment operator who had been forced by tuberculosis to retire when he was not yet thirty. He would tell investigators that in the late afternoon he heard the scraping of furniture being moved across the floor of the new lodger’s room. It was the sound of Ray pushing the chest of drawers away from the lone window. He might have heard Ray moving a straight-backed wooden chair and positioning it close to the window.
When Ray sat in the chair and leaned far out the window, the Lorraine came fully into view. But from that vantage point the motel lay at an angle that would complicate firing a bullet in that direction. Still, it afforded him an adequate perch for watching the Lorraine.
As his new neighbor stirred, Stephens continued to listen through the thin walls. He heard footsteps as Ray strode to the end of the hall and entered the bathroom. Stephens would recall that the man entered the bathroom twice, each time staying only a few minutes. One time Ray flushed the toilet. He returned to the bathroom yet a third time, staying what seemed like a long time to Stephens. He listened impatiently for the man to leave because he was anxious to use the toilet. He was not alone. Willie Anschutz, who occupied Room 4B, also needed the toilet. Anschutz knocked on the bathroom door, which was latched. No response.
Before Ray entered the bathroom, he likely had been peering from the window of Room 5B, his eyes glued on the Lorraine. It is probable that he saw King leave Room 201 at about 5:30 and climb the exterior stairway of the motel to the second floor before entering his room. It was another lucky break. The timing coincided with Stephens’s estimate of when Ray padded to the bathroom the third time.8
Fortunate to have the bathroom available at that moment, Ray latched the door and prepared a sniper’s nest. Off to one side next to the only window stood a claw-foot bathtub. It was small and antique, with sides that were rust-stained and chipped. Ray climbed into the tub and crouched next to the window. He must have been elated when he looked out the window. He had an excellent view of the Lorraine. The whole of the motel came into clear focus two hundred and seven feet away.
Ray yanked the window open and shoved its mesh screen outward. The screen clattered into the backyard. Through the binoculars the Lorraine appeared to be thirty feet away. The Redfield scope mounted on his Remington Gamemaster had the same magnification. He unsheathed the rifle from its blue, zippered carrying case and flipped open the box of soft-point ammunition.9
The army had taught Ray to fire a rifle with a degree of accuracy. He knew enough to pose the Gamemaster firmly on the window ledge. He pressed the muzzle down hard enough to dent the ledge slightly. And he waited.
Chapter 21
Dark Night
In a sense our nation is climbing a mountain . . . and now we are in the most difficult and trying stages.
—MLK, talk at Waycross, Georgia, March 22, 1968
IT WAS A FEW MINUTES before 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 4. The temperature in Memphis was in the mid-fifties, down from the seventies that morning. Despite the chill, King was not warmly dressed as he exited Room 306. He was wearing his customary dark suit, a conservative yellow and black tie, white shirt, and black shoes.
Freshly shaved, with cologne refreshing his face, he was primed for the much-anticipated dinner at Billy Kyles’s house. To finish shaving and dressing for the occasion, Abernathy stayed behind in their room. He wanted to look his best for the night out. He told King that he would be along directly.
King walked the few steps from Room 306 to the adjacent second-story balcony and paused to wait. He had a commanding view of the Lorraine parking lot below. His aides—Young, Bevel, Williams, Lee, Jackson, and Orange—had gathered in the parking lot. They would be going with him to the Kyles’s party. Kyles was waiting for King on the balcony. “People started waving at him,” Kyles would recall. “Hey,” King hollered, waving back. “Hey. Hey.”
In the brisk air, Young and Orange were frolicking about, shadowboxing like kids in a schoolyard. The massive Orange, six foot four and nearly three hundred pounds, towered over Young. Orange’s roughneck appearance was deceiving. He was a gentle, nonviolent guy (“sweet” was Young’s word for him), but the world did not know that. The sight of his imposing heft added a measure of security on the road for King and his entourage. “Nobody would try to be physical with us with James around,” Young would say.1
Bemused by the sight of the two men engaged in mock fighting, King bellowed to Young: “Don’t hurt him, Andy!”
