To this day the white poor also suffer deprivation and the humiliation of poverty, if not of color.
—MLK, in his book Why We Can’t Wait, published in 1963
DESPITE THE NAME, the New Rebel Motor Hotel was not so much a hotel as a forty-two-room motel on the southern outskirts of Memphis. It stood just inside the city limits facing the road known both as Highway 78 and Lamar Avenue. Highway 78 was a main artery from the Deep South. For travelers from Birmingham (250 miles to the southeast) and Atlanta (155 miles beyond), it offered a straight shot to Memphis.
Looming over the motel was a gleaming, red-and-white sign proclaiming its name. The sign beckoned to travelers arriving from the Deep South, for whom the name must have struck a sympathetic chord. The name New Rebel evoked not just old-fashioned nostalgia but also the defiant battle cry of the old Confederacy. Lest there be any doubt about its down-in-Dixie essence, the motel created its own postcards to underscore the theme. The postcards boasted: “Home of Southern Hospitality.”
It was 7:15 in the evening of April 3, as the sky was turning black and the air blustery, when a Ford Mustang pulled off Highway 78 and halted at the New Rebel. In the dim light the Mustang, a pale yellow, looked white or off-white. On the rear of the car was a red-and-white Alabama license plate. A Mexican visa sticker labeled “Turista” adorned the windshield.
A slender, dark-haired man of medium height exited the Mustang into the chill air and entered the office of the New Rebel. He was of medium height. He had a long, sharp nose and a cleft chin. He had turned forty less than a month before, but he looked at least a few years younger. He was wearing a somber business suit, white shirt, and dark, narrow knit tie.
The man asked the motel’s desk clerk, Henrietta Hagemaster, for a room. The rate was $6.24 a night. On a registration card the man scrawled the name Eric S. Galt and the address 2608 Highland Avenue, Birmingham. He was checked in to Room 34.
The roughhewn twang of the few words the man spoke to Hagemaster seemed to peg him as a Southerner of humble origins. In the months to come, the FBI would interview lots of people who had encountered the man in the months before he arrived in Memphis. Something had been puzzling about him. He did not seem to fit into an obvious occupational category. Probably an accountant, one person said. He looked “for all the world like a preacher,” another said.1
He was not an accountant, a preacher, or a Southerner. His real name was not Eric S. Galt. It was James Earl Ray. Outwardly he appeared fairly well off, but it was not so. There was a hidden side to him, even in the matter of his clothes. As an FBI report would indicate, not all of his clothes were as fine as his suit and knit tie. He had extended the life of his undershorts by mending them by hand in two places with brown thread.
Ray was born on March 10, 1928, in Alton, Illinois. Located fifteen miles north of St. Louis along the Mississippi River, Alton was then a decaying industrial town on the brink of the Great Depression. He grew up in abject poverty in Alton and in nearby, blue-highway pockets of southeastern Illinois and eastern Missouri. His early years epitomized American poverty and family dysfunction at its worst.
Ray’s wretched background and the hardships of his youth could have been a case in point for Martin Luther King Jr. If King had known of the toxic circumstances of Ray’s youth, he might have cited them as an example of the kind of corrosive poverty that compelled him to embark on the Poor People’s Campaign.
Ray was the oldest of nine children born to Lucille and George Ray. Derisively nicknamed “Speedy” because of his sluggish speech, George never was much of a breadwinner. He had bounced from one job to another.2 He was an auto mechanic, used-car salesman, railroad brakeman, and carnival fighter, but nothing lasted long. With little or no money coming in, the family was so poor that sometimes they had only potatoes to eat.3 Lucille, who was known as Ceal, coped as best she could or, when she couldn’t anymore, turned to drink.
By the time Ray was in the first grade, the family had retreated to a dilapidated, tin-roof house on a meager farm near the rural hamlet of Ewing, Missouri, population 324. Farming on their infertile land did not pay any better than Speedy’s modest jobs. Ceal hated country life.
