Growing Up King

by Dexter Scott King

  What tends to happen with leadership (not just black or white leadership) is that the ceremony happens first, the announcement comes, then leaders backtrack to capture the sacrament, people’s hearts. Lincoln did the ceremony by freeing the slaves legislatively with the Emancipation Proclamation, but the sacrament was men and women dying in the Civil War, at Gettysburg, at Antietam. Victim/victimizer, slave/slavemaster having sacrament in their hearts, that was even more difficult to achieve, as seen by the failures of Reconstruction, the subsequent rise of the murdering Ku Klux Klan, White Citizens Councils, then denial of suffrage, then, after the turn of the century, the rise in lynchings, the Birth of a Nation film, then the Red Summer of 1919, the torching of the economically successful Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921 and the killing of three hundred innocent black people. That whole process of post–Civil War subjugation is what causes there to still be racism lingering 140 years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. After growing up in an environment of ceremony and sacrament, I saw more ceremony after my father’s death; but people still felt left out, particularly black people, who felt downtrodden, needing validation. Other people felt threatened, like whites who railed against processes like affirmative action. We have all found out together that the ceremony alone doesn’t do it, no matter how much money you put into people’s pockets, no matter how much wealth a community generates; if the people themselves within their hearts aren’t right, if they don’t feel good about themselves, don’t feel or get treated equal, things won’t change.

  Leadership, whatever and whoever that is, has to do its part, black and white. Both races need to understand that it’s not just African-American psyche that needs support; white America needs to realize that its psyche also needs reparations and support— forgiveness, education, and a feeling of security that’s obviously lacking there as well.

  The history of America has left us all insecure, I’m afraid. Saying “I’m sorry” or giving out comparatively meager handouts isn’t the only solution.

  Everybody talks about what Dr. King would have done and what the Civil Rights Movement accomplished or didn’t accomplish. Did it hurt more or help more, in terms of integration? There is validity to the statement that integration opened up doors and avenues that left indigenous home businesses in the lurch. A lot of this has to do with the fact that some black businesses were not operating competitively. Free enterprise means competition. You have to be competitive. My father knew integration meant competition; part of competition is knowing and charging fair market value and delivering goods in a timely and effective manner. That did not happen many times. Often there were reasons why, often it was kept from happening by outside forces. Distribution channels were often closed for minority-produced goods and services. In many cases resources weren’t there, loans were not forthcoming; red-lining for business and private housing was no myth—it happened. It may in fact still happen.

  The problem—or solution—was, and is, what’s in people’s heart of hearts. One who addresses this is Magic Johnson. With his multitude of businesses, from cineplexes to restaurants, he’s saying to black consumers, “We can have nice things, should demand them, be able to go into a nice theater, shouldn’t have to go to a dilapidated, run-down theater not being maintained, not showing a first-run feature. We can have a multiplex.” He has one of his chain of Magic Johnson Theatres multiplexes in Atlanta; it’s one of the most successful. He also put a Magic Johnson’s T.G.I. Friday’s restaurant next to it, and is doing well. This stems from mentality, commitment, and investment—a way of being. It requires stew-ardship, maintenance. The people who were fighting for integration didn’t always understand the technical sides of expanding an economy. Look at the 2000 trade agreement with China: 1.3 billion Chinese can’t be wrong—not as consumers, at least. Any businessman will tell you that as long as the customer buys, the customer is always right, no matter his politics.

  People can talk about the negatives of integration, but look at the positives. The South in particular. Its market share increased a hundredfold because what was traditionally a segregated, backdoor dollar now came in the front door, en masse, and from there momentum took over. We all know by now who often sets the consumer trends in the United States. That black dollar and black aesthetic built up the economy of the South and created opportunities for everybody—just as it had done in the Greenwood section of Tulsa in the early 1900s. But what we have failed to do post-integration is create opportunities in our community; we’ve been so busy gaining access and maybe acceptance that we did not build a more permanent infrastructure. In cases we may have had it, but it was destroyed in the wake of the assassination of my father in 1968, and it was never rebuilt, in some cases not even now, thirty-five years later. We strive for recognition, so much that we have almost told people we don’t want to be part of the mainstream. You can’t have it both ways.

