Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination was quick on the heels of Daddy’s, not to mention heightened tensions in the country, riots,
burning in nearly every city, major and minor, after Daddy was killed; a dissolving hope, a swelling of the ranks of groups
like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, or the Nation of Islam, the Blackstone Rangers, or Black P-Stone
Nation in Chicago, Crips and Bloods in L.A. George Clinton and Parliament singing “(I Wanna) Testify” could not lift the mood
for long. The feeling was, no matter who is involved, what can you do? What recourse do you have? You felt helpless to do
anything else but think about it, roll it over in your mind, try and figure it out. Suffer in silence.
Even if Ray did it, did he do it alone? The force of will behind this murder—did he possess that? Was he that brave, that
resourceful, to escape under the noses of law enforcement without any help? Was he competent enough to make that shot? Anyone
behind him, or with him, we’d never be able to find out. Even if we did… how do you fight a feeling? How can you change what’s
in people’s hearts? That took a man like Daddy. And he was dead. That’s what the world and we lost. I felt hollowed out inside
about it, but I didn’t know it at first. If asked, I said and I believed I was fine. But it also became for my own soul’s
sake that I tried to find out all I could about why and how Daddy was killed. My sisters and our mother had looked into my
eyes and asked me to try. So I did.
Somehow, my logic must have escaped scholars. They can interpret Shaw, Nietzsche, or Churchill, somehow, but they can’t understand
me. I find it all hard to believe, that looking into one’s own father’s murder seems somehow illogical.
Leading up to the civil trial, in the late fall of the year 1999, people asked me, “Why look into it?” The most innocent and
well-intentioned people said this, as well as editorial columnists and scholar-authors with books and their own interests
to protect and, maybe, I don’t know, axes to grind, although I don’t know why anyone would grind an ax on my family’s backs.
Many people said I was wrong for looking into the death of my father. Was that going to stop me? Are those the people I saw
when I looked in the mirror? Or did I see Mother, Daddy, Yoki, Marty, Bunny?
That’s who I answered to in the end. It was as simple as our mental health.
Before he died in 1984, my grandfather Martin Luther King, Sr., patriarch of our clan, said, “In my heart, I never believed
Ray was alone in his plan.” And then he wept. And then he died. So that’s part of my legacy too. I’d disappointed him. I’d
never heard the Call. This seemed like the least I could do. For years, for many reasons, I had averted my eyes. I could stand
to do that no longer.
Shortly before the Jowers trial began, the verdict from our appeal in the CBS case came in; we had won a reversal in federal
appeals court. The attorneys called Mon Ami. She came over and knocked on the door. She said, “We won. You will not be the
sibling or heir that lost your father’s copyrights. You did what he would have wanted.” I hoped that this legal victory would
bode well for the new legal journey we were about to embark on.
With William F. Pepper serving as trial counsel, we, the family of Martin Luther King, Jr., as heirs of the victim, filed
a wrongful death suit, a civil suit against Loyd Jowers, the Memphis owner/operator of a place called Jim’s Grill on South
Main Street, one block due west and upland from the Lorraine Motel, adjacent to Canipe’s Amusements. Jim’s Grill and Canipe’s
were first-floor establishments. Over them was the flophouse and back window from which Ray is said to have taken a single
shot on April 4, 1968, that changed the landscape of America and five lives in particular, those of Coretta, Yolanda, Martin
III, and Bernice. Me too.
Our main purpose in filing this suit was to get to the truth by hearing testimony under oath and having evidence submitted
into court records to create an official permanent record of what had occurred around this tragedy. We were concerned that
with the passage of over thirty years since my father’s death, many relevant individuals would die without having their knowledge
officially recorded. In other words, we believed it was now or never. We only sought a ceremonial $100 damage amount in the
trial because we were more interested in getting the truth than in getting money.