King spotted Jesse Jackson standing in the parking lot. There had been tension between the two men since their exchange of acid words at the staff meeting in Atlanta on Saturday. In a fence-mending gesture King called down to Jackson: “Jesse, I want you to come to dinner with me.”2
“Jesse already took care of that,” Kyles said, as he started down the stairs from the balcony.
Not to let the matter drop quickly, King shouted: “Jesse, we’re going to Billy Kyles’s, and you don’t even have a tie on.”3 Jackson was dressed in the ruggedly mod style of the sixties: olive turtleneck sweater and unzipped brown leather jacket.
“The prerequisite to eating is an appetite, not a tie,” Jackson said.
King laughed. “You’re crazy,” he said, and everyone laughed with him.
Standing next to Jackson was Ben Branch, the director of the Operation Breadbasket band. Jackson shouted, “Doc, this is Ben Branch. Ben used to live in Memphis. He plays in our band.”4
“Oh, yes, he’s my man,” King replied. “How are you, Ben?” Branch, who was a trumpeter as well as bandleader, shouted hello back to King.
“Ben,” King said, “I want you to play ‘Precious Lord’ for me tonight.” It was one of King’s favorite gospel songs. He would have been aware of its origins as a melancholy lyric written in 1932 by Thomas Dorsey. The full title was “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” It was a plea for God’s help to cope with death, and in the case of Dorsey it had been a cry for God’s hand to allay the grief he felt over the deaths of his wife and newborn son.
“Sing it real pretty,” King said.
“I sure will, Doc,” Branch said.
Branch and the others were clustered around a white Cadillac limo. The R. S. Lewis Funeral Home had put the Cadillac and a driver, Solomon Jones, at King’s disposal in Memphis.
Jones was waiting in the parking lot for King. Jones cried out, “Dr. King, it’s going to be cool tonight. Be sure to carry your coat.”
Before King could say a word of thanks, a shot rang out. A bullet struck him on the right side of the face, traveled through his neck, and came to rest on the left side of his back, splintering his spinal column.5 He collapsed instantly onto the floor of the balcony.
It was 6:01 p.m.
When some of the people closest to King heard the shot, they did not recognize it for what it was. Abernathy was dousing his face with aftershave cologne. He would remember hearing what sounded to him like the backfire of a car. “But there was just enough difference to chill my heart,” he would recount years later. When he looked through the open doorway at the balcony adjacent to his room, he saw that King was no longer standing. He was flat on his back, sprawled between the doorway and the balcony’s railing.6
Andrew Young, who was still horsing around with James Orange in the parking lot, thought he had heard either the backfire of a car or the pop of a firecracker. His eyes turned toward King on the balcony. “I could see where he had fallen down, fallen back,” Young would write. “I remember for a moment I thought he was clowning; he had been in such a playful mood.”7
Billy Kyles was five or six steps down from the balcony, when he heard the report of the rifle. “I thought it was a car backfiring,” he would say. Down in the parking lot he saw people suddenly ducking behind cars. Kyles would remember somebody screaming, “Oh, my Lord, they’ve shot Martin!”8
Abernathy bolted through the door of his ro
om to the balcony. He knelt next to King. “Even at the first glance I could see that a bullet had entered his right cheek, leaving a small hole,” he would recall. King’s eyes seemed to flutter. Abernathy patted his face and said, “Martin, this is Ralph. Can you hear me?” He then saw, as he would put it, “the understanding drain from his eyes and leave them absolutely empty.”9
Blood was seeping from his wounds, gathering in a pool on the concrete floor beneath his head. By then Young had rushed to the balcony and was leaning over King. Young peered at the blood and the severity of the wounds, how the skin had been ripped from the chin bone. “Oh, God! Ralph. It’s over,” Abernathy would recall Young saying.10
As Abernathy and Young were tending to King, a swarm of police officers, as many as ten of them, were converging on the Lorraine. They were arriving within a minute or two of the time Ray shot King. They were racing to the Lorraine not in patrol cars but on foot.11 How they arrived so quickly would become a question for investigators. By chance, at 6:01 p.m., the officers had been on a coffee break at Fire Station #2 at South Main and Butler Streets a half block from the Lorraine.