  I’m just saying that we need to understand—as my father understood so clearly—that we are a minority and the only way you are going to transform the majority is to assimilate with it to effect change.

  Are we colored, Negro, African American, Afro-American? This question is hard because, when you look at the African continent, it’s made up of many regions, countries, tribes, peoples—it’s a world unto itself; a continent, not a country. It’s impossible to go back and recapture that which was lost. What can happen is acknowledgment that this is the case.

  There has to be a realization and acceptance of where we stand. I was watching Tavis Smiley on BET Tonight before Bob Johnson and Tavis came to their parting of the ways. Karl Kani and other fashion designers were on. A woman called in and said, “When are you ever going to do a cheaper line?” Why is it that black folk or artists are always expected to drop their prices and give things away, then those same people who ask you to do it will go out and spend top dollar for Tommy Hilfiger? We’ve got to balance the practical side of it and move on. Right on Auburn Avenue, that area could be a major economic engine, an additional economic engine for the city of Atlanta. It already has critical mass in terms of visitors and potential customers. You have people coming here to the King Center, but then they leave. They park, come in, look around, ruminate, then they’re gone. Why not create a destination where people come down and stay a while—eat and sit and spend time? You’ve got the beginnings of the infrastructure. All you need is to put the right things there to interest people, so that when they come, they stay longer than twenty minutes, they stay and spend more money that fuels the local economy.

  * * *

  We have since made up in terms of the issues at hand with the National Park Service, but there is still the inevitable coexistence. They’re interested in purchasing our real estate and our buildings. The King Center edifice is a depreciable asset. This is not land that’s going to be used to build condos twenty years from now. This is historic land. Maintenance is a liability. Maintaining a fixed asset is only going to get more troublesome. Who will be responsible for it after Mother and us are gone? It’ll fall into disrepair over time. With the mandate of preserving the buildings and grounds, and doing facility management, the Park Service makes sense.

  And so it happened that our friends and confidants were subject to human nature, human frailty, just as we Kings were; if we ourselves are subject to all that, then we can all probably rest assured we shall meet resistance until the end—until the legacy is out of our hands, until we’re in our graves, unmourned, possibly misunderstood. The more I learned, the more betrayed I felt we were by some of the big names within the Civil Rights Movement. Perhaps they felt betrayed by us. Sadder still would be not standing up for what you believe. Worse still would be laboring in the wrong, and if proven wrong, refusing to admit it and go on together to the next problem.

  The resistance was from people who, in their hearts, didn’t want to place value or be seen approving placing value on something African American. Because it’s associated with a black individual, it�
��s not supposed to command the same respect. We heard, “Most people donate their papers to the Library.” Those people were presidents still on the public payroll. The government paid the family of Richard Nixon $18 million for papers, tape recordings, and other materials seized after Watergate. The Zapruder film, a few seconds of 8mm film of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas in 1963? In 1999, the government agreed to pay Abraham Zapruder’s family some $15 million for those mere seconds—not the rights to the film, mind you, but the film itself. The rights are retained by the Zapruder family. I don’t know what it’s all worth. I go by the standards set, appraisals of the professionals like Sotheby’s and the Library of Congress, and comparative rates paid for the Nixon papers, the Zapruder film.

  There’s been a lot of political posturing about blocking the Library of Congress purchase of the King papers. Whether that will translate into blocking it into perpetuity, I don’t know.

