Pepper had sent all his archives to the King Center in Atlanta, and said, “I’m giving these to you separately; they are sensitive
and I’m pretty sure you don’t want them mixed in with all the other stuff.”
We got a copy of the autopsy report and the x-rays as well. Understand that all of this for me was still working out my private
hurt, the pain… the death itself. The morbid side of it. The tragedy. Everybody dealt with it intellectually, but very few
people had to deal with it emotionally.
At least I was able to admit in my heart of hearts that I hadn’t dealt with it emotionally.
It felt like I was in a foreign city—another planet—anytime I went to Memphis. As a child I had no real awareness of the things
surrounding the assassination. But from the very first time I visited there as a child, the city felt alien. The Monday after
Daddy’s death, on the eighth of April 1968, was my first time there, for the march to City Hall that Dad never got to complete.
I remember the wrecked faces and wracking sobs and images of smoke, black clothing, shrieking. I went to the sleep clinic
at Baptist Hospital when I was twelve with these images in my head. Then I returned as an adult, finally, to the Lorraine
Motel.
I wanted to hear Betty Spates testify, but it turned out she did not testify in Memphis due to her own long-held fears for
her safety, though we did have the pivotal official deposition from her put into the record during the trial. Who was she?
As a seventeen-year-old girl, she’d worked at Jim’s Grill; she was there on the fateful day, April 4, 1968. Pepper first interviewed
her in Memphis in 1989. She told him, “There’s no doubt [Ray] did not kill Dr. King. I know that for a fact.”
After five years of investigating and developing a measure of trust, Pepper met with Mrs. Spates again. She revealed much,
not only about that April 4, 1968, day at Jim’s Grill on South Main, but also about relationships you don’t hear about in
the wells of Congress, when senators are fulminating in denial about issues pertaining to their African-American citizenry.
Betty was numbered among this citizenry. The pretty seventeen-year-old had not only been a waitress at Jim’s Grill, she’d
also been the young black concubine of the married Jowers. Jowers had a cot set up in back of the ground floor of Jim’s Grill
for their assignations. She went to the grill around noon that day, went back toward the kitchen, calling Jowers. He came
through the back door carrying a rifle. He did not appear to be under stress. She asked, “Loyd, what you doin’ with that gun?”
He replied, “Gonna use it on you, if I catch you with a nigger.” She was black herself. That’s how sick it was, and is. To
placate him, she told Jowers she would never do that. He told her he was kidding anyway. She told Pepper that Jowers broke
the rifle down and took it into the grill. She did not follow him to see where.
Jowers had always discouraged her from coming around on Thursday, a day when his wife often stopped by. But she was there
that day. Mrs. Jowers called her “whore” and told her to “Get out!” He came between them and told Mrs. Jowers to “Get out
yourself,” then told Betty Spates to get behind the counter and go to work. Mrs. Jowers stalked out. This was around 4
P.M
. Shortly thereafter Betty Spates went across the street to see some friends at another establishment. She came back around
six. The three grill regulars weren’t around.
She noticed that the door between the eating area and the kitchen was tightly closed. Thinking this unusual, she opened the
door and noticed that the door leading from the kitchen outside to the back was ajar. Just then, she heard what sounded like
a loud firecracker. Seconds later, she saw Jowers rushing from the brush area through the door, carrying another rifle. She
was convinced it was a different gun from the first one. She told Pepper that Jowers was “out of breath” and “as white as
a ghost.” His hair was in disarray, the knees of his pants were muddy. When he caught his breath, he noticed her. He didn’t
look angry, but frightened. He asked her, “You wouldn’t ever do anything to hurt me, would you, Betty?” He went to a counter
inside, put the rifle on a shelf beneath the counter. Betty remembered the rifle—dark brown stock, a scope, a short barrel.
Betty Spates had gone on to say that a few months after the assassination, she was visited by three men in suits who offered
her and her sisters new identities, relocation, money, for their own protection. She refused. Two of the men returned five
years later, repeating the offer, which was again refused. Pepper had filed Betty Spates’s primary affidavit with the court;
the
Nashville Tennessean
had published its contents. And now her statement was on the record.
After all seventy witnesses testified—providing evidence, among other things, of details of the Mafia contract, the army backup
presence, army photographers on the roof of the fire station, the suppression of evidence, the failure of the Memphis Police
Department to form the usual four-man security team (all consisting of black police officers) for my father, and the identity
of Ray’s contact, Raul, which was confirmed by documents produced by former FBI agent Don Wilson—Judge Swearingen gave the
case to the jury.
“Guilty,” I said in the phone call to Mother. “They came back guilty. Loyd Jowers was found guilty of conspiracy involving
federal, state, and local government agencies.”
It was Wednesday, December 8, 1999. I also called Ami. “You must be relieved,” she said.
“I am. I really am…”
At the courthouse after the verdict, I was emotional; it was cathartic. There were things I wanted to say and I got them off
my chest. At the press conference after the verdict, I said, “I’m appalled anybody would think we’re doing this for money.
We’ve lost money doing this. We’ve had to spend money. This is being said… to distract people, get them off the issue. Anyone
who sat through four weeks of testimony from seventy credible witnesses would know the truth’s here. The question is: What
will be done with it? What will be learned?” I spoke what I felt—not good politics. Nobody to blame. Just tired of hearing
we’d been “duped.”
I thought the verdict in the Jowers civil trial was historic, but the establishment pundits said I was wrong. By their decree
it wasn’t history. Many experts kept repeating this: “It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean
anything at all.”
If I kept repeating it, one day I might believe it, and one day after that, it might become fact. That’s the way it works,
isn’t it? I started out saying, “I think that this is history being created,” as I left the courthouse. “This is the highest
form of democracy, independent jurors rendering a verdict. So we’re very happy.” I believed it was history, a few scholars
did not. The Emory professor told
Memphis Commercial Appeal,
“It certainly has made the Tennessee state judiciary look like a laughingstock.” He said the verdict would have “zero” impact
on history. My eyes burned as I read this. Lewis Garrison, Jowers’s attorney, bemoaned how Ray’s current and former prosecutors
convinced appellate judges to stop subpoenas that would’ve forced them to testify. “Why didn’t they come help me in this case?”
he asked. Congressman John Lewis said, “Who participated in the conspiracy and why? Did law enforcement agencies? Did individuals
at the state level in Tennessee? Did members of U.S. intelligence?”
“I think history is being created,” I said. “The history books aren’t going to be rewritten,” said Gilbert T. Sewall, director
of the American Textbook Council, based at Columbia University. One of several “single gunman” theory authors wrote an editorial
in the
Washington Post:
“To those unfamiliar with the case, the verdict seemed a culmination of a long effort by the King family to determine who
was behind the assassination. To others who have followed the case, the Memphis trial was not about seeking the truth but
a ploy to obtain judicial sanction for a convoluted conspiracy theory embraced by the King family.”
I couldn’t help but wonder if the professor at Emory and the “single gunman” theorist were protecting their life’s work, their
credibility as historians and scholars, their own sanity, in a way. That is only natural. I understand that. I was protecting
my family, also only natural. I hoped people might understand. After all, these “experts” had already written one version
of history, with Ray as lone assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr., and they’d been feted and awarded for it. Maybe I’m slow
to catch on, but it seems they had a vested interest in history remaining the way they said it was. “It’s not history. It
doesn’t mean anything.” I’d have to keep repeating that. Maybe one day it would become true.
Nobody in our family agreed with these scholars’ assessments. How is that we, my family and me, were disqualified from having
a valid thought about a matter that impacted us and our lives and futures to a far greater degree than it impacted anyone
else? We were said to be dupes of Pepper. I guess we are dupes all right, but of whom—well, that depends.
It was not history, they kept telling us. It meant nothing. It meant zero. Except neither Martin, nor Bernice, nor Yolanda,
nor Mother, nor Isaac, nor my cousins agreed with those statements. Rather, they thanked me.
At any rate, the trial accomplished what we needed, closure. It would be nice if there was official acknowledgment, but we
never thought this would happen. We did what we could do. We did something. If it isn’t history, if it means nothing, keep
on repeating it; maybe it will come true. The truth, crushed to earth, will rise again. For now, a flawed man like myself,
a son who lost his father, can sleep at night, look in the mirror, maybe move on. That’s all. That’s enough.