At the Ewing Consolidated Elementary School, James Ray was often the target of ridicule among his classmates. He was painfully shy. Often his clothes were tattered, dirty, and foul-smelling. He did poorly in his studies, though he would test with an average 108 IQ.4 Eight years of schooling was all he could stand, as he would say later.5
As Ray grew older, his life did not get better. It got worse. In his vivid biography, Gerald Posner explains that “there was no guidance in the Ray household, no family member to whom any of the children could look for inspiration, no encouragement to do well at school or to make friends, and no role model who showed it was possible to work honestly and diligently to pull oneself out of poverty.” The Rays reached a point of such desperation that they burned their house piecemeal to stay alive. As Posner describes it: “In 1940 when James was twelve, the Rays began slowly cannibalizing their decrepit house, pulling it apart plank by plank in order to use it as firewood. It gradually disintegrated until they needed a new home.”6
During that time, Ray had his first brush with the law. He was only eleven when he and his brother John grabbed a stack of newspapers deposited by a truck on a street corner for distribution. The Ray brothers were caught and briefly jailed, but the police let them off with only a warning.
In 1951, Ray’s parents separated. By then Speedy had taken up with another woman and Ceal had sunk into utter despair. In her last years she was reduced to loitering in bars or being hauled off by police for drunkenness and disorderly conduct.7 She died of acute alcoholism in 1953.
Most of her children fared no better. All the children were apart from their mother by the age of sixteen.8 One of Ray’s sisters, Marjorie, was six when she burned to death from a fire that she started while playing with matches. Max had severe mental disabilities and was placed in a special home in Aton. Suzan and Franklin were taken from Ceal by court order and placed in a Catholic home in Springfield, Missouri. Melba, who suffered from emotional distress, ended up in a mental institution.9
Ceal’s trouble with the law stemming from poverty and alcoholism paled next to the criminality of her family. When Speedy was twenty-one, before marrying Ceal, he was convicted of breaking and entering, a felony. He served two years in the Iowa State Penitentiary at Fort Madison. A long string of crimes committed by Speedy’s brother, Earl (the inspiration for James’s middle name), including rape, put him behind bars for most of his adult life.10
Two of Ray’s brothers, Jerry and John, seemed to follow in Speedy’s and Uncle Earl’s footsteps. Jerry was sent to a reformatory at fourteen for mugging drunks and snatching purses. Within a month of his release, he was back in prison for grand larceny. At nineteen, John robbed a gas station and was sentenced to two to five years in the Indiana State Penitentiary at Pendleton.11
If Ray seemed destined for a life of crime, he did try to follow a different path. When he was sixteen, he moved to Alton and found work in the dye room of the International Shoe Tannery. Laid off by the tannery, he enlisted in the army at age seventeen.
Military service, however, did not suit him. He showed his contempt for military discipline by flouting the army’s rules of conduct. While stationed in Germany, he peddled cigarettes on the black market. Against army regulations he drank “in quarters”—that is, in the barracks. In a final act of defiance, he went AWOL. He was quickly apprehended and court-martialed. He did not fail at everything in the military. In basic training he qualified for the marksman’s medal, a classification of proficiency, though below the levels of sharpshooter and expert.12 On December 10, 1948, he was discharged from the army for “ineptness and lack of adaptability to military service.”13
Back in the States, Ray found work at the Dryden Rubber Company in Chicago. It was another factory job, honest work, but he was let go after three months. With little money and at loose ends, he jumped freight trains, riding the rails all the way to Los Angeles.
Alone in a city that must have seemed like another world to him, he was soon in trouble. On the night of October 7, 1949, he attempted to rob the upstairs office of a cafeteria, the Forum. The manager spotted him crouched behind a safe. Ray fled, outrunning a parking attendant. Recklessly, he returned to the same area four days later. The parking attendant called the police. Ray denied everything, but he was convicted of second-degree burglary and served ninety days in the county jail.14
He retreated to Chicago, seemingly determined to stay on the right side of the law. He took an assembly-line job in one factory, then two more in succession. He enrolled in a course for a high school equivalency degree. He kept at it for two years before his tolerance for tedious, low-wage jobs reached a limit. He went AWOL, this time not from the army but from his job in the envelope-manufacturing department at Avery Corporation.
