At the beginning, Mother, Martin, and myself rotated in and out of the courtroom. We all wanted to be at the opening, but Bernice and Yolanda couldn’t be there. So we took turns. My mother stayed through Tuesday, Martin came in Wednesday; I was there until Thanksgiving—they had a short week. The following week, Yolanda was there. I can still see her, dressed in dark clothing, huddled against the wet chill in a spitting rain outside the Memphis courthouse, being interviewed by Ricki Kleiman on Court TV, looking so very vulnerable to me. Seeing her there steeled me against all the doubters who questioned this course. If only to make my sister feel whole…
Judge James E. Swearingen handled the proceeding. It was a circuit court trial. He felt it should be over by Christmas. The jury was sworn in; it couldn’t have been more racially balanced—six blacks and six whites. Ordinary people. Lewis Garrison represented Jowers. Swearingen was an African American and well-respected among black Memphians, although I wondered if he would be affected by what had happened to Judge Joe Brown when he had the rifle ballistics hearing in his court. Judge Brown took it on the chin for even trying to hear evidence then. Much would be made of what Judge Swearingen allowed testimony-wise in this trial, and there was the somehow built-in skepticism by some in the media, about our credibility as plaintiffs largely because we had retained Pepper. But I thought Judge Swearingen wanted to let the witnesses speak.
I would be among the last to testify. Mother was among the first on the stand. You could see the respect and empathy in the eyes of the jurors. She has maintained her dignity a long time. I felt protective toward her.
Within three days, the courtroom was nearly empty. Court TV pulled its gavel-to-gavel coverage. This was no O. J. Simpson trial. The media did not seem to want the public to hear the evidence, so there was no live TV coverage when Andy Young took the stand. Uncle Andy was questioned by Pepper, then cross-examined by Garrison, who, by the way, said he agreed with “80 percent of [the Kings’] case.” Andy Young, without wavering, testified that he met with Jowers for four hours a year earlier. “This was a man who was very sick, and who wanted to go to confession to get his soul right,” Uncle Andy said to the jury. He said Jowers told him some Memphis police officers and federal agents met at Jim’s Grill several days before the assassination, and the group included Marrell McCollough, who had been hired by the CIA later, in 1974. Uncle Andy also said that Jowers told him “a Mafia figure” gave him money to hand over to a man who delivered a rifle to Jim’s Grill before the assassination. Jowers told Uncle Andy that he was in the back of the grill when my father was shot by a man hidden in the bushes (the area cleared and cut down the night after the assassination) and this man, a Memphis police lieutenant, handed the smoking rifle to Jowers through a back door. Jowers told me the same story. He said his place was used as a staging area.
Jowers was not present for Andy Young’s testimony. He had been in the court for the first couple of days, but his health was declining and the long days took a toll. I watched him sitting in his threadbare suit and droopy white socks and tried to imagine him young and hateful. Now he was preparing to meet his Maker. Trying to get right. After Uncle Andy stepped down, Pepper promised the jury he’d play a two-hour tape documenting Uncle Andy’s meeting with Jowers that next Monday.
I listened to Judge Joe Brown testify that next Monday, November 23, 1999. As noted, Judge Brown was a criminal court judge in Memphis; Pepper called him as an expert witness in firearms. Brown told the jury he believed “The rifle [that prosecutors used to implicate Ray in the assassination] was not the rifle used to kill Dr. King. In my opinion, that is not the murder weapon.” He looked levelly at the jury. Whether people liked it or not, it was happening. We were now taking Daddy back. As Judge Brown spoke, he held the Remington GameMaster .30-06 hunting rifle. “This weapon, literally, could not have hit the broad side of a barn,” he said. An FBI report showed that the rifle had never been sighted in (never calibrated and aligned).