The Justice Department’s report on the new evidence we brought to them from Jowers and Donald Wilson, a former FBI agent who
had found documents in Ray’s car that had phone numbers for Ray’s handler, Raul, and for the Atlanta office of the FBI, came
in after the trial. My hope was they wouldn’t whitewash and attempt to discredit the whole trial, but I thought that was probably
what would happen, and it did. In William Pepper’s new book,
An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
he addresses the Justice Department’s report and gives a full account of the Jowers trial. (The full and complete trial transcript
is available on the King Center’s Web site at
www.thekingcenter.org
.)
So we can say, “It’s not history, it’s not important, it means zero,” all we want, if it makes it easier for us to get by
in the dayto-day. However, that negation won’t stop legitimate, credible future researchers. As authoritative as some of the
King experts think they are, they are not the last word, or even the last King experts. More of them will come along. As the
writer and poet Sterling Brown once said, “Strong men keep on coming.” History has a way of being relived by future generations
who will address it in a new way; you get new perspectives, new people looking into things, frankly, people with less of a
personal agenda. That’s the great thing about our Constitution, the First Amendment: you can’t stop people from looking at
public records; you can seal them for fifty years, as Congress did, but sooner or later the time will pass, somebody will
get curious. Can’t sweep it under the rug forever. While the public may not get the benefit of official sanction, the records
will bear it out. Do the majority of Americans believe the official story? Well, it’s not like people are walking around asking,
“Oh gosh, could this actually happen?” I believe whoever killed Daddy was aided and abetted. It was not a one-man deal. If
that’s unimportant to the minutes of history, if that means nothing, then so be it. Then neither do we. We never have meant
anything at all, except as the footstools for those who would make good names and a good living off of our misery. We didn’t
pursue it for any other reason than to get the truth on the permanent record, so we could feel like we’d done everything we
could’ve done. We owed Daddy that.
Some months after the trial was over, in March of 2000, we as a family got a good public thrashing in the pages of
TIME
magazine. A columnist who did not attend the trial wrote an opinion piece called “They Have a Scheme: Can Martin Luther King’s
Heirs Handle the Truth?” In this article, he stated that the Justice Department was completing its review of new evidence
coming out of the Jowers trial, and was about to conclude that my family’s “allegations” were not “credible” and provided
no basis for criminal charges. “In other words, they are hogwash,” he said. He described it as “a wild-goose chase to satisfy
a tragically deluded family.” He called the civil trial in Memphis “a fiasco,” said Jowers changed his story so many times
“it ought to come with a version number, like computer software.” He then for some reason also impugned the character of Judge
Joe Brown: “Ballistics testimony was provided by Judge Joe Brown, the TV judge, who has no expertise in the field.” As for
the jury verdict ordering Jowers to pay $100 in damages to the King family, he continued, “King’s younger son Dexter exulted
that the verdict was ‘the period at the end of the sentence’ as far as the King family is concerned, it’s their story and
they’re sticking to it no matter what DOJ says… The real mystery is why King’s heirs, who more than anyone should want the
truth, prefer to believe a lie.”
Did this columnist believe that Ray was the gunman? Why was his tone bitter toward us? Were we making it harder for him, somehow?
Why did those who’d only written about the Civil Rights Movement believe one thing, while Rev. Lawson, Uncle Andy, and so
many others who actually lived the Civil Rights Movement believe otherwise? And, last but not least, if it had been the columnist’s
father who had been murdered, would he be so utterly dismissive, so protective of the status quo?
After the trial I was on a high. Mon Ami felt like she might get the man back she originally fell in love with, not the baggage
of the past three and a half years. Don’t know how it ended up going toward questions of commitment again, but I guess, after
all, that’s where it always goes. After the trial we went on retreat to the Four Seasons Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. I
went through a lot of emotional changes, but the thing that made me open up to her was also the thing that made me withdraw.
I’d created a wall around me and my emotions. I suppose that it’s been a real sob saga for me.