The officers belonged to Police Tactical Unit Ten, one of several created at the outbreak of the garbage workers’ strike to respond to emergencies during the crisis. Still at his surveillance post at the back of the fire station and monitoring the Lorraine, Patrolman Willie Richmond had seen, almost immediately, that King was down. Richmond had alerted the officers. They had sprinted to the motel.
It took five minutes or so before a fire department ambulance arrived. King was placed on a stretcher, hustled down the stairs, and lifted into the ambulance.12
The ambulance, its siren blaring, raced the two miles north through the heart of downtown Memphis to St. Joseph Hospital. Gregory Jaynes, a young reporter for the Commercial Appeal, was hanging out near the police radio monitor in the newsroom when he heard a bulletin that King had been shot. As Jaynes would recount, a copy boy cried, plaintively, “Why here?” A business reporter replied, “Why anywhere?”13
The doctors at St. Joseph, recognizing the gravity of King’s condition, could do nothing for him. He was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. It was forty minutes past sunset. By then the last light in the sky over Memphis had faded to darkness.
In the days before he had returned to the tense city of Memphis, King had been offered his dream job of old. He was invited to take a one-year sabbatical as the interim pastor at the splendid neo-Gothic Riverside Church in New York City.14 He knew it well. It had a long history serving as a forum for political activism and public debate. From its pulpit King had delivered his passionate speech against the Vietnam War, in 1967. If he had accepted the offer to return to the church in the eminent post as pastor, it would have spared him the travail of returning to Memphis. He had declined the offer.
Four days after King’s death at age thirty-nine, Coretta King and Ralph Abernathy led thousands of people on a march through downtown Memphis, mourning King’s death and supporting the garbage workers’ strike. In her remarks that day, Coretta King spoke of her husband’s deepest yearnings, the covenant he had sworn to himself that, by sacrificing himself, dying if necessary, for a cause that was “right and just,” his life would end in the most redemptive way possible.15
Chapter 22
Redemption
One has to conquer the fear of death if he is going to do anything constructive in life and take a stand against evil.
—MLK, comment at news conference in Los Angeles, February 24, 1965
KING HAD EXPECTED to die a violent death, had accepted the fate as inescapable and reconciled himself to it. But he had not sought martyrdom. A martyr invites death in a quest for glory or heavenly reward. King wanted to live a long life, as he had declared movingly at Mason Temple. He wanted to live, but he had a higher calling. As Ralph Abernathy would say, “He loved life, and he wanted to live, but his commitment to the cause of Christ [and social justice]” was “much more powerful than his personal safety.”1
By the spring of 1968 King was risking his life in new and hazardous ways, expecting to sacrifice it, willing to pay the ultimate price, in pursuit of his cause. As he saw it, he was risking his life to save the millions of Americans whose lives he believed were being crushed by racial bigotry and poverty.
He had not always been that way. How he came to see his death at an early age as an inevitable and justifiable sacrifice for high moral purpose is a story of his religious soul-searching and sense of grand destiny.
Even Christian theology had not always defined his purpose. As a student at Morehouse College he did not profess a deeply religious faith. He disavowed the bodily resurrection of Jesus. He lost interest in the church as a career. He opted to study not for the ministry but for medicine and then, when that seemed unattainable, law.2
By the end of his senior year, though, he had yielded to his father’s wishes that he enter the ministry. He enrolled at Crozer Theological Seminary and embarked on a path to become a Baptist pastor and scholar of theology. That was his goal.
