Table of Contents
THE MUG SHOTS
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA, 09/03/1958
These are more than just two mug shots. On the previous page, Times Don Cravens photographs Martin Luther King Jr. from above, while at the same time the police photographer snaps him from the front. To gauge the difference between the two shots in distance and in tone, compare the placement of his hands and legs, the posture of his head and shoulders, his elegant clothing, his stately air, his focused gaze, his manly pride with the mug shot in the foreground. The time and the booking number are the same, but the perspective has changed.
Reverend King was arrested on September 3, 1958, in Montgomery, Alabama, for failing to obey an officer and was released on one-hundred-dollar bail. The mug shot disappeared for forty-six years. It resurfaced in the summer of 2004, when it was discovered at the home of a recently deceased sheriff. A note was added to the mug shot that changes its meaning. With a blue ballpoint pen, someone etched the word dead and the dateApril 4, 1968on the picture.
Leader of the Civil Rights movement in America and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, King was killed at the age of thirty-nine in Memphis, Tennessee. The first witnesses described the assassin as trim, white, about thirty-five years old, wearing a dark suit and a white shirt. A block away from the assassination, the police found a .30-06 caliber Remington rifle.
King was hit in the neck as he was talking with friends outside his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Among them was a musician, Ben Branch, another was Reverend Jesse Jackson, who, in subsequent decades, would try to unite Kings human, religious, and political legacy with varying success.
King was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers strike that had led to violence. After he won the Nobel Prize, his wife had declared, we have lived with the threat of death always present.
Two months later, James Earl Ray, a common criminal known for his hatred toward blacks, was arrested in London. He confessed, recanted three days later, but was sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison. For twenty-nine years, until his death from cirrhosis of the liver, Ray continued to profess his innocence.
A few months before the homicide, the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, wanted to prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Over the years, Kings family has become convinced that Ray is innocent.
ANGELA DAVIS
NEW YORK CITY, 10/13/1970
A pop icon. A political icon. Beauty of ideas. Beauty of the body. In this dance of the personal and the political, of the sex symbol and the role model, nobody comes close to Angela Davis except maybe Ernesto Che Guevara.
Along with her mug shot, the police were wise enough to include a photograph from Daviss daily life, where shes showing off her classic afro. In both hemispheres of the world, unlikely perms cropped up on left-leaning women.
She was born in Alabama on January 26, 1944. The world started to hear about her in 1968 when she was fired for being a Communist from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she taught philosophy. Accused of assisting in a Black Panthers kidnapping of a San Rafael judge during which four people were murdered, she was arrested in a Manhattan motel on October 13, 1970. After an international campaign, she was acquitted in 1972.
During the trial, she admitted to being involved with George Jackson, the black communist leader who was killed in a California prison on August 21, 1971.
Today, Angela Yvonne Davis is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
JANIS JOPLIN
TAMPA, FLORIDA, 11/17/1969
In 1962, at the University of Texas at Austin, where she was studying art, she was voted Ugliest Man on Campus. Janis Joplin was nineteen and, for her, this was nothing new. In Port Arthur, Texas, where she was born and raised, things had been the same. She moved to San Francisco in 1966 and achieved success in 1968 with her album Cheap Thrills. No white woman had ever had a voice like that, like sandpaper soaked in heroin, sex, and Southern Comfort, the bittersweet liquor that nourished her spirit and her voice. In November 1969, she was arrested (and released) for verbally assaulting a police officer. She belonged to a generation of young people who insult their parents, march against the government, consume vast quantities of drugs, screw everything that moves, writes Charles Shaar Murray, Jimi Hendrix biographer. On October 3, 1970, she recorded Buried Alive in the Blues, her last song.
Jopliln started using heroin again in mid-September 1970. She was staying at the Landmark in Los Angeles, which was known as a hotel for pushers. On the evening of October 4, she was waiting for two lovers, one male and one female, but remained alone. She shot up, went to talk to the hotel clerk, and was found dead eighteen hours later. The ugliest man on campus, the greatest female singer in the history of rock n roll, died from a heroin overdosethe first in a long line of rock starson October 5, 1970.
JIM MORRISON
TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA, 09/28/1963
Under James Douglas Morrisonwho was born in Melbourne, Florida, on December 8, 1943, and died in Paris on July 3, 1971the FBI lists ten arrests. Most of the ninety-six-page file remains undisclosed.
One report from March 4, 1969, states: Morrisons program lasted one hour during which time he sang one song and for the remainder he grunted, groaned, gyrated and gestured in order to provoke chaos.
This mug shot captures the future Doors frontmans first arrest. The only one whose reason is still unknown.
BERKELEY STUDENTS
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, 12/03/1964
The 68 revolution started yesterday. Yesterday is December 2, 1964, the same day that Beatle Ringo Starr had his tonsils removed. Students at UC Berkeley had been in a state of unrest since October 1 when a student was arrested for distributing pamphlets.
Berkeley president Clark Kerrs vision of a university didnt include politics; for him, the university was a factory that filled empty heads, shaped them, and made them work for the system.
The day before the group mug shot pictured below, 1,000 students gathered in Berkeleys Sproul Hall. Similar sit-ins occurred in hundreds of other meeting halls. And suddenly, 68 was born.
