Growing Up King

by Dexter Scott King

  Judge Joe Brown was pushing for the rifle test to happen, but there were a lot of appeals, and the DA was fighting it, the state was fighting it, but my mother and I went anyway, and testified why we believed this should happen; essentially, if there was a possibility of finding out the truth, it was worth doing. For a minute it had people on pins and needles because it was looking like those tests might prove something. Then there was a glitch in the system; instructions the judge gave about cleaning the rifle and prepping it were not followed to a tee, therefore they had to request another testing. That’s where everything derailed, because the state fought the new test to the point where the higher court overruled Brown and would not allow a second round of testing at a site in Rhode Island. Every time you fire a rifle, a metal residue is left in the barrel. Grooved markings make each bullet like a fingerprint. Each barrel and each bullet has a certain “fingerprint,” and leave a certain fingerprint on each other, altered slightly each time the gun is fired, altered to the extent that the next bullet you fire in succession is not getting the same print because residue is getting thicker so grooves are less pronounced. Judge Brown’s remedy: a liquid solution you can use that will actually remove residue and allow you to get an accurate reading. With all of that intrigue, Brown, with all his experience, felt that this was not the rifle that killed our father. I don’t know all the reasons, but he had informed data that would come out in trial.

  To be honest, we felt very awkward this whole time, but that was a snowball effect. I’d gotten letters from people. One began, “I’ve been a silent supporter for almost thirty years. I’ve been in silent sympathy with your family and I’ve been wanting to say these things and get them off my chest.” This person happened to be ex-CIA. “I’ve been there and done that, and I just want you to know you’re on the right track. I can tell you for a fact, Ray did not do it.”

  On and on. Letters. Notes. Phone calls explaining how the process works in terms of setting someone up, how a person can be moved around the country, not know he’s being controlled; movements documented, so a person can be framed. When you start getting information like that, what do you do? I’m not an investigator, yet when we talked to the Justice Department, they didn’t want to deal with it. What do you do? All we could do was try to get the authorities to give it a hearing. I never heard of a case where the authorities say, “We don’t want it because the case is thirty years old and it would open a can of worms.” I thought there was no statute of limitations on murder. But the assistant district attorney in Memphis told me, “We don’t need to open this; it’s messy.” But I believe that until you deal with it, it’ll stay messy. I was walking around feeling, “We’re the victim’s family, you’re the DA, representing our rights, and you’re going against us?”

  The assistant DA and I went on Nightline. Ted Koppel asked him, “Why don’t you just give the man a new trial? If you’re so sure that he did it, why are you denying him a trial?” The DA said this much to me, off camera: “If we open this back up, we would have to let Ray walk.”

  Television hurt as much as it helped. Pepper appeared on the ABC show Turning Point and was ambushed by host Forrest Sawyer. In Orders to Kill, based on information he received from former Green Berets, Pepper offered a scenario of the involvement of military personnel in the killing of my father. This account concerned a leader of a special unit that was supposedly in Memphis the day of the assassination. Pepper’s investigators told him that this guy was dead. In fact, he had been convicted of negligent homicide, served time, and then he relocated to Central America, which is apparently why Pepper’s investigators could not find him. But he turned up live on Turning Point, and Forrest Sawyer asked Pepper what he had to say to that, and Pepper could only say what he had been told by his investigators. The guy denied all. But of course he would.

  In 1968, the Lorraine Motel was a black-owned establishment, operated by Walter and Lorraine Bailey. This was where my father at times took a room for meeting local people in Memphis. He’d already been to town twice that March, but he stayed at the Holiday Inn Rivermont. Though there is some controversy about this, as it appears that he never stayed overnight at the Lorraine before April 13, 1968, on that occasion he was at the Lorraine. Mrs. Bailey bragged about it. A freak snowstorm then rain rescheduled plans. Radio got the word out. Although he was originally scheduled to take Room 202—a protected room on a lower level—his room was changed apparently per an SCLC official’s request. He was given Room 306. Daddy had only visited during the day and had reservations at the Peabody Hotel downtown but was diverted to the Rivermont Holiday Inn, where his suite was electronically surveilled. He was on his second trip that March, when he led the march toward City Hall. That march was derailed by rock-wielding youths busting out windows; could have been wild youths, it could have been the Invaders, a “gang” infiltrated by provocateurs, undercover police, and federal agents, including Marrell McCollough, who ended up kneeling over my father’s body at the Lorraine. Some people think there were hardly any actual gang members in the Invaders at all, except those recruited by law enforcement infiltrators.

