A Memoir of Injustice: By the Younger Brother of James Earl Ray, Alleged Assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr
480
A Memoir of Injustice: By the Younger Brother of James Earl Ray, Alleged Assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr
480eBook
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Overview
Including previously undisclosed information on one of the most significant and mysterious events in modern American history, this account debunks the myth that James Earl Ray was a racist and documents his actual location on one of the critical days leading up to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The memoir also reveals photographs of James Earl Ray when he was ill in prison and gives the key to a code used by the brothers in planning a prison break. Presenting a mesmerizing perspective on the manipulation of the media in reporting on race relations, the working middle class, and the U.S. criminal justice system, this account broadcasts an urgent call to action to correct some of the many injustices that surround these events, such as the U.S. government's refusal to rigorously test the alleged murder weapon, and encourages support for new federal legislation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781936296613 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Trine Day |
| Publication date: | 02/19/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 480 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Memoir of Injustice
By the Younger Brother of James Earl Ray, Alleged Assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr.
By Jerry Ray
Trine Day LLC
Copyright © 2011 Jerry Ray; Tamara CarterAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-936296-62-0
CHAPTER 1
Dirt Poor – But Not Trash
People have been after me to do this book for more than thirty years now, and they often ask, "Jerry, why did you wait so long?" Well, I have been attempting to write my story since 1997. However, I experienced various obstacles along the way, including expired contracts, corrupt/suspicious writers, loss of interest in the book and changes in plans, etc. In 2008, I turned to Tamara Carter. The reason I wanted her to write my book is that she is very familiar with the case of my brother Jimmy [James Earl Ray]. There are very few people that I can count on and that I trust; Tamara is one of them.
I'm not asking for personal sympathy, or for you to like my brother Jimmy. I simply want to tell my story in order to expose the injustice and set the record straight. I ask only that you assess the information for yourself and draw your own conclusions. With that said, I'll begin where it all started.
* * *
In the early 1920s, my dad, George E. Ray, was convicted of burglary and sentenced to two to ten years. He was incarcerated at Iowa State Prison in Fort Madison, Iowa. It wasn't like it is now – with prisoners claiming guard brutality and civil liberties groups investigating charges of misconduct. No-no, back then it was hard time. They would tie you up and work you over if you were guilty of any kind of infraction of the rules – and sometimes just for the plain ol' hell of it. After about two years, Dad made parole. Since he was from Keokuk, Iowa, that's where he was paroled. However, Dad was intent on making sure he didn't go back to that hellhole of a prison, so he left the State of Iowa, which automatically violated his parole. To the best of my knowledge, my dad never again returned to Iowa.
Shortly afterwards, around 1926, Dad met my mom, Lucille Maher, in Alton, Illinois. I'm not sure exactly why he went to Alton; I just know that's where he met my mother. Anyway, they got married soon after they met, took a short honeymoon to Florida, and returned to Alton to set up house. On March 10, 1928, Mom and Dad had their first child, a boy they named James Earl, the eldest of nine. He was named after my paternal grandfather, James Ray, and my uncle, Earl Ray, my dad's younger brother. Little did my parents know what the future had in store for little James Earl. My family called my brother Jimmy, not James Earl. The media used his full given name while reporting on the King assassination and they continue to do so. But to me, he was not James Earl Ray; he was my brother – Jimmy. After Jimmy came eight more children.
We moved around often back then. Our first move took us from Alton to Quincy, Illinois. The move was the result of my Dad making a shady deal with a local corn farmer. They were supposed to split the profits fifty/fifty, but my dad took the whole thing. The farmer called the sheriff to arrest my old man. When the sheriff arrived and attempted to arrest my dad, Mom told the sheriff that Dad was Uncle Earl, and that George Ray was not home. The sheriff believed her. Being a parole violator – something the local police didn't know about yet – and in trouble again, Dad figured it was best for the family to leave Alton. So, we moved to Quincy, Illinois where my grandparents, James and Lillian Ray, lived.
I was the fourth born child, coming into this world on July 16, 1935 in Quincy, Illinois. When I was about three months old, the family moved to Ewing, Missouri, about twenty miles from Quincy. We lived there from 1935 to 1944, and then moved again. In a period of only about two and a half years, we moved from Ewing to Quincy, to Galesburg [Illinois], to Hamil [Illinois], to Adams [Illinois], and back to Quincy. My dad being a parole violator and a fugitive on the run forced our family to be on the move constantly. The insecurities resulting from that unstable lifestyle no doubt contributed to us boys later getting involved in a life of crime.
In fact, my dad not only moved us frequently, but changed his last name, as well. First he changed it from Ray to Raynes (sometimes spelled Rayns), and later to Ryan. When they were ducking the authorities, my brothers Jimmy and John used Rayns quite a bit as an alias. In fact, the oldest four kids were born under the name Ray, the next three under Raynes, and the last two under Ryan. My dad was always changing his last name to evade authorities – so they wouldn't locate him. He had the letters JR tattooed on his arm, so he always selected aliases with those initials. In those days, if you wanted to change your identity, you could move to a different location and use almost any name you wanted to – as long as you didn't get into trouble and draw unnecessary attention to yourself. You couldn't do that now, though. If you apply for any form of identification or credit or open a bank account these days, they want to know everything about you.
