Film tells King's story, alongside his killer's
Storms raged in Memphis on April 3, 1968. Holed up in the Lorraine Motel, the night off from garbage strike demonstrations that Martin Luther King Jr. might have fancied was cut short by Ralph Abernathy’s phone call summoning him to hurry over to Mason Temple to speak to the packed house that braved the winds, thunder and lightning for a chance to be inspired.
In one of his most famous speeches, hours before the shot was fired, King vibrated with honesty, telling the crowd it didn’t matter if some “sick white brother” struck him down and stole his chance at longevity. “I may not get there with you,” he sang in his hallmark preacher’s cadence, “but we as a people will get to the promised land.”
"In some fateful way, he resigned himself to it that night," filmmaker Stephen Ives said. "He was preaching his own eulogy."
Ives and author Hampton Sides worked in tandem to produce two accounts of the events that brought James Earl Ray and Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis. Sides' book, "Hellhound on His Trail," was released April 27 and Ives' film, "Roads to Memphis," airs Monday night on PBS.Ives recently spoke about the challenges of joining the two men into one story.
Q: Why did you omit the assassination conspiracy theories?
A: Hampton and I are utterly and completely convinced that James Earl Ray did it. There's never been enough proof to make me believe that any of these other stories are truly credible. In the end, they collapse under their own weight. I'm interested in why Americans feel the need for conspiracies. I think it gets at the struggle we all have to accept the fact that such a great figure can be brought down by such an insignificant person. A great crime needs to have a great conspiracy to make sense. That's what it comes down to. I don't have a high enough opinion of our government to believe they could have pulled something like this off.
Q: Most members of the King family don’t believe Ray did it. Did you contact them for the project?
A: Ray was a master of misdirection and playing people for fools. I think over time he was able to convince even the King family that he didn't do it. If I was a member of the King family, I can't imagine a group of people more justifiably suspicious of the government after what J. Edgar Hoover did to them and to King in his lifetime. We understood that most of the family is of the opinion that Ray is innocent. I fully support them in having that opinion. But since we were not embracing the conspiracy debate in our film, it didn't seem relevant to go and talk to them.
Q: What about this story still resonates today?
A: I wish it wasn't as topical a film as it is. But I feel the same violent crosscurrents are very much roiling the surface of American society right now. And it's as deeply disturbing today as it was then. Ray worked on the political campaign of George Wallace and was swept up in Wallace's rhetoric and coded language, which is a racist message and was not hard to decipher. It concerns me deeply that members of Congress are receiving death threats for passing a vote on a piece of legislation. Or that people are being encouraged to bring assault weapons to political rallies. I feel everyone on all sides of the political spectrum should be doing whatever they can to avoid stoking violent fantasies because it's not inconceivable for there to be another James Earl Ray out there, waiting for the switch to flip, and do something that would change history.
"Roads to Memphis" 9 p.m. Monday on Georgia Public Broadcasting and 8 p.m. Thursday on PBA 30. "Andrew Young: A Conversation" follows at 10:30 p.m. Monday on GPB.
