Ultimately the consensus was, Let’s make a statement supporting a new trial. We talked about Marcus Wayne Chenault, Big Mama’s
murderer, how my grandfather forgave him and made us see the logic of it; how it was Christian; whether Ray did it or not,
he deserved a trial. If Daddy was living, he would have forgiven him. He forgave the woman who stabbed him in the chest at
a Harlem department store and almost took his life. We didn’t know at that point what the outcome would be. We hadn’t seen
evidence, but we had heard that new evidence had come to light. We said we’d hold a press conference to announce we supported
a new trial. That made the
New York Times.
So when I got back, it was February. That’s when I met with Pepper—me, my cousin Isaac, and Phil. Initially I was skeptical.
I didn’t know Pepper from Adam. But once he told me face-to-face about his relationship with Dad, how he had admired him,
how they were friends (authenticated by Mother), and he produced photos of him and my father being friendly and cordial with
each other, then told me about why he did it, represented Ray, why you never hear how dedicated Pepper was to Daddy’s cause,
only that he served as Ray’s lawyer in the late ’80s; about Pepper and Ralph Abernathy visiting Ray, Uncle Ralph having asked
him to meet with Ray, how they concluded he wasn’t the triggerman. They weren’t sure whether or how he was involved, but they
were convinced he didn’t act alone.
Pepper made it clear he had this passion to, I don’t want to say to avenge Daddy, but he did tell me he felt guilty that he
somehow contributed to my father’s death by getting him interested in the war, when Pepper wrote for
Ramparts
about Vietnam; he felt this led to Daddy’s interest in the war, to his making his antiwar statement on April 4, 1967, at
Harlem’s Riverside Church in his “A Time to Break Silence” speech, and to Daddy’s assassination a year to the day after that.
There is no doubt that Pepper felt like he had to resolve his inner conflict. I could relate to that.
It was 1978 when Pepper first went with Ralph Abernathy to visit Ray. He said he had no intentions of representing Ray, had
decided to do so only if he became convinced Ray had been unknowingly involved in the King assassination.
Jerry Ray, James Earl Ray’s brother, reached out to Pepper, saying Ray had so many lawyers because he felt he was set up.
After conducting a private investigation over a ten-year period, Pepper concluded in 1988 that Ray had indeed gotten a raw
deal.
“Don’t take my word,” Pepper said to me. “You have access to everything I’ve got. You have that right as family of the victim.
Talk to any of the witnesses that I’ve interviewed. Read the research and the documents. Don’t take my word. Meet these people.
Meet Ray. Form your own judgment.”
With my family’s blessing—particularly my mother’s and Yolanda’s—I decided to get in there and feel it for myself. There’s
something about looking another person in the eyes and spending time with him and getting to know him as I did with Pepper;
there were brief encounters with some of the other particulars. This was no bunch of actors to me. There are things you must
intuit, feel. That was my meat, intuiting human actions. I’d done it with figuring out the music. I’d done it when I worked
in an environment as a corrections officer for almost two years, where day in and day out I was around people who for a living
lied, cheated, stole, robbed; I knew the con vibe.
I got the feeling Pepper was being straight with me.
I then met with Ray. I needed to see—and feel—for myself. I needed to look at it coldly, unemotionally, as a cop would, as
a detective would. I tried to assume that role.
* * *
The convicted assassin of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was running out of time. His liver was quitting, and the Tennessee
courts wouldn’t give him even a single day of medical furlough from the state pen near Nashville. But before the end, Ray
found some comfort. From the King family itself. Oh, it must’ve been deep for James Earl Ray to shake hands with me, with
the mirror image of the man they say Ray last saw inside the crosshairs of a .30-06 caliber rifle. Ray’s rifle had been tested
by the congressional investigating committee for evidence to spark a new trial. Results were “inconclusive.” That Remington
rifle may have killed Ray better than it ever killed my father. The last request for testing of the rifle for evidence wound
up in Judge Joe Brown’s courtroom in Memphis. Pundits would discredit Brown because he starred in one of the TV judge shows;
but he was on the bench in Memphis for a long time before that, and was respected. I knew because I asked around among Memphis
police. I had to see Ray to confront all of this, so it wouldn’t keep being relived, not only in my nightmares, but also in
the national nightmare. For my brother and sisters. All of us. Without Ray, there might never be an answer to the question
defining the work of even the youngest of the hip-hop nation-inside-a-nation.
