'I'm Gonna Kill That Nigger King'

Some key excerpts from George McMillan's book on the assassination of Martin Luther King, to be published in the fall by Little, Brown:

Ray's Hatred for King

In 1963 and 1964 Martin Luther King was on TV almost every day, talking defiantly about how black people were going to get their rights, insisting that they would accept with nonviolence all the terrible violence that white people were inflicting on them, until the day of victory arrived, until they did overcome.

Ray watched it all avidly on the cell-block TV at Jeff City. He reacted as if King's remarks were directed at him personally. He boiled when King came on the tube. He began to call him Martin "Lucifer" King and Martin Luther "Coon." It got so that the very sight of King would galvanize Ray.

"Somebody's gotta get him," Ray would say, his face drawn with tension, his fists clenched. "Somebody's gotta get him."

In that atmosphere, inside Jeff City, it got so that talk about killing King seemed perfectly ordinary, something rather plausible, not at all unreasonable, certainly possible. Ray and [his fellow convict Raymond] Curtis would sit around, often high on speed, while Ray would spin out the details of how he would do the job ... Ray said he would have the place all set up, all lined up, then he would get his money, his papers. It was his idea to get plumb out of the country ...

There had been the time when Ray had thought there might be a bounty on King's head, and he said, in front of Curtis, about King, "You are my big one, and one day I will collect all that money on your ass, nigger, for you are my retirement plan." But as the months passed, Ray seemed to have given up caring about money, if he ever did consider it seriously, for he got so he would say, about King, "If I ever get to the streets, I am going to kill him."

Something on His Mind

On April 24,1967, just one day after Ray escaped from the prison at Jefferson City, he met his brothers Jack and Jerry in Chicago's Atlantic Hotel. Both brothers are ex-convicts too.

[Jimmy] had something on his mind ... They were about to get down to a reckoning of the money that was coming to Jimmy [funds he had sent out of prison], when he suddenly said, "I'm gonna kill that nigger King. That's something that's been on my mind. That's something I've been working on."

Actually, neither Jerry nor Jack was that much surprised. It was just like Jimmy to get an idea like that, so big, so grandiose. As far as the notion itself, [Jerry and Jack] could not have agreed more, at least as far as hating black people, hating liberals, Jews, but neither of them would have ever conceived of killing King ... [Jerry] told Jimmy flatly then and there that he would help him where he could, but he did not want to be in on that job ... [Jack's] reaction to Jimmy's news was one of unqualified pragmatism: "That's crazy! You can count me out of that deal. There ain't no money in killin' a nigger."

Trying to Help Wallace

On Aug. 22, 1967, Ray and his brother Jerry met again in a North Side Chicago hotel.

The two brothers agreed to keep in touch from this point on. They would write each other ... Jerry even promised that he would come to wherever Jimmy was if Jimmy needed him badly enough ... Jimmy was pleased to have a confidant, and Jerry was excited, fascinated by the chance to have even a secondhand view of something so big...

It took some of the loneliness out of both of their lives.

"Jimmy was going to Birmingham to take out citizenship papers [establish state residency] in Alabama," says Jerry. "He believed that if he killed King in Alabama or if he killed him anywhere in the South, it would help him if he showed he was a resident of Alabama ... Of course, if he killed King in Alabama, he believed Wallace would eventually pardon him, not at first but after a few years, when things had cooled off."

The presidential campaign of Alabama Governor George C. Wallace was beginning to be taken seriously outside the South. "Jimmy was getting caught up in the Wallace campaign," says Jerry. "He was talking as much that night in Chicago about getting Wallace in as he was about rubbing King out. He had it in his head that it would help Wallace if King wasn't around."

Admiring Hitler Jimmy had thought Hitler was right and President Roosevelt wrong about World War II ... To a young man like Jimmy, for whom so many things are unsettled, troubling, unresolved--not the least problem of which is his own personal sexual definition--Hitler was powerfully alluring ... The Nazis had a strong, decisive way of dealing with threats. They knew how to put an end to Jews, Negroes. The regimentation of Nazism was comforting; that everyone knew exactly who he was, where he belonged in the scheme of things, was reassuring to a young man whose family was always slipping and sliding around the borders of social class, a family more often than not collapsing into deviance and criminality. Besides, the Nazis were clean, not dirty, not lazy and not sex-ridden. Speedy [Ray's father] had once said that "niggers just lay around and f____ all the time."

