The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

0:15Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. And it's just the two of us today, which is fine, because we need to keep our nose to the grindstone and really focus on a pair of really important episodes, which we kick off now. That's right. We haven't done a two-parter in a while, but as we got into the originally one-parter of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., you were like, man, there's a lot more here that we can just kind of explode this into a two-parter. Yeah, that was verbatim what I said. And I said, let's do it. There was a ton of stuff that I did not know about MLK's assassination.

0:56Yeah, same. James Earl Ray, like there's a lot of stuff around it. And it's just a reminder that history gets so boiled down to like its bare essence or even like a caricature of itself. And when you really dig into like a historical event, you're just reminded that there's just so many people affected and involved. And it's not just, you know, James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King Jr. and, you know, the world mourned. I mean, that was all true, but there was just so much more to it. So hopefully we'll kind of get some of that across in this. Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, we'll talk about it some, but I went to, I've been to the King Center.

1:40I've been to the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis at the Lorraine Motel. And like, I've thought I knew a lot about this stuff, but until we do our job like we do, I learned a lot more. So it's pretty great. So let's talk MLK, because he kind of skyrocketed to prominence from just the start. He became involved in the Montgomery bus boycott, which most people say kicked off the civil rights era in the United States, thanks to Rosa Parks, who we did an episode on Rosa Parks, agent of change. Remember that? That's right. Yeah, for sure. And all this is just, you know, so we're setting the table kind of as a lead into where things were in April of 1968.

2:25So like you said, you know, 12-ish years earlier is when he really rose to prominence. And so much so that in February of 57, he was on the cover of Time magazine. So in 1963, he was Time's man of the year after being on the cover just, you know, a handful of years earlier. And in 1964, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. So he was one of the most famous Americans by the early 1960s. Yes. But one of the things you don't learn about these days as often is that he was at that point beginning to become widely criticized. Yeah. Not just by white Americans, many of whom have been criticizing him all along, but by black Americans as well.

3:13There was a real division in the civil rights movement between Martin Luther King's vision of his doctrine of nonviolence, which is basically saying like, hey, we're going to essentially do everything we can to show white Americans the problems that black Americans face just by being black in America. and no matter what they do to us, we're not going to fight back and we're going to make an example of ourselves that we'll hopefully set for them. And the ultimate goal was to integrate into America, to integrate black Americans into America so that there wasn't black America and white America. And that ran very much contrary to the other rival idea, which was Malcolm X's idea.

4:06Yeah, and we haven't done one on Malcolm X yet, so maybe we should hit that up as a follow-up at some point. For sure. But yes, this was sort of the other side of the coin. Malcolm X believed in black separatism. He was like, this nonviolent approach isn't working, and black people cannot integrate into white America. It's a racist society, and it's just not possible. So we need self-determination. Violence, you know, by any means necessary is an acceptable sort of avenue to achieve the goals of black determination. And especially considering violence is being inflicted upon black people by white people constantly.

4:51So it's time to fight back, like with fists and clubs and whatever else. Yeah. And again, that's totally contrary to King's doctrine of nonviolence, which Malcolm X considered criminal, as he put it, in the face of just being beaten by whites just for marching in the streets peacefully. And a big portion of the people who are critical of King and his nonviolence doctrine were the younger generations. They tended to lean more militantly, more in Malcolm X's direction. And then in white America, with white Americans, he was basically never popular during his lifetime, at least with the majority of white Americans.

5:30Yeah, I mean, and we know this because, you know, they did polls back then. There were Gallup polls that found in 1963 through 1966 each year found that fewer than 40 percent of white Americans viewed Martin Luther King Jr. favorably. So one of the other things that didn't help besides his work in the, you know, in civil rights was his stance on Vietnam and the war in Vietnam. He was always against it, but really changed his stance in 1967, started being really, really vocal about it as far as publicly condemning the war, started leading anti-war marches, giving speeches against the war. One very famous one was Beyond Vietnam, colon, A Time to Break the Silence, a speech he gave in New York City at Riverside Church in April, actually exactly one year, April 4th, 1967, before his murder.

6:24And it was a very controversial speech because it was his most adamant anti-war, anti-Vietnam speech yet. And he specifically called out America and the U.S. military by sending a disproportionate number of, you know, kind of poor black American boys to fight that war. Yeah. And so this is it's really hard to overstate how controversial the speech was. Like he just stopped mincing words and came out and said everything that needed to be said. And so his alliance with Lyndon Bain Johnson, who was president at the time, was just shattered right then. LBJ stepped away from him, publicly broke with him.