With no means of support, on May 6, 1952, he attempted to hold up a taxi driver with a pistol. He meant to hijack the taxi. The driver foiled him by grabbing the keys. Ray fled. A bystander raced after him and alerted police, who gave chase. In the melee that followed, Ray was shot in the arm and arrested.15
He was twenty-four, a high school dropout, a flop as a soldier, a jobless loner encumbered by a criminal record and unmoored from family. It seemed to mark a moment of final surrender. He slumped into the life of a drifter and habitual outlaw. As Percy Foreman, one of Ray’s eventual lawyers, would put it: “He called his pistol his credit card and committed a robbery every time he came into a new city.”16
For years Ray pulled off a string of petty robberies, many with impunity. At other times he bungled them. A bonehead attempt to burglarize a laundry in East Alton in 1954 ended in a comical snafu.17 As Ray hoisted himself to a window at the laundry, his shoes stuck in deep mud. In 1959, he and an accomplice robbed an IGA food market in Alton, making off with nearly $1,000. At the wheel of the getaway car, Ray failed to shut the door on the driver’s side. It swung open, and he almost fell out. With the police in hot pursuit he crashed the car into a tree.18
As his rap sheet lengthened, so did his prison terms. He served a year or more at two state prisons in Illinois and three years in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. The stickup at gunpoint of a Kroger supermarket in St. Louis in July 1959 landed him in the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City facing a twenty-year sentence.
The arc of his life story seemed complete. He was a common criminal, a habitual offender in and out of prison. He had defined a criminal life for himself, but he was not good at it. In his many ill-conceived, botched attempts at crime, he showed he was “markedly inept,” as Robert Blakey, chief counsel of the US House Select Committee on Assassinations, would observe years later.19
Doing hard time at Jeff City, as the maximum-security penitentiary was known, seemed to reshape his personality. He acquired a savvy and shrewdness that had not been evident before. That newfound capacity, combined with grit, enabled him to escape, Houdini-like, on April 23, 1967.
It was a Sunday. Ray was working his regular shift in the prison bakery, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. A truck was to arrive that day to pick up bread for regular delivery to the honor farm beyond the prison gates. Ray contorted his five-ten frame under a false bottom of a metal breadbox that measured four feet long, three feet wide, and three feet deep. The box was meant for sixty loaves. A fellow inmate covered the false bottom with enough bread to camouflage his curled body below. When the truck arrived, two inmates rolled the breadbox into its cargo bay.
Once the truck cleared the gates, Ray unfolded himself from the box. He had planned carefully. He wore a dyed pair of black pants and white shirt under his orange prison uniform, which he quickly stripped off. When the truck stopped at an intersection, he leaped to the ground. He did not run but instead ambled off so as not to alert the driver.20 He carried a stash of twenty candy bars, a comb, a razor and blades, a piece of mirror, soap, and a transistor radio.
According to his own eventual testimony, Ray laid low till dark, ducked through fields to avoid houses with lights, and trekked for seven nights, covering forty-five to sixty miles, and then jumped a railroad boxcar to St. Louis.21 He had served seven years and thirty-seven days of his twenty-year sentence.
By July he managed to reach Canada, where the border with the United States was not then hard to cross for an American. In Montreal he tried and failed in his attempt to obtain a Canadian passport under the assumed name of Eric Starvo Galt, and he returned to Birmingham. There he answered an ad in the Birmingham News for a 1966 V-8 Mustang with whitewall tires. On August 30, posing as Galt, he bought the car for $1,966 cash.22 Again using the Galt alias, he obtained an Alabama driver’s license.
How Ray acquired the money to buy the Mustang and pay the thousands more that he spent while he was a fugitive would mystify investigators. One likely source was his hustling of drugs and other illicit goods at Jeff City, money he may have parked with his brothers while he was in prison. Another possibility was the armed $27,230 heist of the Bank of Alton, on July 13, 1967. It was an unsolved case in circumstances pointing vaguely to Ray. There were other lesser robberies for which he seemed a likely suspect, but no clear-cut evidence connected him to any of the thefts.
With the sporty Mustang as his calling card, Ray headed south and west. He clocked two thousand miles, eventually crossing the Rio Grande and going halfway down the Pacific coast of Mexico. He wound up in Puerto Vallarta, a derelict former mining town then emerging as an upscale beach resort.
Manuela Aguirre Medrano, a prostitute, would tell investigators that she and Ray became acquainted in Puerto Vallarta. She said that she slept with him several times while he was living high (beer during the day, gin at night). If anyone asked what he did for a living, he said he was a writer. He was calm, shy, yet prone to spew hatred against blacks, she would say of him.23
By mid-November, Ray was on the road again, back across the border and on to Los Angeles. He hung out in bars there, posturing as a businessman who had operated and sold a tavern in Mexico and who was mulling over his next venture. He embarked on a quirky quest for self-improvement. He hired a plastic surgeon to snub his pointy nose. He booked sessions with a psychologist and a hypnotist. He took courses in bartending and ballroom dancing. It was as though he was remaking himself for a more respectable calling. He devised a murderous plot instead.
