The Staple Singers and Mavis (favorites of Daddy’s) came from gospel into secular with a purpose, a cause, with “Respect Yourself,” then “I’ll Take You There” (1974). Their starchildren became the Winans, Kirk Franklin having church in “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” and “Stomp.” “The Sweeter He Is (The Longer the Pain’s Gonna Hurt),” cried the Soul Children (1970); they begat BLACKstreet, Jodeci—all out of the church. Louis Armstrong once told a videographer, “It all started in the sanctified church; how you gonna get away from it? That’s where the beat started.”
Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” A seminal question coming out of assassinations, like Daddy’s, out of conflict like the Civil Rights Movement, like the Vietnam War. Rafael Saddiq of the hiphop nation could sing “I Been Thinking of You” because Al Green, Reverend Al, sang it from the pulpit of his church in Memphis; Green sang after my father was shot, “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?” Missy Elliott broke out in ’97 with “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),” beating a rhythmic raindrop, yodeling the hook. After he was shot, a preacher’s child, Ann Peebles, all of four foot ten, kicked the same hook over the same raindrop, over the same yodel, but not as hard a bottom line. Ann sang it hard in Memphis, in ’71: “I Can’t Stand the Rain.” I did my research. I went to Memphis as a man. I saw. The Sound is what you can use. The Sound is what I shared with Memphis. The Sound was in it, and in me. Only the Sound is there. That’s all that has to be there. Just the Way. Music is the Way. It holds the message.
I can’t stand the ra-in… ’gainst my window… bringing back sweet memories…
From mountaintop into the valley. The straight-up-don’t-give-a-damn-no-more attitude of mass creativity and material confusion—all the Big Wave of hip-hop, from its saddest to its most materialistic and nihilistic forms—was born after our father Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot!
The Sound began when Afrika Bambaataa scratched it up in the Bronx in the late ’70s. I had tried to take it into deejaying. Deejaying had a purpose. The Sound was philosophy, the artists philosophers. So the Sound, it’s always there for me—for us. But the Sound was not the reason.
The reason, the stimulus, the jump-start that began all the Noise of Big Wave hip-hop, can be traced back to Memphis, where a luckless man with no skills named James Earl Ray is said to have brought down a great man who was my father. James Earl Ray, who could screw up boiling water; James Earl Ray, who was uncomfortable in the military, not a trained sharpshooter, who had never drawn down on a person before with a rifle in his life that we know of or that was ever proved; James Earl Ray, escaped con doing time in Missouri for a $150 grocery store knockover, who later said he bought a rifle on orders from a man named Raul, who supposedly had connections with the Mafia’s Memphis branch; James Earl Ray, who woke up screaming one night at age ten because he thought he’d lost his eyesight (the room was dark), whose prison warden said he was “fearful,” who fellow inmates called “Trembler.” After a lifetime of failure, you mean to tell me that completely on his own James Earl Ray pulled off a skilled expert sniper’s shot—one shot only—that blew off our father’s jawbone, severed his spinal column, and broke thirty million hearts that kept living, giving birth, making music? All that’s happened since is the same thing, over and over again—the best hooks sung, the good brothers shot, over and over again. Somebody had to try to interrupt that deadly cycle. Somebody had to say or do something. Or it would just be the same thing, over and over, until somebody confronted what happened and asked, “Why?” And maybe “How?”
It began with my initial face-to-face contact with Dr. William Pepper, which came in February of ’97, with Isaac and Phil. My first encounter via correspondence was probably ’95, when he had sent Orders to Kill to each one of my family members individually with letters saying, “I would like you to consider what I’ve written here. I really want an opportunity to bring the truth out, to bring it to life.”
At that point, I think nobody could get beyond the fact that though he’d known and worked with our father, he was still Ray’s lawyer. He’d written a book about the assassination, in that respect possibly being no different from Ray’s first lawyer, Arthur Hanes, who authorized a book called He Slew the Dreamer, by William Bradford Huie. Huie and Hanes had a deal. Huie didn’t want Ray to even testify in his own defense because it would take away from Ray’s comments in the book. This paved the way for the next lawyer, Percy Foreman, who put down Hanes and then cut his own deal with Huie after Ray dumped Hanes and brought him in. Foreman insisted that Ray plead guilty.