7:02I think Laura helps us out with this. She found 168 newspapers, issued editorials denouncing him for that speech. so that like he was already not super popular with white americans he his popularity was so-so with black americans and all americans were now mad at him for his stance on vietnam or a ton of them were and then one of the other things that really proved to be very difficult for him later in his life later in his career was he shifted focus from strictly civil rights for black americans to economic justice for poor Americans of all races. He created something called the Poor People's Campaign, came up with an economic bill of rights that is essentially pretty socialist, I mean, at its core.

7:58And he also basically said, like, this campaign is also going to be a shift, not just in focus, but in potency. Like, we're not going to be quite as peaceful as we were before. We're not going to go Malcolm X, like full on militant. But we're you can expect, you know, I think he famously said 15 to 16 percent more militancy. Right. Yeah. And, you know, this ship. So he already had, you know, people coming at him from all sides. And now even within his own camp, they didn't love it either. His advisers and his staff didn't love this change of direction. so you know by the time April of 1968 rolls around he's exhausted he's tired he's got people coming at him from every angle even within his own camp and he just wasn't at his peak personally or with his career.

8:52Right so Chuck do you want to take a break now? Yeah we've set the stage with where King was and we'll come back and then set the stage with Memphis and where Memphis was well It was in Tennessee, but how Memphis was in April 1968.

9:32Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been unimaginable without AI, and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people.

10:08Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents in small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

10:38So in the spring of 1968, Memphis, Tennessee, which had previously prided itself on its white community and black communities, kind of, you know, fairly getting along, especially compared to some other places like places in Alabama. it was by this time in high tension as a town. And it was largely because of the Memphis sanitation workers' strike. MLK became very interested in helping further the goals of the Memphis sanitation workers in their strike because he basically saw this as like, this is a perfect bridge between this transition from a focus just on civil rights to this larger focus on poor people of all colors.

11:22because like this was mostly almost exclusively black sanitation workers who were struggling for recognition of their work, dignity in their work, decent wages. Apparently, if you were a full-time sanitation worker in Memphis, you were still eligible for food stamps after your full salary. And he was like, this is exactly the perfect kind of thing that I'm trying to get across. Like, this is important. So he kind of focused on Memphis in the spring of 1968. And like I said, it was in a state of high tension because a couple of protests, marches, essentially, to support the workers had not really gone really well previously.

12:09Yeah, but before these marches, there was, you know, there was already a strike going on. It just wasn't, you know, full throttle at this point. What would really kick that into gear were the very tragic deaths of two sanitation workers, Echo Cole and Robert Walker. They were crushed to death. Their truck malfunctioned. They were trying to take shelter from the rain and were crushed by the truck. And the city didn't pay any compensation to their families at all. So this is what really kind of triggered the mass walk off the job. Almost all the workers, black sanitation workers, went on strike at the time.

12:46And King was like, all right, I got to get to Memphis. It's in trouble. It's an opportunity for me as well, like you said, to sort of help me segue into this other movement. And there were a couple of different marches. On March 28th, he led a march of 5 ,000 people through Memphis. And almost right away, it turned violent, not by his hand, but it was a group called the Invaders. It was a militant group of young African-Americans who were not on board with King. They were not on board with nonviolence, obviously. And they started looting. They started breaking windows in stores. Police came in.

13:25And, you know, we all know the drill at this point. People scatter. Police are beating people, shooting at people. There was a 16-year-old named Larry Payne that was shot and killed by a police officer named Leslie Dean Jones. 60 people injured, and then all of a sudden Memphis is under curfew, and close to 4 ,000 National Guardsmen are brought in. Yeah, and this was on the heels of another march the month before in February, where protesters, including some ministers who were marching, were maced by police. So Memphis just basically almost like throwing a switch went from a generally okay city, as far as race relations were concerned to like the National Guard is now here keeping order in like a month.

14:13It just changed that quickly. And because he was leading the march on March 28th, King became totally, I don't want to say obsessed, but he was fully zeroed in on returning to Memphis to set things right. Because that was a huge black eye against him, his career, and in particular, his whole doctrine of nonviolence. And again, like the invaders were not related to what was going on. They essentially used this as a chance to mix things up. And King just basically wanted to go give it another try and hopefully restore his reputation, hopefully restore the reputation of the civil rights movement he was leading.

