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Martin Luther King, Jr.

Tuesday, Apr 28, 1998 7:00 PM UTC

Triumphant in death

James Earl Ray is laughing all the way to hell, thanks to the King family's preposterous belief that he didn't kill Martin Luther King Jr.

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ATLANTA — Very few people mourned the death last Thursday of James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr. Ray’s brother Jerry, who for years worked for convicted church-bomber and professional anti-Semite J.B. Stoner, was one of the few. But Jerry had reasons to be thankful, too. His brother had never implicated him — or their other brother John — in any discussions or arrangements that preceded King’s April 4, 1968, murder. What’s more, James Earl’s notoriety had allowed Jerry to garner considerable public attention as his imprisoned brother’s primary spokesman. Rarely did any of the eager journalists raise the matter of Jerry’s long, intimate relationship with the once-infamous Stoner.

But those who seemed to mourn Ray’s death even more than Jerry were the widow and children of King himself. Coretta Scott King asserted that her family was “deeply saddened” by Ray’s death, and proclaimed that it was “a tragedy not only for Mr. Ray and his family, but also for the entire nation.”

Readers who recalled the awkwardly staged 1997 scene in which Dexter Scott King, King’s younger son, shook Ray’s very trigger hand and proclaimed the King family’s belief in Ray’s complete innocence should not have been shocked by Coretta King’s peculiar expression of grief.

Coretta King declared that it was “regrettable that Mr. Ray was denied his day in court.” King — or her press agent — had conveniently forgotten how Tennessee prosecutors in 1969 agreed to accept Ray’s guilty plea, and forego a trial, only after receiving the King family’s personal approval.

Since then, a bizarre susceptibility to outlandish claims of Ray’s innocence has slowly spread throughout Martin Luther King’s circle of aides and associates. The first to succumb was the mercurial and once-brilliant James Bevel, who began championing Ray in 1969 before moving on to subsequent alliances with Lyndon LaRouche, Rev. Sun Myung Moon and Louis Farrakhan.

Next came James M. Lawson, the Methodist minister who had invited King to Memphis in the spring of 1968 to help rally support for a city sanitation workers’ strike. Lawson became Ray’s pastor, and officiated at Ray’s in-prison wedding to a media sketch artist, Anna Sandhu, who likewise believed in Ray’s innocence. The couple later divorced after an argument during which, Sandhu reports, Ray angrily declared that of course he had killed King.

The most prominent and recent recruit to Ray’s side has been former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young, whose credulity is perhaps the most puzzling and disappointing of all. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with any actual search for the truth. Young and the Kings have never taken the time to familiarize themselves with the rich portrait of the Ray brothers and their vituperative racism that was provided in George McMillan’s landmark 1976 biography, “The Making of an Assassin,” nor is it likely that any of them have sat down and read Gerald Posner’s impressive new book on the King assassination, “Killing the Dream.”

More importantly, neither Dexter King nor his mother has ever responded to the repeated offers that Memphis prosecutors have made in recent months to come to Atlanta to brief the King family in detail about the prosecutors’ latest review of the overwhelming evidence against Ray. What that review demonstrated was the extent to which all of the supposedly “new” evidence cited by Ray’s lawyer, William Pepper, amounts to nothing more than fabricated stories told by people motivated by the expectation of Hollywood movie riches and, in some instances, actual up-front cash payments.

Two figures loom over the way in which the Kings have
succeeded in making themselves into national laughingstocks. The
first is Pepper, Ray’s lawyer, whose outlandish claims of
government involvement in King’s slaying have been disproven and destroyed by both ABC News’ “Turning Point” and CBS News’ “48 Hours.” The Memphis district attorney’s report highlights “the
pervasive mention of monetary reward that key witnesses relied
upon by Dr. Pepper refer to in their statements.” In the current
Time magazine, longtime civil rights
journalist Jack E. White accurately characterizes Pepper as
“either a credulous buffoon or a con artist.”
Most people who’ve seen Pepper’s
work up close would vote for the second.

The other figure is movie director Oliver Stone, whose forthcoming
film, “Memphis,” will be made in partial cooperation with the King
family. If Pepper is little more than a con artist, Stone more
accurately fits into White’s category of the “credulous buffoon.”
Granted a personal interview with the now-deceased Ray, Stone came
away just as wowed as Dexter King: Ray “looks you in the eye and
there’s just an honesty to the look,” Stone endearingly declared.
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised, after “JFK,” that Oliver Stone would be the last person in America capable of seeing through Ray’s self-serving lies.

In addition to the influence of Pepper and Stone, the King family is also motivated by a desire to
remain in the public eye, and its embrace of the conspiracy theory certainly achieves that. But there is also something else, as one person close to the innermost circle for more than a generation
hesitantly explains. “It’s not rational,” he says. “They’ve got to blame someone else more important [than Ray], no matter what the
evidence.” The unquenchable need to fill the lifelong gap left by
King’s murder has left them grasping at even the most outlandish
claims, even at the price of destroying virtually all of their
own individual credibility.