By this time, Loyd Jowers was an aging, frail, seventy-three-year-old. He bore a resemblance to Byron De La Beckwith, who,
thirty-five years after the fact, was convicted of killing Medgar Evers in Mississippi in 1963. Jowers was not accused of
shooting anyone. But in his dotage he claimed to ABC TV reporter Sam Donaldson that he’d helped carry out the King assassination,
and admitted it to William F. Pepper and to Andy Young, both times in my presence. Jowers contended that his place, Jim’s
Grill, was used as a staging area of sorts. The .30-06 rifle, supposedly the weapon Ray used, was found in the foyer of Canipe’s
Amusements on South Main, close to Jowers’s grill and a few hundred yards from the muddy chop of the Mississippi River.
In the 1993 interview with Sam Donaldson, Jowers claimed to have been in on it, and said the murderer who handed him the still-smoking
murder weapon was not James Earl Ray. Pepper himself had received information from army informants that two teams of army
snipers were in the area, perhaps as backups to a contract killer. All this confusion could have been avoided, maybe, if the
congressional committee hadn’t, in 1979, sealed all its documents regarding the case for fifty years. Fifty years. That would
be 2029. By then, Bernice, the youngest, will be over sixty.
We approached President Clinton about creating a truth and reconciliation commission, similar to the one created in South
Africa to investigate crimes by the government against its people. The commission would have subpoena power and the ability
to grant immunity from prosecution in exchange for the truth. Since our government had been implicated, we felt it was very
important to have an independent, nongovernmental body established. But President Clinton turned it over to the Department
of Justice. We wanted the truth, not retributive justice. We had lost in the criminal proceeding in Memphis, where we tried
to get the rifle tested when Ray was seeking a trial. We could no longer pursue a criminal trial since Ray had died in 1998.
Therefore a civil suit was the only other legal remedy we could employ to get at the truth. So starting Monday, November 15,
1999, there was a proceeding in Shelby County (Memphis), Tennessee, and some seventy witnesses would testify, including Andy
Young and Rev. James Lawson, one of Daddy’s friends and the leader of the Memphis protest back in 1968. All this testimony
went into the record so that historians who want to research it will have an official record of these versions of what happened.
We were not seeking monetary damages. We were not in it to try and bankrupt anybody or gain publicity. We were only seeking
truth. To have Jowers offer to put into the record his information pertinent to this case. Jowers never had been officially
interviewed by the authorities. He was written off as not credible. He said that if he got immunity from prosecution, he’d
tell all he knew. He was never offered immunity. The Department of Justice would have to investigate, follow up, which we
believed it didn’t want to do. People were getting old, like Jowers. In a way he was a more important witness even than Ray.
Ray didn’t have to know anything. Jowers was in his seventies, not in good health. His memory was good, but physically he
had deteriorated, as had others who were close to the—what to call it?—the… event? This was the time to get every scrap of
firsthand knowledge down.
At the beginning, Mother, Martin, and myself rotated in and out of the courtroom. We all wanted to be at the opening, but
Bernice and Yolanda couldn’t be there. So we took turns. My mother stayed through Tuesday, Martin came in Wednesday; I was
there until Thanksgiving—they had a short week. The following week, Yolanda was there. I can still see her, dressed in dark
clothing, huddled against the wet chill in a spitting rain outside the Memphis courthouse, being interviewed by Ricki Kleiman
on Court TV, looking so very vulnerable to me. Seeing her there steeled me against all the doubters who questioned this course.
If only to make my sister feel whole…
Judge James E. Swearingen handled the proceeding. It was a circuit court trial. He felt it should be over by Christmas. The
jury was sworn in; it couldn’t have been more racially balanced—six blacks and six whites. Ordinary people. Lewis Garrison
represented Jowers. Swearingen was an African American and well-respected among black Memphians, although I wondered if he
would be affected by what had happened to Judge Joe Brown when he had the rifle ballistics hearing in his court. Judge Brown
took it on the chin for even trying to hear evidence then. Much would be made of what Judge Swearingen allowed testimony-wise
in this trial, and there was the somehow built-in skepticism by some in the media, about our credibility as plaintiffs largely
because we had retained Pepper. But I thought Judge Swearingen wanted to let the witnesses speak.
I would be among the last to testify. Mother was among the first on the stand. You could see the respect and empathy in the
eyes of the jurors. She has maintained her dignity a long time. I felt protective toward her.