Later on, there were several more books about my father’s assassination. Dozens of them, actually. Mark Lane, another of Ray’s lawyers, Taylor Branch, and even Dick Gregory, wrote about it. Ray also had many lawyers over the years. All along, I don’t think we focused on it very much because we were unconsciously not ready to deal with it. Then that blue-green laser light hit me on the balcony of the Lorraine, and I had this feeling that I wanted to know. Why? How? Who?
At first, we hadn’t responded to Pepper, feeling we should “just leave it alone.”
Fast-forward to December ’96; Ray went into the hospital for liver disease and entered a coma. Immediately we started getting calls from the media. Over the years, every time something would happen with Ray, we would get some type of call from the media. Like when he was stabbed in prison and almost killed. Okay, well you’re a victim, the victimizer is in prison and something has happened to him, how does that make you feel? In this case, it was “James Earl Ray is in the hospital and there’s a chance he may die. Any comment? Do you believe Ray actually killed your father?” This question I remember being asked almost all my life.
I hadn’t been there. I was seven years old at the time. So what was I expected to say?
We took the standard approach—“No comment.” We really didn’t deal with it. Then Ray would recuperate for a time. Three weeks later he’d have a relapse and go back in. Every time that happened, we got a call—not a call, we got bombarded with calls.
I was traveling, on vacation, down to Negril in Jamaica. I happened to call in, and it probably was a mistake to call in and check my messages; I had a number on there. It was a New York Times reporter who said, “We’re trying to reach you because we have been contacted by the Ray family behind the scenes, off the record.” They were making a plea, they wanted to make an appeal to my family; their loved one was about to die; while they know it’s awkward that they never bothered in the past, they feel it’s now or never, but would we please consider making a statement in support of a new trial for James Earl Ray so that his guilt or his innocence could be fairly determined once and for all?
The Atlanta bureau chief of the New York Times had interviewed me in the past, which is how he got my pager number. I had to respond. Now it went beyond just “No comment.” I spoke to a woman reporter, following up. The bureau chief was out of the office. I said I’d run it by my family, but to bear with me, because I was traveling overseas. My brother and sisters were traveling; getting everybody on one call would take some doing; be patient, I’ll get back.
My brother and sisters and mother and I had a conference call and took a consensus. I went around to everybody and asked, “What do you think?” Bernice was indifferent. She said, “God will judge, brother.” But Yolanda said, “… I’ve been wanting to know, Dexter. I feel like we should know what happened. And why.” She sounded expectant. Never have I loved her more or felt more powerless to comfort her. Long ago she was exasperated with me for asking why. Now…
Ultimately the consensus was, Let’s make a statement supporting a new trial. We talked about Marcus Wayne Chenault, Big Mama’s murderer, how my grandfather forgave him and made us see the logic of it; how it was Christian; whether Ray did it or not, he deserved a trial. If Daddy was living, he would have forgiven him. He forgave the woman who stabbed him in the chest at a Harlem department store and almost took his life. We didn’t know at that point what the outcome would be. We
hadn’t seen evidence, but we had heard that new evidence had come to light. We said we’d hold a press conference to announce we supported a new trial. That made the New York Times.
So when I got back, it was February. That’s when I met with Pepper—me, my cousin Isaac, and Phil. Initially I was skeptical. I didn’t know Pepper from Adam. But once he told me face-to-face about his relationship with Dad, how he had admired him, how they were friends (authenticated by Mother), and he produced photos of him and my father being friendly and cordial with each other, then told me about why he did it, represented Ray, why you never hear how dedicated Pepper was to Daddy’s cause, only that he served as Ray’s lawyer in the late ’80s; about Pepper and Ralph Abernathy visiting Ray, Uncle Ralph having asked him to meet with Ray, how they concluded he wasn’t the triggerman. They weren’t sure whether or how he was involved, but they were convinced he didn’t act alone.
