Chasing King's Killer: The Hunt for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Assassin Page 14

  Creation of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Holiday Commission. Public Law 98-399 (transferred to the King Center in 1996).

  November 18, 1948—Charged with the violation of the 96th Article of War (being drunk in quarters on October 31), and charged with the violation of the 69th Article of War (and after being duly placed under arrest on November 3 for breaking arrest before he was set “at liberty”). Sentenced to hard labor for three months at the stockade at Nuremberg, and forfeiture of his pay ($45 per month for four months).

  December 10, 1948—Hard labor sentenced was commuted and Ray returned to the United States.

  December 23, 1948—Discharged for “ineptness.” (After thirty-four months and four days in uniform—never obtaining the rank higher than private first class).

  December 9, 1949—Convicted of second degree burglary in Los Angeles, California (sentenced to eight months in county jail and two-year probation).

  March 1950—Application for early release approved.

  April 1950—Jailed in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for suspicion of robbery and vagrancy, but released.

  July 23, 1951—Jailed in Alton, Illinois, for vagrancy and given ninety-day sentence.

  June 4, 1952—Sentenced to one to two years and sent to Joliet State Penitentiary after having pled guilty to armed robbery of a taxi driver in Chicago, Illinois.

  Early July 1952—Transferred to the state penitentiary at Pontiac.

  March 12, 1954—Released after serving twenty-two months of his sentence.

  August 28, 1954—Arrested for suspicion of numerous petty crimes in Alton, Illinois. Posted bail and skipped town.

  April 1955—Convicted in Kansas City, Missouri, for mail fraud and stealing money orders, in Hannibal, Missouri. Received forty-five-month sentence.

  July 7, 1955—Arrived at Leavenworth prison.

  April 5, 1958—Released from “honor” farm where he resided for about one year.

  October 10, 1959—Committed armed robbery of a few Kroger grocery stores in St. Louis, Missouri.

  October 26, 1959—Found guilty of armed robbery on parole, so sentenced to twenty years for repeated offenses.

  March 17, 1960—Transferred from the city jail to the Missouri State Penitentiary.

  April 23, 1967—Escaped from Missouri State Penitentiary by hiding in a breadbox in a truck transporting bread to prison bakery.

  POST-ASSASSINATION

  June 8, 1968—Captured at London Heathrow Airport.

  March 10, 1969—Pled guilty, sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison.

  May 3, 1971—Attempted escape through ventilation fan and manhole on a steam tunnel that led to the outside of prison wall, after placing a dummy in his bed. It was too hot in the tunnel, so he returned to the prison yard.

  February 1972—Attempted escape by cutting a hole through the ceiling in his work area.

  June 10, 1977—Escaped from Brushy Mountain State Prison with six other inmates, using a pipe ladder over the fourteen-foot back wall.

  June 13, 1977—Recaptured, and two years was added to his ninety-nine-year sentence.

  November 9, 1979—Attempted escape but captured when a guard caught him crawling along the base of the prison wall under a camouflage blanket.

  June 4, 1981—Stabbed twenty-two times in prison library by four inmates, three black and one white. Required seventy-seven stitches.

  December 1996–April 1998—Hospitalized more than a dozen times.

  April 23, 1998—Ray died in prison from kidney and liver disease.

  (The principal sources for this chronology are McMillan, Making of an Assassin; Posner, Killing the Dream; Sides, Hellhound on His Trail; U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations [Final Report and Appendixes]; and various New York Times articles.)

  PROLOGUE: “A SNEEZE MEANT DEATH”

  The stabbing of King by Izola Curry. While King had received national attention with brief stories in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the most complete coverage of the events surrounding the stabbing was in the weekly black newspaper the New York Amsterdam News, September 27, 1958, and, to a lesser extent, in the Chicago Defender, September 27, 1958, another influential weekly for African American readers. See also the graphic photographic coverage in the Sunday News: New York’s Picture Newspaper, “Martin Luther King Stabbed,” September 21, 1958. In addition, see Hugh Pearson, When Harlem Nearly Killed King: The 1958 Stabbing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), and go to: http://www.thesmokinggun.com /documents/crime/the-woman-who-nearly-murdered-martin -luther-king-jr-687453. In addition, see King’s comments about this incident at: http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia /documentsentry/from_dexter_avenue_baptist_church_21 _sept_1958/index.html and http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu /encyclopedia/documentsentry/statement_upon_return_to _montgomery/index.html, and additional material, as found in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Volume IV, Symbol of the Movement, January 1957–December 1958 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, including King’s full statement from Harlem Hospital), 502, and 513–514.

  PART ONE: INTRODUCTION TO MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

  1865–1958: JIM CROW AMERICA

  Overview. I must pay tribute to my mentor and friend, the late John Hope Franklin. The most updated edition of his seminal work remains a classic: John Hope Franklin and Evelyn Higginbotham, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 9th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010).

  Jim Crow. See C. Vann Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955). Also, William H. Chafe, et al. Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South (New York: The New Press, 2001).

  Ku Klux Klan (KKK). See David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The First Century of the Ku Klux Klan, 1865–1965 (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1965), and updated as Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987). Also, Elaine Frantz Parsons, Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015) and William Rawlings, The Second Coming of the Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2016).

  Lynching. Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 2nd ed. (Montgomery, AL: Equal Justice Initiative, 2015), http://eji.org /sites/default/files/lynching-in-america-second-edition-summary .pdf; James Allen, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Press, 2000); Christopher Waldrep, Lynching in America: A History in Documents (New York: New York University Press, 2006); and Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002).

  THE EARLY YEARS

  King’s early years and biography. An appropriate place to begin is the edited work by Clayborne Carson, ed., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Warner Books, 1998). See also Marshall Frady, Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Life. (New York: Penguin Group, 2002); Lerone Bennett, Jr., What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4th revised edition (Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 1964, 1976); Lawrence D. Reddick, Crusader without Violence: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959); and Stephen Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1982).

  The birth name of Martin Luther King, Jr., was Michael—the same as his father. As a pastor, his father traveled to Berlin, Germany, to attend the Fifth Baptist World Alliance Conference, and inspired by the Protestant Reformation leader, Martin Luther, he subsequently renamed himself and his five-year-old son. The Montgomery bus boycott. Important firsthand accounts include King’s own book, Stride Toward Freedom: A Leader of His People Tells the Montgomery Story (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), as well as Uriah J. Fields, Inside the Montgomery Bus Boycott: My Personal Story (Baltimore: America House, 2002); Fred D. Gray, Bus Ride to Freedom: The Life and Works of Fred Gray (Montgomery: Black Be
lt Press, 1995); Rosa Parks and Jim Haskins, Rosa Parks: My Story (New York: Dial Books, 1992); and Jo Ann Robinson (edited by David J. Garrow), The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987). Additionally, see David J. Garrow, ed., The Walking City: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955–1956 (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1969); Willy S. Leventhal, The Children Coming On: A Retrospective of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (Montgomery, AL: Black Belt Press, 1968); Stewart Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Donnie Williams and Wayne Greenhaw, The Thunder of Angels: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the People Who Broke the Back of Jim Crow (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2006).

  The civil rights movement. The literature on this subject is rich with personal memoirs of participants, and also with critical scholarly works, as noted in my selected bibliography. An ideal place to begin is with Taylor Branch’s monumental trilogy on this topic. See Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989); Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–1965 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998); At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–1968 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006). See also David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986). And for President Lyndon Johnson’s response leading up to the signing of the Civil Rights Act, see Brian A. McKee, et al., eds., The Presidential Recordings; Lyndon B. Johnson: Mississippi Burning and the Passage of the Civil Rights Act, June 1, 1964–July 4, 1964, Volumes 7 and 8 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011).

  Climate of violence against King and the civil rights movement. Between 1955 and 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr., was arrested thirty times—largely for his nonviolence protest activities, as well as “trumped-up” charges, such as driving five miles over the speed limit. Similar to many others in the civil rights movement, King’s life—as well as his family’s—was constantly in danger wherever he appeared. Besides the bomb threats and other physical dangers, there was an explosion at his home in Montgomery in January 1956, and in months afterward as well. So it should come as no surprise that there were guns in his home, and a few of his associates carried weapons. Some may see an irony in King’s nonviolent philosophy and the perceived need to be armed. But the history and use of arms in the black community, including during the 1960s, is a fascinating one. See Charles E. Cobb, Jr., This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (New York: Basic Books, 2015); Nicholas Johnson, Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2014), 209–284 (Chapter Seven, “Freedom Fight”); and Simon Wendt, The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007).

  Brown v. Board of Education. For the complete text of the U.S. Supreme Court decision, see Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/347/483. Also, see Leon Friedman, ed., Argument: The Oral Argument Before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 1952–1955 (New York: Chelsea House, 1983); Jack Greenberg, Brown v. Board of Education: Witness to a Landmark Decision, 50th Anniversary Edition (New York: Twelve Tables Press, 2004); Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976); Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Brown v. Board of Education: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 1998); James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Paul E. Wilson, A Time to Lose: Representing Kansas in Brown v. Board of Education (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995).

  1959–1962: ON THE RISE: LUNCH COUNTERS, FREEDOM RIDERS, AND OLE MISS

  Lunch counters. For instance, see Miles Wolff, Lunch at the Five and Ten: The Greensboro Sit-ins (New York: Stein and Day, 1970); Merrill Proudfoot, Diary of a Sit-In (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962); and William Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

  Freedom Riders. See Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) and PBS, American Experience: Freedom Riders, 2001 (DVD). See also Eric Etheridge and Roger Wilkens, Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Freedom Riders (New York: Atlas & Co., 2008).