  My father had stayed at the Rivermont hotel by the river after the first march had not ended well on March 28. But he stayed at the Lorraine on April 3 and 4. Daddy wanted to put “Negroes” into economic play (as well as focus on where integration really counted), and he knew this was most needed in the cities, where economic and educational segregation was obviously blatant, especially at that time in Atlanta, Birmingham, and Memphis. He had planned the Poor People’s March on Washington for the summer of ’68. He’d just taken Martin and me with him on a trip through rural Georgia, handshaking, preparing poor people. Higher-ups weren’t happy. J. Edgar Hoover called Daddy “the most notorious liar in the country.” My father’s FBI code name: Zorro. The Vatican hosted him, TIME magazine made him Man of the Year in 1963; the Nobel committee awarded him its Peace Prize in 1964. And yet authorities feared violence from him? Guilt transference, is all. In Birmingham, four little girls were bombed out of existence inside the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in ’63. New Orleans? Different world. Miami? That wasn’t Miami. That was They-ami. Atlanta was home to the Kings, the Atlanta University Center of five United Negro College Fund schools. Atlanta was the Head. In Memphis, reflection of ancient Egypt atop the Mississippi Delta, most blacks went uneducated. One UNCF school. Yet the people there in Memphis wanted their children educated as much as anybody. More. They were almost uniformly poor. But they were also many. Memphis was the Body. They say kill the Head and the Body will die.

  It was for sanitation workers that Daddy went to Memphis. The men had already done the work. They moved 2,500 cubic tons of garbage a week. Hard to find any litter on the tree-lined parkways—as hard as finding up-to-date materials in the segregated schools. It is always the dollars that are most rigidly segregated. Memphis had won an “America’s Cleanest City” award ten years running. Retired it. The men had done it, for $1.27 an hour, up to $1.65 if you proved yourself quiet and reliable over a ten-year career. They took it. They took it to educate you, fool. In February 1968, in twenty-two-degree weather, two workers, Echol Cole, thirty-five, and Robert Walker, twenty-nine, were crushed to death inside a garbage packer. The city gave their families a month’s salary, and $500 for burial. The union tiptoed in. Wanted $2.35 for laborers, $3.00 for drivers. City wouldn’t deal. Laughed, basically. So the Body looked to Atlanta. Most of the Body came up, over and down from the Delta; so they knew well that when somebody slaps a book out of your hand, it’s not because you’re “acting white”; it’s because you’re getting ahead. That makes them angry.

  Daddy came to Memphis rapping hard. When he finished, 930 of 1,100 garbage men wore signs reading I AM A MAN as they picketed for $2.35 an hour for their children’s education.

  On March 18, before 13,000 people at Mason Temple, Daddy said, “Y’all know what? We may have to escalate this struggle a little bit.” He urged a work stoppage, called for
“all Negro public school students to miss class,” and suggested a sit-in at the Board of Education.

  He came back and gave the “Mountaintop” speech April 3 at Mason Temple before 5,000.

  Mayor Henry Loeb, Police Chief J. C. Macdonald, Fire and Police Director Frank Holliman, Public Works commissioners Pete Sisson and Charles Blackburn all realized how much my father knew about how Memphis operated, knew the enterprise of Memphis was based on the poor working for low or no wage, and not being educated enough to do anything about it. Friday, April 5, students were to stay home. Those who could would walk to the Board of Education. Sit on the grass. Adults not in lifesaving jobs were to stay home from work. My father gave the word, Wednesday, April 3. It was to be Friday. The day after tomorrow.

  In Memphis, Friday never got there.

  Just before 6:00 P.M. on April 4, 1968, Daddy came onto the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel, outside Room 306, facing the rear of the buildings fronting the east side of South Main. A sniper was lining up from an angle in a camouflage of bushes two hundred feet away, straight on. In the parking lot two aides shadowboxed. Solomon Jones, Daddy’s driver, said it was cool for April; he suggested Daddy bring a topcoat. Looking down, Daddy asked Ben Branch to play “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” that night. “Play it real pretty,” he asked of Ben Branch.

  My father’s last request was for music!

  Then, just after he answered Jones’s request that he get a coat, a shot resounded. Daddy was down. “I saw a man jump out of the thicket across the street,” Jones said afterward. “He ran. I climbed up to the balcony. There was a white man there. I don’t know who he was. They say he lived there… he covered [Daddy’s] face with a cloth.” Earl Caldwell, then of the New York Times, also confirmed seeing a figure in the bushes, and Rev. James Orange confirmed seeing smoke rising from the same bushes. Though Caldwell told the police he saw a man, the police never questioned him. The bushes were cut down and that area was swept clean the next morning, only hours later.

  A man named Marrell McCollough had infiltrated that “gang” in Memphis called the Invaders; they’d been held responsible for a rock-throwing incident that broke up a peaceful demonstration on my father’s last trip to town on March 28. McCollough had been in military intelligence, had been discharged, and was called back. He appeared on the scene seconds after the shot, and was the first person to reach my father. He came running up to the balcony, was photographed checking my father’s vital signs, and attempted to establish the flophouse as the scene of the shooting. He’s disappeared from the scene now. A black cop, E. E. “Ed” Redditt, was one of a two-man surveillance team on duty in the fire station. He was pulled off the detail an hour and a half before the shooting— and escorted home.

  Mrs. Bailey, manager of the Lorraine motel, upon learning of the assassination, ran to her room, locked the door, and collapsed, having suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. She was rushed to the same hospital as my father—Saint Joseph’s—where she laid in a coma until her death on April 9. My father’s autopsy report was filed April 11, 1968, a week after he was killed.

  From Autopsy Report #A68-252, county medical examiner, J. T. Francisco:

  Gunshot wound to the chin and neck, fracture of mandible, laceration of vertebral artery, jugular vein and sub-laceration of spinal cord… intrapulmonary hematoma, apex, right upper lobe… Death was result of a gunshot wound to the chin and neck with a total transection of the lower cervical and upper thoracic spinal cord and other structures… direction of the wounding was from front to back, above downward and from right to left… The severing of the spinal cord at this level and to this extent was a wound that was fatal very shortly after its occurrence… an extensive excvating lesion… beginning one inch lateral to the right corner of the mouth and ½ inch inferior to right corner of the mouth; measures approximately 3 inches in length… angle of the penetrating wound is approximately 45 degrees from a sagittal plane at an angle right to left.

  For a conspiracy all you need is two. One was in the bag with J. Edgar Hoover, who died in 1972 after forty-eight years as FBI director. Hoover, a notorious megalomaniac, was not above pushing a button on a guy. He’d posed smiling with bullet-riddled corpses before, like Machine Gun Kelly, a small-time armed robber also killed in Memphis. Hoover stood by his corpse, smiling. He had my father under surveillance, tried to blackmail him over alleged sex tapes, not for profit but to tempt him to commit suicide. Hoover even sent audiotapes to my mother, but my father said they’d have to come up with something better than that. He wasn’t going to respond to blackmail. Then there was the operator of Jim’s Grill, Loyd Jowers. The grill was located beneath the rooming house from where the shot supposedly was fired.

  Jim’s Grill was behind the bushes from where the shot was most likely to have been fired.

  Surveillance of our family wasn’t new. My grandfather, even my great-grandfather, were surveilled by the army. “Conspiracy” doesn’t mean the Joint Chiefs convened or Aunt Inez in the secretarial pool knew. But, suspiciously, at the last minute Ed Redditt was deemed untrustworthy and was pulled off the surveillance detail. The bushes directly across from the Lorraine and Room 306 were cut down and the area swept and cleared the morning after the assassination, before any search of that area. Loyd Jowers would eventually confirm that Ray wasn’t the assassin, that another man, a policeman, had given him a smoking rifle right after the assassination. There was a reported “car chase” on police radio of a white Mustang like Ray’s out of north Memphis minutes after the shot, while Ray was in fact going east-southeast out of town, on either Lamar or Summer Avenue. Somebody leaked the fake chase confusion to the local papers—maybe a decent cop. The papers displayed it like news. The police disavowed it, saying there was no chase. There was the rifle left in the doorway of Canipe’s Amusements at 424 South Main. If that’s the murder weapon, if Ray shot it then left it, he is the all-time idiot.