Pepper made it clear he had this passion to, I don’t want to say to avenge Daddy, but he did tell me he felt guilty that he somehow contributed to my father’s death by getting him interested in the war, when Pepper wrote for Ramparts about Vietnam; he felt this led to Daddy’s interest in the war, to his making his antiwar statement on April 4, 1967, at Harlem’s Riverside Church in his “A Time to Break Silence” speech, and to Daddy’s assassination a year to the day after that.
There is no doubt that Pepper felt like he had to resolve his inner conflict. I could relate to that.
It was 1978 when Pepper first went with Ralph Abernathy to visit Ray. He said he had no intentions of representing Ray, had decided to do so only if he became convinced Ray had been unknowingly involved in the King assassination.
Jerry Ray, James Earl Ray’s brother, reached out to Pepper, saying Ray had so many lawyers because he felt he was set up. After conducting a private investigation over a ten-year period, Pepper concluded in 1988 that Ray had indeed gotten a raw deal.
“Don’t take my word,” Pepper said to me. “You have access to everything I’ve got. You have that right as family of the victim. Talk to any of the witnesses that I’ve interviewed. Read the research and the documents. Don’t take my word. Meet these people. Meet Ray. Form your own judgment.”
With my family’s blessing—particularly my mother’s and Yolanda’s—I decided to get in there and feel it for myself. There’s something about looking another person in the eyes and spending time with him and getting to know him as I did with Pepper; there were brief encounters with some of the other particulars. This was no bunch of actors to me. There are things you must intuit, feel. That was my meat, intuiting human actions. I’d done it with figuring out the music. I’d done it when I worked in an environment as a corrections officer for almost two years, where day in and day out I was around people who for a living lied, cheated, stole, robbed; I knew the con vibe.
I got the feeling Pepper was being straight with me.
I then met with Ray. I needed to see—and feel—for myself. I needed to look at it coldly, unemotionally, as a cop would, as a detective would. I tried to assume that role.
* * *
The convicted assassin of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was running out of time. His liver was quitting, and the Tennessee courts wouldn’t give him even a single day of medical furlough from the state pen near Nashville. But before the end, Ray found some comfort. From the King family itself. Oh, it must’ve been deep for James Earl Ray to shake hands with me, with the mirror image of the man they say Ray last saw inside the crosshairs of a .30-06 caliber rifle. Ray’s rifle had been tested by the congressional investigating committee for evidence to spark a new trial. Results were “inconclusive.” That Remington rifle may have killed Ray better than it ever killed my father. The last request for testing of the rifle for evidence wound up in Judge Joe Brown’s courtroom in Memphis. Pundits would discredit Brown because he starred in one of the TV judge shows; but he was on the bench in Memphis for a long time before that, and was respected. I knew because I asked around among Memphis police. I had to see Ray to confront all of this, so it wouldn’t keep being relived, not only in my nightmares, but also in the national nightmare. For my brother and sisters. All of us. Without Ray, there might never be an answer to the question defining the work of even the youngest of the hip-hop nation-inside-a-nation.
The question is: Who shot Martin Luther King, Jr? And why?
Did Ray do it alone? Fine. Just show me how he did it alone, so I can sleep at night. Show me that nobody else had anything to do with it, so I can sleep at night. Show me, and I’ll believe.
Is that why I was so polite when I met Ray in a Nashville medical detention ward in March of 1997? No. That’s just the way I was raised. No different than my grandfather was with Marcus Wayne Chenault. “Thank you for letting me impose on your time,” I said to a desiccated Ray, and yes, some people later said I spoke to James Earl Ray like he was green-lighting movies over at Warner Bros. or something. But I would have said it that way to the Devil himself. “I just want to ask for the record—did you kill my father?” I asked.
Guess what Ray said then. “No,” claimed the sixty-nine-year-old convict.
“There’s something about looking another person in the eye and asking him a question,” I told a small contingent of press right after the meeting. “Spiritually speaking, you yourself can then say, ‘Yes… I personally feel this now… and… I think… I believe this man is innocent.’”