Within three days, the courtroom was nearly empty. Court TV pulled its gavel-to-gavel coverage. This was no O. J. Simpson
trial. The media did not seem to want the public to hear the evidence, so there was no live TV coverage when Andy Young took
the stand. Uncle Andy was questioned by Pepper, then cross-examined by Garrison, who, by the way, said he agreed with “80
percent of [the Kings’] case.” Andy Young, without wavering, testified that he met with Jowers for four hours a year earlier.
“This was a man who was very sick, and who wanted to go to confession to get his soul right,” Uncle Andy said to the jury.
He said Jowers told him some Memphis police officers and federal agents met at Jim’s Grill several days before the assassination,
and the group included Marrell McCollough, who had been hired by the CIA later, in 1974. Uncle Andy also said that Jowers
told him “a Mafia figure” gave him money to hand over to a man who delivered a rifle to Jim’s Grill before the assassination.
Jowers told Uncle Andy that he was in the back of the grill when my father was shot by a man hidden in the bushes (the area
cleared and cut down the night after the assassination) and this man, a Memphis police lieutenant, handed the smoking rifle
to Jowers through a back door. Jowers told me the same story. He said his place was used as a staging area.
Jowers was not present for Andy Young’s testimony. He had been in the court for the first couple of days, but his health was
declining and the long days took a toll. I watched him sitting in his threadbare suit and droopy white socks and tried to
imagine him young and hateful. Now he was preparing to meet his Maker. Trying to get right. After Uncle Andy stepped down,
Pepper promised the jury he’d play a two-hour tape documenting Uncle Andy’s meeting with Jowers that next Monday.
I listened to Judge Joe Brown testify that next Monday, November 23, 1999. As noted, Judge Brown was a criminal court judge
in Memphis; Pepper called him as an expert witness in firearms. Brown told the jury he believed “The rifle [that prosecutors
used to implicate Ray in the assassination] was not the rifle used to kill Dr. King. In my opinion, that is not the murder
weapon.” He looked levelly at the jury. Whether people liked it or not, it was happening. We were now taking Daddy back. As
Judge Brown spoke, he held the Remington GameMaster .30-06 hunting rifle. “This weapon, literally, could not have hit the
broad side of a barn,” he said. An FBI report showed that the rifle had never been sighted in (never calibrated and aligned).
Judge Brown is a recreational hunter. Guns are a hobby of his, and as a criminal court judge, of course, he has had a lot
of experience with forensics experts and weapons, and knows the law. But when asked on cross-examination by Garrison if he
had any formal ballistics training, he cited none. After his testimony, the press sought the opinion of the prosecutor in
the criminal trial, John Campbell. He said Judge Brown’s testimony raised more questions about Judge Brown than it did about
the so-called murder weapon, or Ray’s guilt. That’s how it’s often done: if you have a “black” expert witness, then his credibility
is subtly undermined, not for a particular reason, but because of—well, touch the skin on your arm.
Garrison could’ve objected to Joe Brown being called, but didn’t, and the county prosecutor took Garrison to task publicly.
“The problem is, if no one is objecting, it makes no difference,” Campbell said. “He could’ve gotten up there and said he
was an expert in nuclear physics.” Garrison’s position consistently was that his client was a small cog in a massive conspiracy.
Pepper’s evidence was amply demonstrating that that was the case.
Joe Brown is a righteous man who tried. He tried when he had the rifle in his court to get a new trial for Ray. But he met
staunch resistance every step of the way. He could only do so much, and then he was summarily removed from presiding over
the criminal trial by the Court of Appeals without a hearing.
For the first time, I started to identify with my own feelings. Then I saw the brutality of the autopsy photos… my God… how
horrible… I had never seen the photos. I’d had no desire to see any of them. I was caught off guard. An autopsy photograph
was submitted into evidence and shown in court. I was upset with Pepper. We didn’t talk about it beforehand. I felt very awkward
sitting there, even though it wasn’t one of the most gruesome ones. It showed a shot of my father’s back where the bullet
lodged; you couldn’t see a face, who it was. When photographs were first sent to me by Pepper, I’d put them away. No desire
to see them. Now they stared at me even in my sleep.