A few years after we moved to Ewing, my sister Margie, about six years old at the time, was playing with matches and caught her dress on fire. Mom jumped on her and tried to put out the fire, but Margie was burned badly. They rushed her to the hospital in Quincy but, unfortunately, she died a few days later.
The other big tragedy for our family in those years involved my younger brother Frank who was killed in a car wreck in 1963 at the age of 19. What I remember most about Frank was that his favorite signer was Roy Orbison, and I liked Orbison too. That's about the time I started listening to country music instead of rock: Ray Price, Webb Pierce – singers like that.
Growing up in Missouri, we raised almost everything we ate and drank: dairy cows, chickens, tomatoes, and potatoes. My dad got a job with the Works Progress Administration, known as the WPA, for short. The WPA, created by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) as a part of his New Deal program, provided jobs and income to the unemployed during the Great Depression in the United States. My dad brought home only a few dollars, however, and we barely got by. But, it wasn't only my family. Almost all families back then had it rough. After all, my early years in Ewing, Missouri were right after the Depression. I've read where my family once lived in a house with a dirt floor. I can't say for sure that I remember us living in a house with a dirt floor, but neither am I going to deny the possibility.
Our life in Missouri was simple, poor, and ordinary for a small town in America. One other aspect of it is crucial to mention, however: it was totally white.
Although I now know that the Ku Klux Klan [KKK] was rampant throughout America during the 1930s and 1940s, I don't remember even once seeing or hearing about them during my childhood years, much less having been influenced by them. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, April 4, 1968, a lot of puppet writers for the government, including George McMillan, a writer in the service of official government agencies. I had a lot of contact with him over the years and I became deeply familiar with his distortions and outright fabrications. He tried to portray my family as a bunch of whiskey-guzzling, cross-burning racists who hated everybody who wasn't white – blacks, Jews, Latinos, anybody. Although these bogus allegations had no basis in fact, they were hatched by certain writers to convince the gullible public that Jimmy (James Earl Ray, as they called him) had been raised in a bigoted environment, had evolved into a racist because of it, and had killed King because of those racist views.
During the first nine years of my life while living in Ewing, Missouri, I never saw a single black person – not one. In Ewing, all the kids in school were white; all the stores in town were run by white people; and the only people patronizing the stores were whites. The only time I or anybody in my family ever saw a black person during those early years was when we would go to Quincy, about twenty miles away, to visit my grandparents, which was very seldom. As I've said over the years since the King assassination, how could we have hatred for a group of people we never were around? If my family harbored any racist sentiments, prejudice or hatred when I was growing up, it would had to have been against whites because they were the only people we had any personal contact with back then. And, on top of that, my mother's favorite athlete was Joe Louis – black – and Jimmy's favorite athlete was Hank Greenberg – Jewish.
I started my schooling in Ewing, Missouri and ended it at the Sheridan Reformatory in Sheridan, Illinois. You could get a high school diploma at a reformatory, but I never did get my high school diploma. I made it through elementary school and finished one year of high school. I'm pretty sure that Jimmy finished the tenth grade. I know that Susan finished high school, and maybe Carol did too. I'm not that certain about the education level of the rest of my brothers and sisters.
Looking back on my early years in Ewing, I recall that Jimmy and I were extra close. One of my strongest memories is that he, seven years older than I was, did a lot of things that most big brothers do for their little brothers. The thing about Jimmy, though, was that he never would show you his true feelings, his emotions. For example, he would come home with a candy bar and not offer me any at first. After just a little while, though, he would pull me off to the side and tell me that he didn't want the candy bar – hadn't even broken the wrapper – so he was going to let me have it. Even as a young kid, I knew that he'd purposely bought the candy for me, but he didn't want me to know that he had. I now realize that was his way of keeping an edge.
* * *
Over the years, many people – writers, reporters and the merely curious – have asked me what caused Jimmy, John and me to become involved in a life of crime. No doubt, living in virtual poverty, always on the move, and having to lie about your true name had its effect on us growing up. More than that, though, I feel that what caused us to choose the wrong side of the law back then were the people we hung around with. For example, in addition to our dad having served time in prison, my Uncle Earl was a hardcore criminal – a true badass – and he, no doubt, had an effect on us because we all looked up to him. He taught us boys not to take any shit from anybody, no matter how big or how bad, even if it meant getting your eyes stomped out of your head. Our parents did not encourage us, as kids, towards violence, especially starting it. We were only to fight when protecting ourselves. We were like a normal family back then. When I was in jail, I learned if you didn't fight back, you would be killed.
In addition, Quincy, Illinois was wide open and rather lawless when I was growing up – gambling, whorehouses, bootleg joints – every damn thing! It served as the perfect breeding ground for crime, and this environment seemed 'natural' to Jimmy and John and me because we grew up in it.