Judge Brown is a recreational hunter. Guns are a hobby of his, and as a criminal court judge, of course, he has had a lot of experience with forensics experts and weapons, and knows the law. But when asked on cross-examination by Garrison if he had any formal ballistics training, he cited none. After his testimony, the press sought the opinion of the prosecutor in the criminal trial, John Campbell. He said Judge Brown’s testimony raised more questions about Judge Brown than it did about the so-called murder weapon, or Ray’s guilt. That’s how it’s often done: if you have a “black” expert witness, then his credibility is subtly undermined, not for a particular reason, but because of—well, touch the skin on your arm.
Garrison could’ve objected to Joe Brown being called, but didn’t, and the county prosecutor took Garrison to task publicly. “The problem is, if no one is objecting, it makes no difference,” Campbell said. “He could’ve gotten up there and said he was an expert in nuclear physics.” Garrison’s position consistently was that his client was a small cog in a massive conspiracy. Pepper’s evidence was amply demonstrating that that was the case.
Joe Brown is a righteous man who tried. He tried when he had the rifle in his court to get a new trial for Ray. But he met staunch resistance every step of the way. He could only do so much, and then he was summarily removed from presiding over the criminal trial by the Court of Appeals without a hearing.
For the first time, I started to identify with my own feelings. Then I saw the brutality of the autopsy photos… my God… how horrible… I had never seen the photos. I’d had no desire to see any of them. I was caught off guard. An autopsy photograph was submitted into evidence and shown in court. I was upset with Pepper. We didn’t talk about it beforehand. I felt very awkward sitting there, even though it wasn’t one of the most gruesome ones. It showed a shot of my father’s back where the bullet lodged; you couldn’t see a face, who it was. When photographs were first sent to me by Pepper, I’d put them away. No desire to see them. Now they stared at me even in my sleep.
Pepper had sent all his archives to the King Center in Atlanta, and said, “I’m giving these to you separately; they are sensitive and I’m pretty sure you don’t want them mixed in with all the other stuff.”
We got a copy of the autopsy report and the x-rays as well. Understand that all of this for me was still working out my private hurt, the pain… the death itself. The morbid side of it. The tragedy. Everybody dealt with it intellectually, but very few people had to deal with it emotionally.
At least I was able to admit in my heart of hearts that I hadn’t dealt with it emotionally.
It felt like I was in a foreign city—another planet—anytime I went to Memphis. As a child I had no real awareness of the things surrounding the assassination. But from the very first time I visited there as a child, the city felt alien. The Monday after Daddy’s death, on the eighth of April 1968, was my first time there, for the march to City Hall that Dad never got to complete. I remember the wrecked faces and wracking sobs and images of smoke, black clothing, shrieking. I went to the sleep clinic at Baptist Hospital when I was twelve with these images in my head. Then I returned as an adult, finally, to the Lorraine Motel.
I wanted to hear Betty Spates testify, but it turned out she did not testify in Memphis due to her own long-held fears for her safety, though we did have the pivotal official deposition from her put into the record during the trial. Who was she? As a seventeen-year-old girl, she’d worked at Jim’s Grill; she was there on the fateful day, April 4, 1968. Pepper first interviewed her in Memphis in 1989. She told him, “There’s no doubt [Ray] did not kill Dr. King. I know that for a fact.”
After five years of investigating and developing a measure of trust, Pepper met with Mrs. Spates again. She revealed much, not only about that April 4, 1968, day at Jim’s Grill on South Main, but also about relationships you don’t hear about in the wells of Congress, when senators are fulminating in denial about issues pertaining to their African-American citizenry. Betty was numbered among this citizen
ry. The pretty seventeen-year-old had not only been a waitress at Jim’s Grill, she’d also been the young black concubine of the married Jowers. Jowers had a cot set up in back of the ground floor of Jim’s Grill for their assignations. She went to the grill around noon that day, went back toward the kitchen, calling Jowers. He came through the back door carrying a rifle. He did not appear to be under stress. She asked, “Loyd, what you doin’ with that gun?” He replied, “Gonna use it on you, if I catch you with a nigger.” She was black herself. That’s how sick it was, and is. To placate him, she told Jowers she would never do that. He told her he was kidding anyway. She told Pepper that Jowers broke the rifle down and took it into the grill. She did not follow him to see where.