The question is: Who shot Martin Luther King, Jr? And why?
Did Ray do it alone? Fine. Just show me how he did it alone, so I can sleep at night. Show me that nobody else had anything
to do with it, so I can sleep at night. Show me, and I’ll believe.
Is that why I was so polite when I met Ray in a Nashville medical detention ward in March of 1997? No. That’s just the way
I was raised. No different than my grandfather was with Marcus Wayne Chenault. “Thank you for letting me impose on your time,”
I said to a desiccated Ray, and yes, some people later said I spoke to James Earl Ray like he was green-lighting movies over
at Warner Bros. or something. But I would have said it that way to the Devil himself. “I just want to ask for the record—did
you kill my father?” I asked.
Guess what Ray said then. “No,” claimed the sixty-nine-year-old convict.
“There’s something about looking another person in the eye and asking him a question,” I told a small contingent of press
right after the meeting. “Spiritually speaking, you yourself can then say, ‘Yes… I personally feel this now… and… I think…
I believe this man is innocent.’”
Then who was responsible, and why? The press asked questions that I usually liked to ask. And there was a reason I said what
I did to the press. Most people think I was just humming a script I’d heard from Pepper: “Army Intelligence, CIA, FBI…” Could’ve
thrown in the Klan, Memphis police, Ray. Could be any of them. Could be none of them.
When I met with Ray, this was the sense I got: he was a petty criminal who had done stupid things. He didn’t have much common
sense and said as much. “Look, I ain’t gonna tell you I’m totally innocent here. I did mess up and make mistakes. But I did
not shoot Dr. King.”
A guy who can take somebody out at two hundred feet with one shot is a cold-blooded marksman and killer. I saw evidence that
when James Earl Ray was in the military, he couldn’t hit a target from a hundred feet with an M1 rifle. So how in the name
of God did he hit a moving target in the neck from two hundred feet away in a cramped position with one shot from an uncalibrated
.30-06?
When the cameras left, Ray and I spoke privately; I wanted him to know we were trying to get the new trial, get the truth
out, whatever it was; we wanted him to have his day in court, and if on that day he was proven guilty or exonerated, so be
it, either way. My family deserved to know and needed to know. People needed to know. I asked if he knew of any other people
involved, did he have any information he wanted to share with me that was not common knowledge. He kept saying you need to
open up the files, sealed FBI files and congressional records. He said he thought we’d find out a lot in them. It was a known
fact that the FBI was looking to set up my father and in fact did fabricate things about him and harass him. So I don’t know
how much the records would reveal the truth, because I think the real nitty-gritty is buried. That’s not the kind of stuff
you’re going to put in writing. He sighed deeply. It was almost like he didn’t even care anymore. “Look, I’m tired of defending
myself and saying I didn’t do it. Go look at the records and then you’ll see.” It was almost like he didn’t want to speak
for himself anymore; I got the impression he wasn’t going to willingly take the fall. I felt he was telling the truth.
His thing was a liver transplant. He needed to get one done. They weren’t letting him out.
He felt if he had a little more time, health-wise, there was a good chance that he could get his trial. Another thing that
struck me was that he really just seemed like almost a model prisoner in the sense that if somebody did something wrong to
him, it was almost like he would just keep it to himself. I got this sense that he didn’t want to cause anybody any problems
and he didn’t want any problems. I almost felt sorry for him. In a strange sort of way I really felt for the guy; I felt like
we were both victims. I told him that. “We’re caught in the same web.”
If he didn’t do it and he’s been in jail for almost thirty years for a crime he didn’t commit, that’s victimhood. The general
reaction of people afterward was: “You mean to tell me he went all the way up there and met with this guy and came out convinced
he was innocent? What a sucker.” This was around the same time of the California mass suicide that coincided with the appearance
of the Hale-Bopp comet, where everyone was wearing black clothes and Nike sneakers, out near San Diego. Because of that incident,
CNN broke away from me and was going back and forth between the reporting on the mass suicide and me; CNN covered it live,
then they broke to California; so they caught me meeting with Ray live, but they didn’t do the pre–press conference, so what
the average person saw was me coming out of this meeting and saying I thought he didn’t do it. Commentators, out of context,
were giving this impression, “Well, isn’t that amazing?” Just go in and meet this guy for lunch and suddenly he’s innocent.