15:00And he put everything on the line to go back to Memphis and try it again. Because it could have gone wrong again, and that would have really damaged things even further. A lot of his advisors were like, we don't need to go back to Memphis. Like, we have a trip to Africa scheduled, and like, let's just follow through and we'll leave it behind us. And he was like, no, we have to go back. So we actually canceled that Africa trip. and brought everyone back to Memphis. And he got back there on April 3rd. And that evening, he gave what's been known today as his I've been to the mountaintop speech. I believe it was his final speech.

15:40Gave it at the Mason Temple Church in Memphis. And it was a pretty significant speech, as you can imagine. I mean, basically everyone's aware of this. But in it, he recounts in a previous assassination attempt that I had never heard of, had you? Yeah, from visiting the museums, but it's certainly not something that I don't think is like super widely known. Right. Well, so he was signing a book at a department store when he was stabbed in a chest by a mentally ill woman named Zola Curry, stabbed in the chest with a seven-inch letter opener. And Zola Curry was convinced that civil rights organizations like MLKs were tracking her, had singled her out, and were tracking her, preventing her from getting employment, just generally messing with her life.

16:30And the papers all reported that the surgeon who treated MLK, obviously he survived, was that the letter opener came so close to his heart that had he sneezed, it would have penetrated his aorta and killed him. So he really lucked out. And he talked about this in his I've Been to the Mountaintop speech. But the thing that most people remember about it is that he, in a way, almost predicted his death the following day at the end of the speech. Yeah, I mean, I'll go ahead and read it. He talked about not being around. He said, like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place.

17:08But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And he's allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land. So a definite sort of eerie thing to happen the night before his murder. Yeah, and I've read that some people are like he was he felt like that death was close, that he didn't have much time left. So it makes sense that he would have put that in. I don't think he expected to be murdered the next day, but he he just I read that he sensed that he he was not going to live much longer.

17:46Yeah, I mean, he had seen what happened with Kennedy, obviously what happened with Robert Kennedy afterward. But yeah, it was those kind of things, you know, very sadly were just much more common back then. Yeah, I was thinking about that and just like living in an era of assassinations, like successful assassinations of prominent political figures, one of whom was the president at the time. I just that's just nuts that America went through that period. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, King, Malcolm X, the two Kennedys. Yeah, it's just a very fraught, fraught time in our history for sure. For sure. So he's back in town to hold a march to set the previous march right.

18:27And one of the things he had to do was get the invaders on board with not doing this again. So at the Lorraine Motel, he was actually meeting with them. One of the things he did there was meet with them and negotiate a deal where like, hey, you guys don't turn this thing violent. and they said, okay, we can do that. Give us some money, give us some cars and give us a little more influence and we'll do that. So they were negotiating that. The march was actually planned for April 4th and this is one of those sort of sliding doors thing. It was actually put on hold because the city got an injunction to stop it from a federal court.

19:07And if that hadn't happened and he would have been marching on April 4th, perhaps James Earl Ray would have continued to sort of pursue King because as we'll see, he had been following him around for about a month or maybe not. Maybe that assassination never happens. But because of that injunction, the march was delayed from April 4th. King stayed in town to go to court to help appeal that injunction, was in court on April 4th through the day. and then late that afternoon the judges said, all right, we can do this march. It'll be next Monday. And King, so late that afternoon the judges said, all right, the march can go forward, but it's going to go forward next Monday.

19:51So that day on April 4th, it was the evening. It turns out Bono got it wrong in that song Pride because he says early morning. Did you know they corrected it? Did they? Yeah, I never listened to much of it, but they put out reimaginings of a bunch of their songs called Songs of Surrender. And like you said, it was early morning, April 4th, Shot Rings Out in the Memphis Sky, and the song Pride in the Name of Love. And he changed it to In the Evening, April 4th. Well, yes, that's much more accurate because that's when it happened. King had just been grinding away in Memphis for two days by then.

20:29And he was staying in room 306 of the now very famous Lorraine Motel. That was the room that he usually took anytime he and his people were in Memphis. They stayed at the Lorraine Hotel because it was a black-owned business and had been owned by Walter Bailey and his wife Lori since the 1940s. It was listed in the Green Book even. It was just a black-owned business and it was a nice hotel to stay in. And by the time the late afternoon, early evening rolled around, And MLK was late for a dinner at the Reverend Billy Kyle's house in Memphis. And they all started to leave to head to Billy Kyle's house for dinner.