  The journey will be difficult, but in the end we’ll get where we’re going. That’s in my gut—Daddy’s real, spoken legacy will survive and flourish. In many ways, it is fitting and proper for the lion’s share of his papers to be going to the Library of Congress. I don’t know why people would object, unless they are objecting to what he stood for. They say, “Dr. King wouldn’t have wanted this,” or “The papers aren’t that valuable.” Prove that by his five blood heirs. As long as you respect my mother and siblings, then you can discount me. No need to discount the whole family. Just me. As long as Mother’s angle of repose is comfortable, and her mind clear, and my sisters and brother are free to pursue their own level of love, peace, and happiness, then I’m fine. One last move to safeguard Daddy’s legacy and know the truth about his assassination might assure Mother a final comfort and clarity. This move would be the civil trial of one Loyd Jowers.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Reckoning

  It had never been confronted in open court. Not for us, by us, the family of the victim.

  We were in collective shock in 1968 when James Earl Ray was shot through the legal system as if greased, with first Arthur Hanes then Percy Foreman as his lawyer. For us, it was hard enough just to accept Daddy’s being dead, to accept what people said and did in the aftermath, to accept the different reactions from others, to accept what the authorities said about who killed him. “Try to move on,” I remember people saying. As if. As time went on, deep down inside, all the adults in my family—Mother, Uncle A.D., Granddaddy, Big Mama, cousin Alveda—felt there was more to it. I, me, Dexter, the last one, ended up as point man for all those years of muffled questions and suppressed doubts. My family looked to me now. Right or wrong, they looked to me. For my family. For my father. You tell me—what was I supposed to do?

  Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination was quick on the heels of Daddy’s, not to mention heightened tensions in the country, riots, burning in nearly every city, major and minor, after Daddy was killed; a dissolving hope, a swelling of the ranks of groups like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, or the Nation of Islam, the Blackstone Rangers, or Black P-Stone Nation in Chicago, Crips and Bloods in L.A. George Clinton and Parliament singing “(I Wanna) Testify” could not lift the mood for long. The feeling was, no matter who is involved, what can you do? What recourse do you have? You felt helpless to do anything else but think about it, roll it over in your mind, try and figure it out. Suffer in silence.

  Even if Ray did it, did he do it alone? The force of will behind this murder—did he possess that? Was he that brave, that resourceful, to escape under the noses of law enforcement without any help? Was he competent enough to make that shot? Anyone behind him, or with him, we’d never be able to find out. Even if we did… how do you fight a feeling? How can you change what’s in people’s hearts? That took a man like Daddy. And he was dead. That’s what the world and we lost. I felt hollowed out inside about it, but I didn’t know it at first. If asked, I said and I believed I was fine. But it also became for my own soul’s sake that I tried to find out all I could about why and how Daddy was killed. My sisters and our mother had looked into my eyes and asked me to try. So I did.

  Somehow, my logic must have escaped scholars. They can interpret Shaw, Nietzsche, or Churchill, somehow, but they can’t understand me. I find it all hard to believe, that looking into one’s own father’s murder seems somehow illogical.

  Leading up to the civil trial, in the late fall of the year 1999, people asked me, “Why look into it?” The most innocent and well-intentioned people said this, as well as editorial columnists and scholar-authors with books and their own interests to protect and, maybe, I don’t know, axes to grind, although I don’t know why anyone would grind an ax on my family’s backs. Many people said I was wrong for looking into the death of my father. Was that going to stop me? Are those the people I saw when I looked in the mirror? Or did I see Mother, Daddy, Yoki, Marty, Bunny?

  That’s who I answered to in the end. It was as simple as our mental health.

  Before he died in 1984, my grandfather Martin Luther King, Sr., patriarch of our clan, said, “In my heart, I never believed Ray was alone in his plan.” And then he wept. And then he died. So that’s part of my legacy too. I’d disappointed him. I’d never heard the Call. This seemed like the least I could do. For years, for many reasons, I had averted my eyes. I could stand to do that no longer.

  Shortly before the Jowers trial began, the verdict from our appeal in the CBS case came in; we had won a reversal in federal appeals court. The attorneys called Mon Ami. She came over and knocked on the door. She said, “We won. You will not be the sibling or heir that lost your father’s copyrights. You did what he would have wanted.” I hoped that this legal victory would bode well for the new legal journey we were about to embark on.

  With William F. Pepper serving as trial counsel, we, the family of Martin Luther King, Jr., as heirs of the victim, filed a wrongful death suit, a civil suit against Loyd Jowers, the Memphis owner/operator of a place called Jim’s Grill on South Main Street, one block due west and upland from the Lorraine Motel, adjacent to Canipe’s Amusements. Jim’s Grill and Canipe’s were first-floor establishments. Over them was the flophouse and back window from which Ray is said to have taken a single shot on April 4, 1968, that changed the landscape of America and five lives in particular, those of Coretta, Yolanda, Martin III, and Bernice. Me too.

  Our main purpose in filing this suit was to get to the truth by hearing testimony under oath and having evidence submitted into court records to create an official permanent record of what had occurred around this tragedy. We were concerned that with the passage of over thirty years since my father’s death, many relevant individuals would die without having their knowledge officially recorded. In other words, we believed it was now or never. We only sought a ceremonial $100 damage amount in the trial because we were more interested in getting the truth than in getting money.

  By this time, Loyd Jowers was an aging, frail, seventy-three-year-old. He bore a resemblance to Byron De La Beckwith, who, thirty-five years after the fact, was convicted of killing Medgar Evers in Mississippi in 1963. Jowers was not accused of shooting anyone. But in his dotage he claimed to ABC TV reporter Sam Donaldson that he’d helped carry out the King assassination, and admitted it to William F. Pepper and to Andy Young, both times in my presence. Jowers contended that his place, Jim’s Grill, was used as a staging area of sorts. The .30-06 rifle, supposedly the weapon Ray used, was found in the foyer of Canipe’s Amusements on South Main, close to Jowers’s grill and a few hundred yards from the muddy chop of the Mississippi River.

  In the 1993 interview with Sam Donaldson, Jowers claimed to have been in on it, and said the murderer who handed him the still-smoking murder weapon was not James Earl Ray. Pepper himself had received information from army informants that two teams of army snipers were in the area, perhaps as backups to a contract killer. All this confusion could have been avoided, maybe, if the congressional committee hadn’t, in 1979, sealed all its documents
regarding the case for fifty years. Fifty years. That would be 2029. By then, Bernice, the youngest, will be over sixty.

  We approached President Clinton about creating a truth and reconciliation commission, similar to the one created in South Africa to investigate crimes by the government against its people. The commission would have subpoena power and the ability to grant immunity from prosecution in exchange for the truth. Since our government had been implicated, we felt it was very important to have an independent, nongovernmental body established. But President Clinton turned it over to the Department of Justice. We wanted the truth, not retributive justice. We had lost in the criminal proceeding in Memphis, where we tried to get the rifle tested when Ray was seeking a trial. We could no longer pursue a criminal trial since Ray had died in 1998. Therefore a civil suit was the only other legal remedy we could employ to get at the truth. So starting Monday, November 15, 1999, there was a proceeding in Shelby County (Memphis), Tennessee, and some seventy witnesses would testify, including Andy Young and Rev. James Lawson, one of Daddy’s friends and the leader of the Memphis protest back in 1968. All this testimony went into the record so that historians who want to research it will have an official record of these versions of what happened.

  We were not seeking monetary damages. We were not in it to try and bankrupt anybody or gain publicity. We were only seeking truth. To have Jowers offer to put into the record his information pertinent to this case. Jowers never had been officially interviewed by the authorities. He was written off as not credible. He said that if he got immunity from prosecution, he’d tell all he knew. He was never offered immunity. The Department of Justice would have to investigate, follow up, which we believed it didn’t want to do. People were getting old, like Jowers. In a way he was a more important witness even than Ray. Ray didn’t have to know anything. Jowers was in his seventies, not in good health. His memory was good, but physically he had deteriorated, as had others who were close to the—what to call it?—the… event? This was the time to get every scrap of firsthand knowledge down.