“Somebody somewhere must have some sense. Men must see that force begets force, hate begets hate, toughness begets toughness. … Somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe. And you do that by love.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Loving Your Enemies
On April 4, 1968 a fury of violence erupted in more than 100 U.S. cities as word spread throughout the nation and around the world that famed civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was dead from an assassin’s bullet. The kill shot, fired at 2:15 p.m. from a 30.06 Remington rifle, felled King as he stood on the balcony just outside of his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Shortly after 7:00 p.m. doctors at St. Joseph’s Hospital pronounced him dead, and the already tense climate of social unrest exploded in a wave of violence not seen since the Civil War. A rash of race related outbreaks and riots would leave 40 dead in its wake, along with the arrests of more than 25,000 citizens and $65 million in property damage.
King was in Memphis to work with striking sanitation workers. But only hours after the Nobel Peace Prize winner, addressed an overflow crowd at the Mason Temple Church — where he delivered the remarkably prophetic “Mountain Top” speech — he was dead. Ironic, in that the emotional tenor of that speech foreshadowed what would come later. “I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I know that we as a people will get there one day.”
Mary Ellen Norwood a waitress at the Lorraine Motel, now living in Lansing, was known to Memphis police in 1968 as “Witness No. 43.” Soft-spoken and unpretentious, Norwood granted her first public interview on April 3, 2018 just one day shy of the 50th anniversary.
“I was in the kitchen [of the Lorraine Motel] cooking, and we heard what we thought were some people shooting off firecrackers. … but then we ran outside to see what was going on, and he was laying there on the balcony,” she said humbly. “I just stood there, confounded and wondering ‘what just happened.’ All I could hear was people yelling they shot Dr. King, they shot Dr. King,” Norwood said through her tears.
As she talked about the sights she witnessed on that day with ‘Today’ show reporter Craig Melvin, she became emotionally overwhelmed and sobbed inconsolably.
“We didn’t think he was going to die, no … he can’t,” Norwood whispered.
In Detroit, as news unfolded, officials responded to the rash of reactions and raw unadulterated rage by imposing a dawn-to- dusk curfew. Bars, liquor stores and gun shops were closed almost immediately. “This tragedy came only a year after the ’67 riot which devastated our communities and our city,” said Mitzy Smith, who lived on Davison and 12th street near the epicenter of the ’67 Riot. “So cooler heads prevailed in Detroit, although there was violence it was not on the scale that was taking place in other cities,” Smith concluded. Then governor, George W. Romney ordered the National Guard into Detroit. One person was killed and gangs tossed objects at cars and smashed storefront windows along 12th Street on the west side.
Thought to be the work of a lone gunman, James Earl Ray, an escaped Missouri State Penitentiary convict, the fugitive was arrested in London and ultimately sentence to 99 years in prison where he died from cancer at age 70, still recanting his confession.
In the decade following, after much speculation and mountains of evidence contradicting the lone gunman theory, information implicating the CIA, the FBI, Memphis police and a cohort of racial extremists began surfaced.
From the FBI smear campaign devised by the agency’s notorious director, J. Edgar Hoover, to the unrelenting push to demean his character and discredit the civil rights movement, there was never any doubt that the opponents of equality and social justice would stop at nothing to see their mission to the end. In short, the revered clergyman had to be silenced.
The King family and others believe the assassination was the result of a conspiracy as alleged by white racist and local Memphis businessman, Loyd Jowers that James Earl Ray was merely a scapegoat for the real perpetrators of the assassination.
In a 1993 episode of ABC’s “Primetime Live,” Jowers told reporter Sam Donaldson that he hired someone to kill King as a favor to a friend in the mafia, produce merchant Frank Liberto. Jowers said Liberto, who died prior to the ABC interview, had paid him $100,000 to arrange the assassination. He did not name the person he claimed to have hired, but said it was not Ray.
In 1998, some 30 years after the assassination, the King family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the U.S. government, the Mafia and Memphis police along with Memphis businessman Lloyd Jowers, for the sum of $10 million. After four weeks of testimony which involved over 70 witnesses and thousands of pages of never before seen evidence, a Memphis jury unanimously found, that Jowers was part of a conspiracy to kill King, and that the assassination plot also involved “others, including governmental agencies.”
King attorney William Pepper asked that the award be reduced from $10 million to $100, insisting that the civil suit was never about the money. The jury concurred.
In a reverse decision, the allegations and the finding of the Memphis jury were later reversed by the United States Department of Justice in 2000 due to lack of evidence.
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