A Merchant in Jeff City It is a misconception to assume that the status a man has in prison depends upon his status or rank as a criminal. It doesn't. The fact that James Earl Ray was a small-time criminal didn't keep him from becoming a "Merchant" [prison term for one who deals in contraband] in Jeff City ... [He] understood prison life, and he knew how to operate with "Big Shots," guards and other prisoners.

The history of Ray's illegal dealings as a Merchant in Jeff City has been very difficult to document. The prison authorities are not helpful. Just the opposite. They can no more admit that they have lost control of the prison, that the prisoners are running it, than they can fly to the moon.

[McMillan found two convicts, Bill Miles and Raymond Curtis, who had served sentences at the same time as Ray and who described some of Ray's activities as a Merchant.] "He was a peddler at Jeff City, all right," Curtis went on. "I've seen him work on a plan as long as 30 days to get a dozen eggs halfway across the prison yard. He stole many a case of eggs in his time, sold them for $1 a dozen, $30 a case ... Sometimes we made raisin jack, sometimes homemade beer. Ray supplied the yeast because he could get it in the bakery, where he worked, and I made the stuff..."

Curtis told me that to his knowledge Ray had used pills and amphetamines since he had first known him 15 years before. "At Jeff City he was in that business," Curtis said. "Him and another boy had the connection. Ain't but one way to get it in--the guard ... I can't use no names," said Curtis, "but Ray's connection was in the culinary, doing a life sentence. There was a lot of stuff in that prison ... One thing you could do is give a guard $100 to buy a plane ticket to St. Louis and pick [the drugs] up for you, or even $500 to go to Kansas City. A fella like Ray would end up paying about $750 a pound [for speed]. You may sell a whole pound to somebody for $3,500. With pills you make more.

You buy 1,000 for 500 apiece and sell them for $1 apiece ... I could give you the names of nine guards who worked with fellas like Ray."

Sending His Money Out

The guard with whom James Earl Ray had his connection ... took his share off the top and mailed the rest to one of the Ray family members, in plain envelopes that bore no return address. He sent it in $100 bills, wrapped in a piece of plain paper. He sent some to Jerry. It was addressed to Box 22, Wheeling, Ill. When Jerry got the money, he would write "O.K." on a piece of paper and mail it back.

A Motive to Kill

His ideas had come together. The idea JERRY RAY of killing King, the idea of working for a new political structure in America, were one ... By killing King, he would become an actor in the turbulent ideological drama of his times, the drama he had heretofore only watched on the cellblock TV. He saw how King's assassination could serve a larger political power by a single act performed by him. And he saw at the end of the road a hero's sanctuary, if he turned out to need a sanctuary, in several places, one of which was Rhodesia.

For him, by this tune, killing King was not a luxury. He needed the mission, he needed the concept of killing King to hold himself together. It gave him the cohesion he was utterly dependent on. It was not just a twisted ideal that led him on. It was a compulsive obsession, and he was having trouble sustaining it over the period of time he had set to accomplish his disparate plans ... Given the chain of circumstances of his life, killing King had become Ray's destiny.

On the Day of Murder

And now he made one last call from Memphis. It seems to have been on the morning of April 4 . Jerry was in Chicago, working in a suburban country club as a night watchman. It was in the morning, Jerry's off-time, that Jimmy phoned. "I don't know where he was in Memphis when he called," says Jerry ... "I guess he talked about two minutes ... Usually when he called, he talked, I talked. But not this time. If I tried to tell him anything, he wouldn't let me. He wasn't wanting any jokes or small talk that day. He was excited and all worked up. What he said was, 'Jerry, tomorrow it will all be over. I might not see you and Jack for a while. But don't worry about me. I'll be all right. Big Nigger has had it!'" [King was killed at 6:01 p.m. that day.]

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