Then who was responsible, and why? The press asked questions that I usually liked to ask. And there was a reason I said what I did to the press. Most people think I was just humming a script I’d heard from Pepper: “Army Intelligence, CIA, FBI…” Could’ve thrown in the Klan, Memphis police, Ray. Could be any of them. Could be none of them.
When I met with Ray, this was the sense I got: he was a petty criminal who had done stupid things. He didn’t have much common sense and said as much. “Look, I ain’t gonna tell you I’m totally innocent here. I did mess up and make mistakes. But I did not shoot Dr. King.”
A guy who can take somebody out at two hundred feet with one shot is a cold-blooded marksman and killer. I saw evidence that when James Earl Ray was in the military, he couldn’t hit a target from a hundred feet with an M1 rifle. So how in the name of God did he hit a moving target in the neck from two hundred feet away in a cramped position with one shot from an uncalibrated .30-06?
When the cameras left, Ray and I spoke privately; I wanted him to know we were trying to get the new trial, get the truth out, whatever it was; we wanted him to have his day in court, and if on that day he was proven guilty or exonerated, so be it, either way. My family deserved to know and needed to know. People needed to know. I asked if he knew of any other people involved, did he have any information he wanted to share with me that was not common knowledge. He kept saying you need to open up the files, sealed FBI files and congressional records. He said he thought we’d find out a lot in them. It was a known fact that the FBI was looking to set up my father and in fact did fabricate things about him and harass him. So I don’t know how much the records would reveal the truth, because I think the real nitty-gritty is buried. That’s not the kind of stuff you’re going to put in writing. He sighed deeply. It was almost like he didn’t even care anymore. “Look, I’m tired of defending myself and saying I didn’t do it. Go look at the records and then you’ll see.” It was almost like he didn’t want to speak for himself anymore; I got the impression he wasn’t going to willingly take the fall. I felt he was telling the truth.
His thing was a liver transplant. He needed to get one done. They weren’t letting him out.
He felt if he had a little more time, health-wise, there was a good chance that he could get his trial. Another thing that struck me was that he really just seemed like almost a model prisoner in the sense that if somebody did something wrong to him, it was almost like he would just keep it to himself. I got this sense that he didn’t want to cause anybody any problems and he didn’t want any problem
s. I almost felt sorry for him. In a strange sort of way I really felt for the guy; I felt like we were both victims. I told him that. “We’re caught in the same web.”
If he didn’t do it and he’s been in jail for almost thirty years for a crime he didn’t commit, that’s victimhood. The general reaction of people afterward was: “You mean to tell me he went all the way up there and met with this guy and came out convinced he was innocent? What a sucker.” This was around the same time of the California mass suicide that coincided with the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet, where everyone was wearing black clothes and Nike sneakers, out near San Diego. Because of that incident, CNN broke away from me and was going back and forth between the reporting on the mass suicide and me; CNN covered it live, then they broke to California; so they caught me meeting with Ray live, but they didn’t do the pre–press conference, so what the average person saw was me coming out of this meeting and saying I thought he didn’t do it. Commentators, out of context, were giving this impression, “Well, isn’t that amazing?” Just go in and meet this guy for lunch and suddenly he’s innocent. Snide. But in the press conference after the meeting, I explained I’d already seen evidence I couldn’t really discuss in detail, but that I was convinced not just by the encounter. I was convinced before I met him.
I felt the guy got a bum rap. I felt he was a patsy.
My mother and I went to Memphis in February of 1997 to testify before Judge Joe Brown in an attempt to bring a rifle testing procedure into court, in hopes of sparking a new trial for Ray; Ray was hoping to spark his own release from prison so he could get a liver transplant. I did some walking around and thinking in Memphis. I had always hated going there, ever since I was twelve and thirteen and going to the sleep disorder clinic at Baptist Memorial Hospital, all the way until I visited the Lorraine Motel in the early ’90s.
Growing Up King Page 22