Snide. But in the press conference after the meeting, I explained I’d already seen evidence I couldn’t really discuss in detail,
but that I was convinced not just by the encounter. I was convinced before I met him.
I felt the guy got a bum rap. I felt he was a patsy.
My mother and I went to Memphis in February of 1997 to testify before Judge Joe Brown in an attempt to bring a rifle testing
procedure into court, in hopes of sparking a new trial for Ray; Ray was hoping to spark his own release from prison so he
could get a liver transplant. I did some walking around and thinking in Memphis. I had always hated going there, ever since
I was twelve and thirteen and going to the sleep disorder clinic at Baptist Memorial Hospital, all the way until I visited
the Lorraine Motel in the early ’90s.
Judge Joe Brown was pushing for the rifle test to happen, but there were a lot of appeals, and the DA was fighting it, the
state was fighting it, but my mother and I went anyway, and testified why we believed this should happen; essentially, if
there was a possibility of finding out the truth, it was worth doing. For a minute it had people on pins and needles because
it was looking like those tests might prove something. Then there was a glitch in the system; instructions the judge gave
about cleaning the rifle and prepping it were not followed to a tee, therefore they had to request another testing. That’s
where everything derailed, because the state fought the new test to the point where the higher court overruled Brown and would
not allow a second round of testing at a site in Rhode Island. Every time you fire a rifle, a metal residue is left in the
barrel. Grooved markings make each bullet like a fingerprint. Each barrel and each bullet has a certain “fingerprint,” and
leave a certain fingerprint on each other, altered slightly each time the gun is fired, altered to the extent that the next
bullet you fire in succession is not getting the same print because residue is getting thicker so grooves are less pronounced.
Judge Brown’s remedy: a liquid solution you can use that will actually remove residue and allow you to get an accurate reading.
With all of that intrigue, Brown, with all his experience, felt that this was not the rifle that killed our father. I don’t
know all the reasons, but he had informed data that would come out in trial.
To be honest, we felt very awkward this whole time, but that was a snowball effect. I’d gotten letters from people. One began,
“I’ve been a silent supporter for almost thirty years. I’ve been in silent sympathy with your family and I’ve been wanting
to say these things and get them off my chest.” This person happened to be ex-CIA. “I’ve been there and done that, and I just
want you to know you’re on the right track. I can tell you for a fact, Ray did not do it.”
On and on. Letters. Notes. Phone calls explaining how the process works in terms of setting someone up, how a person can be
moved around the country, not know he’s being controlled; movements documented, so a person can be framed. When you start
getting information like that, what do you do? I’m not an investigator, yet when we talked to the Justice Department, they
didn’t want to deal with it. What do you do? All we could do was try to get the authorities to give it a hearing. I never
heard of a case where the authorities say, “We don’t want it because the case is thirty years old and it would open a can
of worms.” I thought there was no statute of limitations on murder. But the assistant district attorney in Memphis told me,
“We don’t need to open this; it’s messy.” But I believe that until you deal with it, it’ll stay messy. I was walking around
feeling, “We’re the victim’s family, you’re the DA, representing our rights, and you’re going against us?”
The assistant DA and I went on
Nightline.
Ted Koppel asked him, “Why don’t you just give the man a new trial? If you’re so sure that he did it, why are you denying
him a trial?” The DA said this much to me, off camera: “If we open this back up, we would have to let Ray walk.”
Television hurt as much as it helped. Pepper appeared on the ABC show
Turning Point
and was ambushed by host Forrest Sawyer. In
Orders to Kill,
based on information he received from former Green Berets, Pepper offered a scenario of the involvement of military personnel
in the killing of my father. This account concerned a leader of a special unit that was supposedly in Memphis the day of the
assassination. Pepper’s investigators told him that this guy was dead. In fact, he had been convicted of negligent homicide,
served time, and then he relocated to Central America, which is apparently why Pepper’s investigators could not find him.
But he turned up live on
Turning Point,
and Forrest Sawyer asked Pepper what he had to say to that, and Pepper could only say what he had been told by his investigators.
The guy denied all. But of course he would.