James Earl Ray’s most successful crime was not his murder of
Martin Luther King Jr., because for that crime he was imprisoned for life. No, Ray’s most successful crime
was the huge and grotesque historical scam that he triumphantly
perpetrated upon the King family during the last
year of his life. Having destroyed, irretrievably, the surviving family members’ credibility, it remains to be seen
whether King’s own long-term legacy has also been harmed and diminished by the foolishness of his widow and children.

James Earl Ray no doubt was bemused by the King family’s
mourning of his fatal illness, but of one thing we can
be absolutely sure: that Ray died a happy man. Not only has he gone down in history as
the killer of one of America’s greatest figures, but he also
pulled off an even more unimaginable offense: convincing the victim’s relatives to champion his own innocence and importance.
No killer of historical import has ever come close.

There’s much here to mourn, and none of it is for James Earl Ray.

David J. Garrow is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Bearing the Cross" and numerous books on Martin Luther King Jr. and the American civil rights movement. His latest book is "Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe V. Wade," scheduled to be published in an updated and expanded edition in October 1998 by the University of California Press. More David J. Garrow.

Thursday, Jan 29, 1998 8:00 PM UTC

Newsreal: Defending the right to pry

Many commentators, notably feminists, dismiss stories about the sex life of President Clinton as irrelevant to his public role. But this drawing of a line between public and private lives, says a homosexual writer, cannot work.

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Well before Americans ever heard of Monica Lewinsky, the nation’s most important feminist organizations turned silent on the subject of President Clinton’s treatment of women like Gennifer Flowers. But then, who cared about Flowers, with her tall hair and cheap perfume. In the grand scheme of things, the need was for a “progressive” in the White House to advance a feminist agenda.

That still seems to be the case. Referring to Clinton’s latest alleged scandal, Molly Ivins, a feminist journalist in Texas, declares in her cowboy prose style: “I, for one, do not think the president’s sex life has squat to do with his job.”

I disagree. I think Americans had every right to know that President John F. Kennedy was having an affair with a Mafia moll. Kennedy’s famous libido, so carefully protected by the Secret Service and by crony journalists, jeopardized the entire nation.

History is full of famous disparities. The cruel dictator dotes on his granddaughters. The eminent educator abuses his children. But such lives are gross distortions. For us, there cannot be this clear line separating our public from our private life. The kind of people we are in private should influence the kind of people we are in public. And vice versa.

I say this as a homosexual man. All my life, heterosexual America has tried to draw a straight line between my private and public life. Political liberals, like President Clinton, think “don’t ask, don’t tell” is an acceptable compromise for having me in the military. Even good friends, frankly, would prefer I kept sexual matters to myself.

Feminists have, in our time, overcome age-old restrictions that kept women from public lives. Gays, similarly, are insisting on the light of day. The danger for both homosexuals and feminists is that our hunger for public freedom makes us blind to private contradictions.

The French like to say, after all, that Americans are Puritans. Americans turn prudish when the subject turns to sex. Ah, the French. They know wine and good food. They’ve also shown themselves to be moral cowards several times in this century.

My sense is that most Americans are not prudish but that we have become — much like the French — a cynical people. Many Americans, I fear, are inclined to live with a disparity between the public and the private, so ambitious have we become for the former. Many women, I know, tolerate the spectacle of a feminist president who mistreats female subordinates emerging from church, Bible in hand.

God knows, none of us are saints. The football star with his bright smile beats his wife. And Thomas Jefferson had sex with his slaves. And the priest favors blond altar boys.

For me, however, candor is all. I admire Malcolm X more than I admire Martin Luther King Jr. Both men were womanizers. But Malcolm X admitted his mistreatment of women and used his mistakes to teach a new generation of men. To be a true leader, after all, requires that one confronts one’s failures.

“Oh, I feel so sorry for Chelsea,” everyone sighs. What troubles me more is that we are teaching young people in this country to profess one set of ideas in public and then to behave privately in ways exactly opposite.

I like what a London newspaper said the other day about the first lady. Hillary Rodham Clinton — the model of the “new woman” — may be the problem, the London newspaper argued. She tolerates her husband the way a Victorian wife tolerated male misbehavior and arrogance.

She smiles. She stands by her man. When he turns his puppy eyes toward the camera and insists he never had a 12-year affair with Gennifer Flowers, she nods. She wants the public life too much to ask questions about the private man.

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Richard Rodriguez is the author of "Brown: The Last Discovery of America." More Richard Rodriguez.

Monday, Sep 15, 1997 7:00 PM UTC

When “civil rights” means civil wrongs

The real carriers of the civil rights banner
are those who are helping end affirmative action.

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during the darkest days of the Cold War, the Italian writer Ignazio Silone
predicted the final struggle of that conflict would be between the communist believers and the ex-believers. A similar conflict seems to be shaping up among civil rights
activists, as affirmative action undergoes its last death throes.

Last month, Jesse Jackson chose the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous 1963 march on Washington to lead a march across the Golden Gate Bridge against California’s Proposition 209, passed last year, which prohibits race-based hiring and recruiting in government jobs and state colleges. The symbolism was clear: Opposition to Prop. 209 is
the latest front in the civil rights struggle.

The trouble is, the architect and principal spokesman for Prop. 209, businessman Ward Connerly, is also a veteran of King’s movement. And it is no accident (as we leftist radicals used to say) that the anti-affirmative action measure is called “The California Civil Rights Initiative,” or that its text is carefully constructed to conform to both the
letter and spirit of the landmark Civil Rights acts of 1964 and 1965.

The split in the ranks is not about ending racism. It is, rather, over conflicting memories of the past and differing strategies for the future. How much racial progress has been made since the federal government embraced the civil rights agenda? What is the best way to overcome the racial inequalities that still persist?

For the anti-209 marchers, little has changed. Whatever gains blacks have
made have been forced upon a recalcitrant white populace. Without remedial effort, existing inequalities will morph into new injustices. Making the government race-neutral would encourage historic prejudice to reassert itself in all its malevolence. To eliminate affirmative action, both Jesse Jackson and President Clinton have warned, is to invite the “resegregation” of American life.

Yet consider these unruly facts:

  • In 1940, 87 percent of American blacks lived below the poverty line. By 1960, five years before the Civil Rights acts and 10 years before the first affirmative action policies, the figure was down to 47 percent. That was a
    greater and more rapid decline than took place over the next 35 years, when the black poverty rate came down to 26 percent.

  • In 1940, only 5 percent of black men and 6.4 percent of black women were in middle-class occupations. By 1970, the figures were 22 percent for black men and 36 percent for black women — larger again than the increases that took place in the 20 years after affirmative action was put in place, when the
    figures reached 32 percent and 59 percent respectively.

These figures come from a massive new scholarly work, “America in Black and White,”
by two civil rights veterans, Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom, who have
reconstructed the history of racial progress and conflict in the postwar
era and examined the impact of affirmative action solutions.

Black poverty, the Thernstroms show, has little to do
with race, and its solution will not be affected by affirmative
action set-asides. Such policies, they assert, have had the net effect not
of employing greater numbers of blacks or raising their living standards,
but of shifting black employment from small businesses to large
corporations and to government. A far more effective anti-poverty program would
be to promote black marriages. Currently, for example, 85 percent of poor
black children live in fatherless families; the poverty
rate for black children without fathers is nearly five times that for black
children with two parents.

In higher education, the rate of gain for blacks in college
enrollments was greater between 1960 and 1970 (when enrollments
increased from 4 percent to 7 percent of the total college population) than it was in the decades after affirmative action was implemented. Enrollments rose from 7 percent to 9.9 percent between 1970 and 1980, and to 10.7 percent between 1980 and 1994. In 1965 — before affirmative action — blacks were only
about half as likely to actually graduate college as whites. In 1995, the figure was exactly the same.

In 1995, only 1,764 black students nationwide (1.7 percent of all blacks who took the test) scored as high as 600 on the verbal SATs; the math scores were even worse. By comparison, 64,950 white students (9.6 percent of all whites who took the test) scored 600 or higher on the verbal SATs. But under affirmative-action guidelines, those black students have been
recruited by Berkeley, Harvard and similar elite schools, where the average
white student (and the average Asian) had scores at least 100 points higher. At Berkeley, the gap is nearly 300 points. Predictably, blacks drop out of Berkeley at
nearly three times the rate of whites.

This is but one of the unspoken nightmares of
affirmative action. Simply put, African-Americans are being put in college programs that far exceed their abilities and qualifications. As the Thernstroms ruefully observe, the college that comes closest to equality in actually graduating its students is Ole Miss, one of the last bastions of segregation in the South.

Integrated now, Ole Miss is resistant to the new racial duplicity in admissions standards. The result:
49 percent of freshmen whites graduate, and so do 48 percent of blacks.

On the basis of what actually has happened, increasing numbers of civil rights supporters are concluding that affirmative action is not only having little or no effect on the income and education gaps, but is actually destructive to the people it is supposed to help. It is creating black failure while stirring the resentment of other groups who see themselves displaced, on the basis of race, from
their hard-earned places of merit.

“Liberalism no longer curbs discrimination. It invites it. It does not expose racism; it recapitulates and, sometimes, reinvents it.” Those are not the words of some Confederate flag-waving demagogue from below the Mason-Dixon line; they are the words of another veteran of the civil rights movement, Jim Sleeper, a columnist with the New York Daily News, and they are taken from his new book, “Liberal Racism,” which examines the toxic effects of well-intended liberal programs like affirmative action.

So does the wheel of history turn. Old models and old beliefs are crumbling. It was the survivors and reformers of communism who dumped that unworkable ideology into the ash can of history. A similar process is taking place in the civil rights movement. And for the people who need it the most, that cannot come too soon.

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David Horowitz is a conservative writer and activist. More David Horowitz.

Page 7 of 7 in Martin Luther King, Jr.

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