Jowers had always discouraged her from coming around on Thursday, a day when his wife often stopped by. But she was there that day. Mrs. Jowers called her “whore” and told her to “Get out!” He came between them and told Mrs. Jowers to “Get out yourself,” then told Betty Spates to get behind the counter and go to work. Mrs. Jowers stalked out. This was around 4 P.M. Shortly thereafter Betty Spates went across the street to see some friends at another establishment. She came back around six. The three grill regulars weren’t around.
She noticed that the door between the eating area and the kitchen was tightly closed. Thinking this unusual, she opened the door and noticed that the door leading from the kitchen outside to the back was ajar. Just then, she heard what sounded like a loud firecracker. Seconds later, she saw Jowers rushing from the brush area through the door, carrying another rifle. She was convinced it was a different gun from the first one. She told Pepper that Jowers was “out of breath” and “as white as a ghost.” His hair was in disarray, the knees of his pants were muddy. When he caught his breath, he noticed her. He didn’t look angry, but frightened. He asked her, “You wouldn’t ever do anything to hurt me, would you, Betty?” He went to a counter inside, put the rifle on a shelf beneath the counter. Betty remembered the rifle—dark brown stock, a scope, a short barrel.
Betty Spates had gone on to say that a few months after the assassination, she was visited by three men in suits who offered her and her sisters new identities, relocation, money, for their own protection. She refused. Two of the men returned five years later, repeating the offer, which was again refused. Pepper had filed Betty Spates’s primary affidavit with the court; the Nashville Tennessean had published its contents. And now her statement was on the record.
After all seventy witnesses testified—providing evidence, among other things, of details of the Mafia contract, the army backup presence, army photographers on the roof of the fire station, the suppression of evidence, the failure of the Memphis Police Department to form the usual four-man security team (all consisting of black police officers) for my father, and the identity of Ray’s contact, Raul, which was confirmed by documents produced by former FBI agent Don Wilson—Judge Swearingen gave the case to the jury.
“Guilty,” I said in the phone call to Mother. “They came back guilty. Loyd Jowers was found guilty of conspiracy involving federal, state, and local government agencies.”
It was Wednesday, December 8, 1999. I also called Ami. “You must be relieved,” she said.
“I am. I really am…”
At the courthouse after the verdict, I was emotional; it was cathartic. There were things I wanted to say and I got them off my chest. At the press conference after the verdict, I said, “I’m appalled anybody would think we’re doing this for money. We’ve lost money doing this. We’ve had to spend money. This is being said… to distract people, get them off the issue. Anyone who sat through four weeks of testimony from seventy credible witnesses would know the truth’s here. The question is: What will be done with it? What will be learned?” I spoke what I felt—not good politics. Nobody to blame. Just tired of hearing we’d been “duped.”
I thought the verdict in the Jowers civil trial was historic, but the establishment pundits said I was wrong. By their decree it wasn’t history. Many experts kept repeating this: “It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything at all.”
If I kept repeating it, one day I might believe it, and one day after that, it might become fact. That’s the way it works, isn’t it? I started out saying, “I think that this is history being created,” as I left the courthouse. “This is the highest form of democracy, independent jurors rendering a verdict. So we’re very happy.” I believed it was history, a few scholars did not. The Emory professor told Memphis Commercial Appeal, “It certainly has made the Tennessee state judiciary look like a laughingstock.” He said the verdict would have “zero” impact on history. My eyes burned as I read this. Lewis Garrison, Jowers’s attorney, bemoaned how Ray’s current and former prosecutors convinced appellate judges to stop subpoenas that would’ve forced them to testify. “Why didn’t they come help me in this case?” he asked. Congressman John Lewis said, “Who participated in the conspiracy and why? Did law enforcement agencies? Did individuals at the state level in Tennessee? Did members of U.S. intelligence?”