Cairo and Quincy, Illinois were often written about in magazines because of their reputation for rampant crime. Jimmy told me about going into those rough joints in Quincy with his namesake, Uncle Earl, who wasn't all that big, but he was wiry and had those steel-piercing eyes. As soon as he walked into a joint, it would get quiet as a mouse. Anybody with any sense knew that if he messed with Uncle Earl the wrong way, there would be a heavy price to pay. One of Jimmy's first ventures over to the wrong side of the law occurred when he tagged along with Uncle Earl to one of the whorehouses in Quincy and ended up running an errand for the madam of that place. Jimmy even mentions this in his book (Who Killed Martin Luther King? The True Story By the Alleged Assassin) because it made such a lasting impression on him.
In March 1946, Jimmy enlisted in the U.S. Army. Although I was only about eleven years old, I still remember it just as if it was yesterday because I missed him so much, and as close as we were. Jimmy did his basic training at a signal corps base near Joplin, Missouri and four months later, he was stationed in Bamberg, Germany, near Nuremberg.
I have a picture of Jimmy when he was home on leave from the Army. I am standing beside him and he is playfully pulling on my ear. In 1948 my brother Jimmy was discharged from the Army and returned to Quincy. I later found out that he had gotten into trouble for missing guard duty and had done time in the stockade. That incident had led to his discharge, which was neither an honorable, nor a dishonorable one – somewhere in between. Friends, family, everyone who knew Jimmy was surprised that he had been discharged from the military under those conditions. We all thought that if anybody in our family would amount to something, it would be Jimmy because he was so bright. Also, Jimmy wasn't a bad-looking guy. Women noticed him. Jimmy always took good care of himself by exercising and watching what he ate. He lectured me to stop smoking and soaking the suds.
After Jimmy was discharged from the Army, he returned home to Quincy for a while. There wasn't much going on there, however, and he was restless. As a result, he left Quincy and hoboed his way out to Los Angeles, California.
Los Angeles was where Jimmy first got into trouble with the authorities. As he later told me, about the only work he could find was day-to-day, jobs that were usually for migrant workers. Almost starving to death, Jimmy broke into a business office in Los Angeles and stole some office equipment. A day or two later, he was identified and arrested. Jimmy was ultimately convicted for that break-in and he served about four months in prison, from around December 1949 until March 1950.
However, none of the family saw Jimmy until around May of 1950 because he had to hobo his way back to Quincy from Los Angeles and it took him awhile. Hopping the trains was illegal back then. In fact, while Jimmy was on the rails from Los Angeles, he was arrested in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. As the train passed through Cedar Rapids, it made a stop and a deputy sheriff, specifically looking for hobos, spotted Jimmy and arrested him for having a suspicious roll of coins on him. Sure enough, Jimmy had broken into a restaurant and stolen the coins before he left Los Angeles. The authorities in Cedar Rapids, however, never could gather enough evidence to convict him. So, after about a month of detention, they had to release him. Being locked up in Cedar Rapids for a month lengthened the time it took Jimmy to get home.
* * *
Leroy Houston, Jim Baker and I were neighbors in Quincy and we were about the same age. The three of us lived just off Third Street and in those days, it was lined with taverns, gambling joints and whorehouses. We started committing strong-arm robberies together in the late forties. We were game for anything and everything, just poor boys trying to make some fast bucks here and there, any way we could. We'd catch a drunk coming out of one of those places, and if we thought we could physically handle him, we'd strong-arm him. We'd run up on him, grab him, drag him over to a side alley, knock him to the ground and take everything he had – money, watches, rings, whatever. If he was some big, rough-looking badass, though, we'd leave him alone, because we were fairly young and not yet all that big ourselves.
One of those robberies that I remember vividly was the one that Leroy and I did together, just the two of us. It happened at a place called the Cozy Inn, only about a block and a half from my house. The Cozy Inn had a small bar that held maybe about twelve to fifteen people. All the prostitutes would hang out at the bar. A "John" would walk in, have a drink with a prostitute of his choice, cut a deal with her, and take her back to one of the rooms right behind the bar and have sex with her. On this particular night it was cold as hell and I was wearing a pair of black gloves to keep my hands from freezing. Leroy and I snuck around to the outside window of the room where one of the 'Johns' and one of the prostitutes were getting it on. You could hear them grunting, breathing hard and the bedsprings creaking. The Venetian blinds on the window of their room were open enough to allow you to peak inside the room, so Leroy and I looked. The man and the prostitute were too busy to notice. We happened to see the man's pants hanging on the back of a chair, just a foot or so from the window. I had an idea....
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Memoir of Injustice by Jerry Ray. Copyright © 2011 Jerry Ray; Tamara Carter. Excerpted by permission of Trine Day LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Foreword Barry Bachrach 1
Preface Tamara Carter 7
Chapter 1 Dirt Poor-but Not Trash 13
Chapter 2 The Bloodiest 47 Acres in America 35
Chapter 3 Bigger Stakes 49
Chapter 4 Will the Real Raoul Please Stand Up! 63
Chapter 5 Stone Cold Stoner 99
Chapter 6 The Snitch & the Escape Artist 115
Chapter 7 Life and Death in Prison 123
Afterword Judge Joe Brown 133
Photographs 139
Bibliography 149
Index 155