21:11And he stepped outside of his room and onto the balcony. And he was speaking down to some other members of his group. I think he told one of them to start the car. And a shot did ring out and it hit MLK in the face. yeah um sort of in the chin and jaw area and the neckline um there were there's that very famous photograph uh of um the people you know his his group standing on the on the balcony uh i think like three guys are pointing across mulberry street which ran between the lorraine motel and the um what was it the bessie what boarding house bessie brewer's boarding house yeah bessie brewer's boarding house and they were like, that's where the shot came from.

21:55The picture was taken by a South African photographer named Joseph Lau, L-O-U-W, became one of the most famous, you know, photographs in American history, of course. And the gentleman kneeling, attending to King, trying to do whatever he could, that was a guy named Merrill McCullough. And he was an undercover cop who had infiltrated the invaders. So, just by chance, he was on hand as an undercover cop there, and he's the one that's kneeling, kind of trying to tend to King. Again, he was shot at 601, was alive, even at the hospital, barely, but he died just an hour later. He's pronounced dead at the age of 39 at 7.05 p.m.

22:45Yeah. And a doctor named Jerry T. Francisco was the medical examiner at Shelby County at the time, and he conducted an autopsy. And he concluded that Martin Luther King was killed by a gunshot wound to the chin and neck with the total transaction of the lower cervical and upper thoracic spinal cord and other structures of the neck. I read somewhere that Martin Luther King probably didn't even hear the shot that killed him. It just hit him so fast. It was shot from a high-powered rifle close enough by that he just wouldn't have heard it. And I was thinking it was possible that he died almost instantly.

23:35Had you read that he was still alive for a period, like when he got to the hospital? Yeah, he was apparently just hanging on. You know, he was alive in the ambulance. He was alive, I think, shortly after he got to the hospital. Well, hopefully he was completely unconscious at the time. So, I mean, it's my hope that he just never knew what hit him or anything hit him. Yeah, I didn't realize that. Yeah, I thought he probably died instantly. Yeah, but when Francisco, that doctor, you know, he described the gunshot wound, But he didn't fully dissect the path of the bullet. He said he did that because he didn't want to deform the body any further.

24:17But that, of course, would help out later with conspiracy theories as far as not having a full accounting of the path of the bullet, which we'll get into all that, I believe, in part two. Yeah. But right after the shooting, like literally the minutes right afterward, there were two men in that boarding house who saw a guy leaving with a suitcase and like a blanket bundled up that had a bunch of stuff in it big enough to where it could have held a rifle. And what happened was, well, there was another witness that said they saw a man passing. I don't know how it's pronounced. K-A-N-I-P-E. Canipe or canip?

24:58Knieps. That's what I'm going with. Okay, Knieps Amusement Company. And just drop this bundle on the front door of the store. There's a picture of it if you look that up. And you can kind of see the rifle poking out even. And that's what they found. They found some aftershave. They found a portable radio. They found some brand-new binoculars, a couple of cans of beer, and precisely a 30-06 Remington 760 Game Master rifle with a scope, which is a hunting rifle. It's kind of a unique gun in that it's a long-range rifle that's a pump-action rifle, which usually they are bolt-action rifles. Oh, I didn't know that.

25:42Yeah, that is fairly unique. So, yeah, that's pretty specific. At the boarding house, too, at Bessie Brewer's boarding house, People who were staying there later told police that they heard people, or at least someone, maybe going back and forth to the bathroom. This is a boarding house, so obviously there was a shared bathroom rather than a bathroom in each room. And somebody kept going to the bathroom, hanging out in the bathroom, coming out of the bathroom, going back to the bathroom. And the cops who investigated found scuff marks in the bathtub, obviously left by somebody's shoes. And the bathtub was where you would have had to have stood to see out the window to have a shot at Martin Luther King on the balcony.

26:29So the people in the boarding house heard MLK's assassin. The question was who it was. And obviously we know now it was James Earl Ray, but at the time they didn't realize that. Also, like two minutes later, the shooting had been radioed into the police. And just five minutes later, at 6.08, the owner of that amusement company told police that he saw a white man running through the alley and, like, actually saw him drop that bundle and then flee the scene in a white Ford Mustang. Yeah. We'll talk about the investigation and everything like that in part two. But I say we take our second break and come back and talk about what happened after MLK died.

27:14Thank you.

27:44I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses.