Gerald Posner - Killing the Dream : James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Killing the Dream

James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Gerald Posner

To my wife, Trisha, my eternal partner

I Am a Man

I Am A Man. Those were the simple words on the signs carried by many of more than 1, 300 striking Memphis sanitation workersnearly all blackduring the spring of 1968. The slide toward a strike had begun on February 1, 1968, when two workers seeking shelter during a torrential rainstorm hid inside the rear of a garbage truck. They were crushed to death when a switch was accidentally thrown. The city refused to compensate the victims families, and other workers were infuriated. That tragedy was compounded a few days later when, in the midst of another storm, twenty-two black sewer workers were sent home without pay. The white supervisors who had ordered them home went to work after the weather cleared and were paid for a full day. Following a formal protest, the black employees received only two hours pay. That prompted a work stoppage on Lincolns birthday, Monday, February 12. The demands were straightforward: All garbage and sewer workers wanted a new contract that guaranteed a fifty-cent-an-hour increase and the right to have their union dues deducted directly from their paychecks.

The strike would have had a different history if Memphis had not had Henry Loeb III as mayor. The forty-five-year-old Loeb, who was six-five with a booming voice, had been elected only five weeks earlier. He was an heir to one of the citys wealthiest Jewish families, and had converted to Episcopalianism just after being sworn in. An opinionated and stubborn man, Loeb, while not a racist, had a plantation view of blackshe would see they were taken care of since he knew what was best for them. That attitude ensured that in the recent election, forty-nine of every fifty blacks voted against him.

Now threatened with the sanitation strike, Loeb adopted a hard position. Since a strike of municipal workers was illegal, he refused to negotiate unless they returned to work, and in no case would he allow a paycheck deduction to the union, since that meant he would be the first major Southern mayor to recognize a black municipal union.

The day after the sanitation workers walked off their jobs, officials of the national union began arriving to lend their support. Loeb announced midweek that if workers did not return to work the following day, he would fire them. On Thursday, only four days after the walkout started, Loeb began hiring scabs, and with a police escort they made limited attempts at picking up garbage.

The racial overtones were evident from the start. The bulk of workers were black, and most white Memphians had little sympathy for their cause. Initially, the only support came from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and local black pastors, led by James M. Lawson. Many of the strikers were members of Lawsons Centenary Methodist Church. Lawson himself was a friend of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., having met him shortly after the successful 1956 Montgomery bus boycott. Thirty-nine years old, he had served three years as a missionary in India, where he became a follower of Ghandis principles of nonviolence, and had spent thirteen months in prison for refusing to fight in the Korean War. Lawson, together with the Reverend H. Ralph Jackson, called for a meeting between Loeb and the Memphis Ministers Association. Loeb refused to talk to them.

On Friday, February 23, more than a thousand strikers and supporters crammed a meeting of the city councils Public Works Committee. The rumor was that the committee had decided to recognize the union and approve the paycheck deduction, but, once the meeting started, the city council dodged the issue and threw the strike, as an administrative matter, back to Loeb. The reaction was swift and furious, with strike leaders calling for an impromptu march down Main Street to Mason Temple, strike headquarters. It was the first defiant black march in Memphis history. The police shoved the men to the right side of the street, four abreast. After several blocks trouble started. A police car came too close to the crowd and ran over a womans foot. In a moment, young black men were rocking the squad car. Riot police, clad in blue helmets and gas masks, then swarmed into the crowds, indiscriminately macing and clubbing protestors.

That night, strike leaders met and elected a strategy committee, Community On the Move for Equality (COME). Lawson was chairman, Jackson vice chairman, and Jesse Epps, an international union representative, an adviser. The next day, COME presented a five-point program to all 150 of the citys black ministers and their congregations. The program included fund-raising campaigns and rallies in churches, a boycott of all downtown businesses as well as companies with the Loeb name, and two daily marches through downtown Memphis, the first for strikers, families, and supporters, and the second for students.

When the police had attacked and maced the Memphis demonstrators, Martin Luther King, Jr., was in Miami, at a ministers retreat sponsored by the Ford Foundation. One of those attending was the Reverend Samuel Billy Kyles, a tall, thin, charismatic pastor of Memphiss Monumental Baptist Church. Kyles, in his early thirties, was a prominent Memphis pastor who, together with Lawson and Jackson, helped form public opinion in much of the citys black community.

The Miami police begged Martin not to leave the hotel because there were so many threats against him, recalls Kyles.

When Kyles called home, he learned about the police attack on the demonstrators. His own seven-year-old daughter was among those maced. Later that day, I mentioned it off-handedly to Martin, that they had a march in Memphis and had been attacked. Maybe you have to come down and help us out. I may do that, he said.

By coincidence, a few days after Kyles had spoken to King, Lawson proposed that prominent national figures be invited weekly to rally the strikers and their

Most of Kings energies were going toward the Poor Peoples Campaign. His announcement the previous November that he wanted waves of the nations poor and disinherited to descend on Washington, D.C., and stay there until the government responded with reforms had already caused many whites to fear that the summer would be racked by major civil disturbances.

However, the sanitation strike seemed a clear-cut issue of right or wrong, and King and his staff relented, finally shifting a March 18 meeting of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) executive committee from Jackson, Mississippi, to Memphis.

The strike, meanwhile, remained at a standstill. A huge white banner NOT BY MIGHT , NOT BY POWER , SAITH THE LORD OF HOSTS , BUT BY MY SPIRIT was draped behind the podium. King, a rousing orator who was best before large crowds, was in rare form that night. Time and again, he had the crowd on its feet. By the end of his talk, the three shiny garbage cans on the stage near him had over $5,000 in contributions for the strikers.

Martin, we are having daily marches, Lawson said to King on the podium. Why dont you come back and lead a big march? You see how they receive you. It would be terrific!

Lawson had approached King at the right moment. Reveling in the excitement of the tumultuous reception he had just received, King checked with two of his closest advisers, Andrew Young and Ralph Abernathy, both of whom agreed it was worth returning. He said it was like the old days, says Kyles. It really energized him.