Investigators who would inquire into Ray’s life would find abundant evidence that he hated black people, King in particular.24 Written on the back of his TV set they found the segregationist slur “Martin Luther Coon.” They reported many instances in which Ray had allegedly uttered anti-black insults.25 One of his lawyers, Percy Foreman, would say years later, “He is a racist, and has been one all his life. He could not think of anybody else not being a racist if they were white.”26
While he was in Los Angeles, Ray’s anti-black bigotry seemed to seize him with acute insistence. He circulated a petition to place third-party presidential candidate George Wallace, the segregationist former Alabama governor, on the California ballot. In one incident at a bar, the Rabbit Foot’s Club, he had an angry exchange with a white woman, presumably over race. According to the bartender, Ray dragged the woman toward the door, hollering that he aimed to drop the woman off in Watts, the city’s African American neighborhood.27
Just when Ray resolved to kill King remains an open question. In Los Angeles the idea stirred him into action. Perhaps not coincidentally, King was highly visible at the time, denouncing the Vietnam War and vowing massive demonstrations in Washington.
Over the weekend of March 16 to 17, King was in Los Angeles to preach at the Second Baptist Church. Ray, an avid newspaper reader, might well have seen articles in the Los Angeles press reporting King’s visit and his plan to blitz the South later that week on behalf of the Poor People’s Campaign.28 Ray filled out a postal change-of-address form marked “General Delivery, Atlanta.” On March 17, he left Los Angeles in the Mustang.
If Ray intended to head straight to Atlanta, he changed his mind. News media were reporting that King would travel to Selma, Alabama. Hot on King’s trail, Ray drove to Selma. He spent the night of March 22, a Friday, at a motel in the Alabama city. But King was not in Selma that night. A last-minute change in his schedule had him sleeping in Camden, thirty-eight miles away.
Ray drove on to Atlanta. As was his habit on arriving in a new city, Ray looked for a cheap rooming house where he could stay. He found a room for $10.50 a week on Fourteenth Street near Piedmont Park, a Midtown area known as a hippie enclave.
He zeroed in on King’s likely whereabouts. In pencil he circled a map of Atlanta at three points linked to King. One circle marked the SCLC headquarters, a second the Ebenezer Baptist Church, and the third a former house of King’s. A fourth circle, around the Capitol Hill Housing Project, is where Ray would abandon his Mustang on April 5.
Ray outfitted himself in sniper mode. He shopped for a high-powered rifle, not in Atlanta but 150 miles away in Birmingham. For Ray, a felon using a fake name, Alabama was a less risky state than Georgia in which to buy a gun. In Alabama, unlike Georgia, there was no requirement that he identify himself.29 He did not have to show his counterfeit driver’s license, which would have identified him as Eric S. Galt. Keeping the transaction separate from his alias avoided creating a paper trail that might link the driver’s license to the rifle that he intended to buy.
On Saturday, March 23, a week after his departure from Los Angeles, he drove to Birmingham to shop for the rifle. He parked the Mustang at the Aquamarine Supply Company, a sporting goods store opposite the Birmingham airport, and went inside.
He told the store manager, Donald Wood, that he wanted a rifle for deer hunting in Wisconsin. Ray selected a .30–06, pump-action Remington Gamemaster 760. The rifle could “drop a charging bull,” according to Remington’s marketing material.30 Ray bought a Redfield 7x2 scope to attach to the Gamemaster. The scope would magnify an image to look seven times closer. He also bought a box of soft-point, military-style bullets, a kind that would mushroom on impact.31 The total cost of the three purchases, plus tax, was $265.85. Ray signed the sales slip as Harvey Lowmeyer, thus distancing the alias of Eric S. Galt from the purchase of the rifle.
By Monday newspapers were reporting that King would return to Memphis that week to stage a nonviolent march. That same day, Ray left Atlanta for Tennessee. Where he stopped between Atlanta and Memphis is not known, although investigators would surmise that he paused somewhere, likely in a wooded area, for target practice.
On the outskirts of Memphis he found the New Rebel Motel and checked in. No one would report seeing Ray leave Room 34. At 10:20, during his evening rounds, night clerk Ivan Well would note that lights were burning brightly in Room 34. Ray may have been watching television. If so, he might have seen the late evening news on Channel Five, which reported King’s arrival in Memphis that morning. A clip of the footage showed King entering Room 306 at the Lorraine.32