  Then there was the presence of two white Mustangs, less than one hundred feet apart, in front of the boarding house. One being Ray’s, with Alabama license plates, which was parked in front of Jim’s Grill and in which two eyewitnesses said they saw him driving away some fifteen to twenty minutes before the shooting. The other car had Arkansas plates and sped away after the shooting.

  Back in the early ’80s, a yokel lounging up on South Main cackled at Jeff Prugh, then a journalist with the Los Angeles Times, “A man left it there—only that was before the shootin’.”

  Who was in the bushes? Who had them cut down? Pepper produced a statement under oath from the deputy public works director, Maynard Stiles, who said that the cleanup was ordered by MPD inspector Sam Evans.

  Ray drove to Atlanta on main interstate and state highways. Troopers may have even waved to him. Then he went to London. Portugal. Thought he was off to Africa—Nigeria, Angola, or Mozambique—destinations that would never have entered his mind without suggestion. It was like he was on tour. Yeah, he was financed. By whoever had that end of the job. Probably by whoever gave him up. A combination of somebodies, actively or tacitly. Two months after the assassination, Ray got a surprise at London’s Heathrow Airport. He was arrested, coerced into pleading guilty, was convicted, and filed a motion for a new trial three days after the plea. Even if Ray would have done it, did he have the skill to make the shot, a single fatal perfect shot from two hundred feet away from a cramped position with a secondhand rifle? He never was that good. Who actually knew Ray? Harold Swenson was warden of the prison in Jefferson City, Missouri, where Ray spent nearly two years doing time, and from which he escaped by hiding in a breadbox truck a year before Daddy’s murder. “Odd,” Harold Swenson said two weeks after Ray’s arrest in ’68. “I won’t believe [Ray] did it until it’s proved. Didn’t seem to be the desperado type, compared to some real bad ones we’ve got. He couldn’t join the team. Not in here.”

  Judge Joe Brown had the hearing—what was left of it—in Memphis court through August of 1996. Ray’s rifle was shot i
nto a barrel in Rhode Island: “Inconclusive,” of course. Brown couldn’t move forward. Came to Memphis from California years ago on a “Reggie”—a Reginald Huber Fellowship—one of the things my father’s death set in motion, things that are slowly being rescinded now. Brown came to serve the underserved. Judge Joe Brown was authentically trying to do justice.

  In mid-August of ’97, Judge Brown had asked that a special prosecutor be assigned. “The state is not really interested in finding out the truth,” he said in frustration. Brown was then lampooned in a scathing editorial cartoon in the Memphis Commercial Appeal.

  Memphis. I still feel awkward there. Yolanda says the same thing. People in Memphis, black and white, are very warm and hospitable, giving. People genuinely wanted to help us. I felt wrong for disliking Memphis. If I went shopping, if I went out to the drugstore, people were taking pictures. It was just warm, hospitable; people bent over backward. It was almost like they were going out of their way, white and black, to be accommodating; you didn’t get the impression it was phony. They were still sensitive to the tragedy, and they were sorry, and they didn’t want to carry the burden of it forever. I thought about the fact I had two young black police officers as my security detail, Memphis police officers, and how they seemed honored to have the detail, and the fact that one of them in particular said he was born three months after my father got killed. So here’s a thirty-one-year-old entrusted with protecting me in this city; he and his partner were assigned to this tactical unit whose same name had come up in testimony in the court about the involvement of the Memphis police on April 4, 1968. It was weird leaving the courtroom and then getting in this unmarked car; the irony of being embraced by the Establishment on the one hand, but on the other hand, here we were trying to resolve this injustice, even though I knew this detail had nothing to do with it.