“I think history is being created,” I said. “The history books aren’t going to be rewritten,” said Gilbert T. Sewall, director of the American Textbook Council, based at Columbia University. One of several “single gunman” theory authors wrote an editorial in the Washington Post: “To those unfamiliar with the case, the verdict seemed a culmination of a long effort by the King family to determine who was behind the assassination. To others who have followed the case, the Memphis trial was not about seeking the truth but a ploy to obtain judicial sanction for a convoluted conspiracy theory embraced by the King family.”
I couldn’t help but wonder if the professor at Emory and the “single gunman” theorist were protecting their life’s work, their credibility as historians and scholars, their own sanity, in a way. That is only natural. I understand that. I was protecting my family, also only natural. I hoped people might understand. After all, these “experts” had already written one version of history, with Ray as lone assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr., and they’d been feted and awarded for it. Maybe I’m slow to catch on, but it seems they had a vested interest in history remaining the way they said it was. “It’s not history. It doesn’t mean anything.” I’d have to keep repeating that. Maybe one day it would become true.
Nobody in our family agreed with these scholars’ assessments. How is that we, my family and me, were disqualified from having a valid thought about a matter that impacted us and our lives and futures to a far greater degree than it impacted anyone else? We were said to be dupes of Pepper. I guess we are dupes all right, but of whom—well, that depends.
It was not history, they kept telling us. It meant nothing. It meant zero. Except neither Martin, nor Bernice, nor Yolanda, nor Mother, nor Isaac, nor my cousins agreed with those statements. Rather, they thanked me.
At any rate, the trial accomplished what we needed, closure. It would be nice if there was official acknowledgment, but we never thought this would happen. We did what we could do. We did something. If it isn’t history, if it means nothing, keep on repeating it; maybe it will come true. The truth, crushed to earth, will rise again. For now, a flawed man like myself, a son who lost his father, can sleep at night, look in the mirror, maybe move on. That’s all. That’s enough.
The Justice Department’s report on the new evidence we brought to them from Jowers and Donald Wilson, a former FBI agent who had found documents in Ray’s car that had phone numbers for Ray’s handler, Raul, and for the Atlanta office of the FBI, came in after the trial. My hope was they wouldn’t whitewash and attempt to discredit the whole trial, but I thought that was probably what would happen, and it did. In William Pepper’s new book, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, Jr., he addresses the Justice Department’s report and gives a full account of the Jowers trial. (The full and complete trial transcript is available on the King Center’s Web site at www.thekingcenter.org.)
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p; So we can say, “It’s not history, it’s not important, it means zero,” all we want, if it makes it easier for us to get by in the dayto-day. However, that negation won’t stop legitimate, credible future researchers. As authoritative as some of the King experts think they are, they are not the last word, or even the last King experts. More of them will come along. As the writer and poet Sterling Brown once said, “Strong men keep on coming.” History has a way of being relived by future generations who will address it in a new way; you get new perspectives, new people looking into things, frankly, people with less of a personal agenda. That’s the great thing about our Constitution, the First Amendment: you can’t stop people from looking at public records; you can seal them for fifty years, as Congress did, but sooner or later the time will pass, somebody will get curious. Can’t sweep it under the rug forever. While the public may not get the benefit of official sanction, the records will bear it out. Do the majority of Americans believe the official story? Well, it’s not like people are walking around asking, “Oh gosh, could this actually happen?” I believe whoever killed Daddy was aided and abetted. It was not a one-man deal. If that’s unimportant to the minutes of history, if that means nothing, then so be it. Then neither do we. We never have meant anything at all, except as the footstools for those who would make good names and a good living off of our misery. We didn’t pursue it for any other reason than to get the truth on the permanent record, so we could feel like we’d done everything we could’ve done. We owed Daddy that.
Growing Up King Page 28
