Play Book Tag discussion

I was not particularly interested in the character of Martin Luther King’s killer, James Earl Ray, but I trusted Sides to make the story of his crime and manhunt interesting and a means to elucidate the history of this time. I was already batting a 1,000 with three five-star reads among his books (Blood and Thunder, Ghost Soldiers, and In the Kingdom of Ice). His genius lies in telling an historical story like a novel, conjuring up characters with personal details and putting their dramatic actions in the context of social trends in a way that elucidates aspects of the big picture about human nature.

It’s painful how vulnerable we are on the safety of our public leaders in the face of random twists in the psyche of a rare individual. It’s almost easier to accommodate to the killers being part of a conspiracy of true believers and adherence to political causes. If a fanatic or opportunist cabal is behind the murder of our heroes, then we have more of a target for our anger. If a targeted assassination or mass killing of our people arises from insanity or hermetic obsession, it’s more like the empty “why” of a traffic accident or lightning strike. How could a nobody like Oswald have the capacity to pull off the JFK assassination and change the course of a nation? As Sides lays out for us, James Earl Ray was another such nobody. Someone who drifted from one low-paying job to another, got hooked on the faster rate of pay from robbery, and eventually got caught and served some time in prison.

The psychohistory of Ray is not a draw for me, and nor is it for the killer of Robert Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan, later that fateful, depressing year of 1968. But I did get a surprising lift out of his craftiness in escaping prison and successfully staying on the lam for over a year. If in this narrative we are going reopening the wound we got then of losing our best hope for achieving peaceful race relations and a key voice for ending the Vietnam War, let it be to some kind of mastermind. The quirky aspects of his personality that Sides shares puts a human face on the killer, which somehow makes it less of a challenge than to deal with a total maniac. That he was obsessed with self-help schemes (a book on personal “cybernetics” always at his side), ballroom dancing, and dressing well while living in hovels relieves me by suggesting evil acts do not arise from supreme devils (in sort of a “Sopranos” effect or takeaway from a Coen brothers’ production).

The story of Martin Luther King in his last months and retrospective on his accomplishments was a valuable part of my reading experience. I didn’t have much curiosity going into this book, as I figured I knew enough about the man and how he deserved a Nobel Prize for applying Gandhi’s lessons to the institutions of segregation and disenfranchisement of blacks. But I was fascinated to learn how he related to and inspired his contentious inner circle, sustained the constant surveillance, harassment, and dirty tricks of Hoover’s FBI, and pursued in his last year the rights of all American poor in a mission beyond that of black civil rights. The reason he was visiting Memphis was for a peaceful demonstration in support of a garbage workers’ strike, involving mostly black workers in very low-paying jobs under dangerous, unhealthy conditions. It was so easy for Ray to find out about the motel where King’s party usually stayed and set up shop with a telescopic rifle in a flophouse with a line of sight on the balcony entry of King. He would have gotten away clean if he had planned his getaway better and not been forced to leave his bag with the rifle and other belongings.

The courage of King to knowingly face the dangers of his mission is pretty awe inspiring. Sides puts it succintly:
I believe King anticipated James Earl Ray. The night before his death he spoke of the threats that were out there “some of our sick white brothers.” Like Robert Johnson waiting for his hellhound to come, King had spent much of his career looking over his shoulder for some deranged redneck to take him. If there was ever a sick white brother, Ray was it.

It was an education to go behind the scenes with his friends and family in the aftermath. Coretta’s courage and magnanimity. Ralph Abernathy trying to fill his shoes as the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Jesse Jackson presenting a false story to the media of being at King’s side at the end. Andrew Young befuddling the FBI by stating “We aren’t so much concerned with who killed Martin, as to with what killed him.” King’s circle working together to continue the march in Memphis despite the riots that exploded all around the country (about 50 people died). Abernathy leading the “Poor People’s Campaign”, which was capped by 3,000 representatives of the poor setting up camp in the National Mall for months of protest of unjust disparities in their conditions.

King’s funeral was an event of world significance. So much hope for America was dashed and darkened with his death. Though President Johnson had allied with King in accomplishing major civil rights legislation, he refrained from attending the funeral, which Sides surmises was because he “could not quite bring himself to honor the man who had so brazenly undermined him on Vietnam.” All who attended couldn’t help be plagued by all the extreme possibilities about those responsible for the assassination:
Along the funeral route, angry mutterings could be heard. Johnson had done it. Wallace had done it. The Klan, the White Citizen’s Council, the Memphis Police Department. The Mafia, the CIA. The National Security Agency, the generals who ran the war King condemned. In a society already marinated in conspiracy, it was only natural that every form of collusion would be bruited about.

Reverend King’s persona for the nation had such a moral force that his death assumed mythi overtones according Sides’ insight:
…he was a black Moses, parting the waters, leading his people on their great exodus out of Egypt. It was an image he consciously and repeatedly invoked even in his last speech in Memphis—“I may not get there with you but we as a people will get to the Promised Land.” With his assassination, however, the analogy suddenly shifted to the New Testament: King had become a black Jesus, crucified (during the Easter season, no less) for telling society radical truths. If this new analogy was to carry any biblical resonance, then the entire apparatus of the state and culture must be compliant in the Messiah’s death—King Heron, Pontius Pilate, the Levites and the Pharisees, the long arm of the Roman Empire. As Coretta herself said, “There were many fingers on the rifle.”

An irony of the tale is that King’s nemesis, the FBI (Hoover pegged him as a dangerous degenerate commie), did a marvelous job resolving the case. They building on a trail out of small clues and eventually worked their way through the layers of his various identities and residences (I won’t spoil that fun, but a laundry marker from time spent in L.A. was critical at one point). He was such a loner and vagabond, it took them two months to catch up with him. By that time he had used a fake passport to travel to and hide in Portugal, Toronto, Montreal, and London, and was about to head to Rhodesia by way of Belgium when he was caught (he thought to work as a mercenary for their white supremacist regime).

In the same way we reach to blame ISIS when someone voluntarily adopts their beliefs and commits an atrocity, we can’t help wonder how much the hate rant of Ray’s hero Governor George Wallace of Alabama can be blamed for empowering Ray to act:
He didn’t literally say “Go kill King” yet Wallace and other segregationists created an inflamed environment in which a confused but also ambitious man like Ray could think it was permissible perhaps, even noble, to murder King. The signals Ray was picking up enabled him to believe that society would smile on his crime.

This kind of thinking has obvious parallels to the escalation of both hate speech and hate crimes in Western nations today. Ultimately, Sides comes round to a complex answer for why Ray killed King:

I’ve come to think that he was guided not by a single motivation but a cluster of submotivations that spun in the blender of his unsettled mind. Yes, he was a racist. Yes, he wanted money. Yes, he was mentally ill—his skewed thoughts intensified by a lifetime of using amphetamines. Yes, he loved the chase, and never felt more alive than when he was running from authority. But what really motivated him, I’m convinced, was a desire for recognition. Herein lies a paradox: though he spent his criminal career striving for anonymity, he desperately wanted the world to know he existed. He longed to do something bold and big and lasting. Sadly, like so many before him, he realized the best way to leave his mark was to gun down an international figure who was young, eloquent, and charismatic.
… Ray is just one of a long line of American nobodies who’ve left their permanent stain on history.

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James Earl Ray, the nobody who almost got away.