In 1955, he accepted the pulpit at the Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery, Alabama, as his first job after satisfying most of the requirements for his PhD in theology from Boston University. His immediate goal was putting the final touches on his dissertation to complete the degree.
He chose the church in Montgomery with an eye toward improving race relations in at least one harshly segregated city of the Deep South.3 That was not, however, his primary reason for going to Montgomery. He envisioned the pastor’s job at Dexter as a way station. He would serve long enough to gain experience pastoring a church. He would check that box (“ministry to an African American community in a small Southern city”) en route to a career as a theologian. He would be an ivory tower scholar, a teacher, and a pastor. “When he first started to preach,” Andrew Young would say later, “Martin’s ambition was to teach at a top-notch seminary and become the preacher at a place like Riverside Church, the big church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.”4
Nor had King always sought the end of poverty as his overriding mission or called for anything on the scale of massive, militant civil disobedience in the nation’s capital to force far-reaching political change.
As a college student, he showed little interest in politics. He was said to be bookish or frivolous, depending on who was recollecting his interests at that time. No one remembered him as political. Maxine Smith, who knew him as a sophomore at Morehouse when she was a freshman at nearby Spelman College, remembered him as studious, often lugging a load of books that he “carried under an umbrella.”5 Others recalled his penchant for frivolity, especially dancing and playing cards.6
By the time he reached Boston University for doctoral study he was exhibiting a serious political intent. He was intrigued by leftist political theory. In a letter to Coretta, whom he was courting at the time, he wrote that capitalism “has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.” He went on, “I would certainly welcome the day to come when there would be nationalization of industry.”7
If King’s misgivings about capitalism stayed with him beyond his student days, he kept his views to himself. He knew that his leftist notions would offend many Americans. He avoided sharp anticapitalist rhetoric, and he went to great pains to disassociate himself from communism. In his first book, Stride Toward Freedom, published in 1958, he leveled only a veiled critique of capitalism as inducing people to be “more concerned about making a living than making a life.”8 Communism he rejected flatly for what he regarded as its materialistic view of history, ethical relativism, and political totalitarianism.9
His affinity for leftist politics coincided with his interest in a theological doctrine known as the social gospel. The term social gospel crystallized a body of thought that had emerged in American theological circles during the first half of the twentieth century. The idea was to bring Christian ethics to bear on social problems, such as racial
and economic injustice. When he was barely in his twenties, studying at Crozer, King embraced the social gospel as the core of his theology.10
As it turned out, his move to Montgomery allowed him to put the concept of social gospel into practice to an extent that must have surpassed his greatest expectations. That story is well known. He found himself in a hotbed of racial oppression that ignited the city’s bus boycott and propelled him to civil rights leadership and national prominence. It had happened almost against his will. As he admitted in 1956, “If anybody had asked me a year ago to lead this movement, I tell you very honestly, I would have run a mile to get away from it.”11
In Montgomery he discovered the high price that he would have to pay as a nationally prominent leader of the movement. His family then comprised a wife and baby daughter, Yolanda, whom he and Coretta called Yoki. The phone rang incessantly at the house. Callers screamed threats. The family’s life seemed in constant danger.
As King recognized what a high price he was paying for his political activism, a profound distress gripped him. On a sleepless night in late January 1956, a tortured King struggled to come to terms with the horror of it all. As he would write in Stride Toward Freedom, he bowed his head over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. Whereupon, he heard an inner voice saying to him: “Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth, and God will be at your side forever.” The reservoir of strength and faith he found within himself that night, he would write, prepared him to face anything.12
As the movement pushed him more deeply toward the life of a national civil rights figure and he rose to the challenge, he redefined himself. His self-image acquired a new, larger dimension. Fate seemed to be calling him to a higher purpose. “This is not the life I expected to lead,” he told Coretta in 1958 after being released from jail in Montgomery. But events had swept him along, and gradually he came to view the movement as his calling and had given himself utterly to it.13
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