  Ole Miss. The most important primary source was written by the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi: James Meredith, Three Years in Mississippi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966). See also Henry T. Gallagher, James Meredith and the Ole Miss Riot: A Soldier’s Story (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012) and Charles W. Eagles, The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

  1963: TRAGEDIES AND TRIUMPHS: PROTESTS IN BIRMINGHAM, A LETTER FROM JAIL, AND A MARCH ON WASHINGTON

  Letter from Birmingham Jail. This letter originally was published by the American Friends Service Committee as a small stapled pamphlet in May 1963. See also Jonathan Rieder, Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013). To view the letter and hear King read his words, go to: https://kinginstitute .stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/letter-birmingham-jail

  The March on Washington and the “I Have a Dream” speech. See Clarence Jones, Behind the Dream: The Making of a Speech That Transformed a Nation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and William P. Jones, March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom and the Forgotten History of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2013). Also, see generally, Charles Euchner, Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010); Thomas Gentile, March on Washington, August 28, 1963 (Washington, DC: New Day Publications, 1983); Leonard Freed (photographer), This Is the Day: The March on Washington (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013); and Kitty Kelly, Let Freedom Ring: Stanley Tretlick’s Iconic Images of the March on Washington (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013). Also go to: http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc _march_on_washington_for_jobs_and_freedom/index.html. For the complete text of King’s speech, go to:

  http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/kingweb/publications/speeches /address_at_march_on_washington.pdf and Clayborne Carson and Kris Shepard, eds., A Call to Conscience: the Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: IPM [Intellectual Properties Management] in association with Warner Books, 2001), 75–88. King’s sermons and speeches. All further quotations in this book on the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., are found in the following sources: The King Paper Project at Stanford University has already published seven volumes containing correspondence, sermons, speeches, published writing, and unpublished manuscripts. Much material is available online at: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/ and https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/about-papers-project

  Murder of Medgar Evers. See Adam Nossiter, Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1994).

  1963: DISASTER AND HOPE: A BOMBING IN BIRMINGHAM, THE ASSASSINATION OF A PRESIDENT, AND A NEW LEADER

  The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing. This, the oldest black church in Birmingham, was first organized in 1873. For a brief description of its history, see http://16thstreetbaptist.org/history-2/. See also Elizabeth H. Cobbs and Petric J. Smith, Long Time Coming: An Insider’s Story of the Birmingham Church Bombing That Rocked the World (Birmingham: Crane Hill, 1994); Frank Sikora, Until Justice Rolls Down: The Birmingham Church Bombing Case (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991); and T. K. Thorne, Last Chance for Justice: How Relentless
Investigators Uncovered New Evidence Convicting the Birmingham Church Bombers (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2013). See also the FBI vault website: https://vault.fbi.gov/16th%20Street%20Church%20Bombing %20 (in 50 parts).

  For the text of King’s eulogy for three of the four children killed in the bombing (there was a separate service for the fourth victim), see Carson, A Call to Conscience, 89–100.

  Assassination of John F. Kennedy. For a thorough treatment of the JFK assassination, see James L. Swanson, “The President Has Been Shot!”: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy (New York: Scholastic Press, 2013) and James L. Swanson, End of Days: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2013).

  1964: FROM THE CIVIL RIGHTS BILL AND THE NOBEL PRIZE TO A MURDER AND A SLANDER

  The Civil Rights Act. This landmark legislation was signed into Public Law by President Lyndon Johnson on July 2, 1964 (Public Law 88-352), https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=97& page=transcript. See also Clay Risen, The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014); Todd S. Purdum, An Idea Whose Time Had Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1964); Charles Whalen, The Longest Debate: A Legislative History of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Washington, DC: Seven Locks Press, 1985); and https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil -rights-act/civil-rights-act-of-1964.html

  Mississippi burning (killing of the three civil rights workers). See William Bradford Huie, Three Lives for Mississippi, 2nd edition with introduction by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: New American Library, 1968); Seth Cagin and Phillip Drey, We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1988); Bruce Watson, Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy (New York: Viking Press, 2010); and Howard Ball, Murder in Mississippi: United States v. Price and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), and Justice in Mississippi: The Murder Trial of Edgar Ray Killen (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008). See also the FBI vault website: https://vault.fbi.gov/Mississippi %20Burning%20(MIBURN)%20Case (in 9 parts), and U.S. Department of Justice Report to the Attorney General of the State of Mississippi, Investigation of the 1964 Murders of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, 2016), http://www .ago.state.ms.us/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/DOJ-Report-to -Mississippi-Attorney-General-Jim-Hood.pdf