Growing Up King (29 page)

H
ow did not just the life but also the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., my father, define not just me, my brother, sisters,
cousins, and our generation, but also the whole of a generation behind us, the whole of the hip-hop nation? How can that be,
when there was no hip-hop nation in 1968?

Oh, but there was a hip-hop nation in 1968. The whole continuum of fashion, music, film, videos, canvas artistry, advertising,
and whatever helps define that generation after ours, was already being influenced by the actions of the children of 1968,
who would become their parents.

It gleamed in the eyes of the youth of all denominations, combed up and Vaselined down, flirting with their eyes while filing
down the rain-slicked street into the fortress of Mason Temple, behind the Fowler Homes housing project, south of downtown
Memphis, on a rainy April night of that year. The hiphop nation, who would be in their twenties and early thirties in the
year 2000, were the future children of the children then filing into Mason Temple.

Mason Temple is world headquarters of the Pentecostals—Church of God in Christ. It all comes out of the church—music, activism,
social gospel, culture—all from the influence of the black church. It often takes a form of music. In
Parting the Waters,
author Taylor Branch sensed it: “The spirit of the songs could sweep up the crowd, and the young leaders realized that through
song they could induce humble people to say and feel things that were otherwise beyond them.” On Wednesday, April 3, 1968,
youth of an R&B and gospel world joined the aged, coming by bus, car, and foot to hear my father. And what he gave them was
knowledge.

[If] the Almighty said to me, “Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?” I would take my mental flight by
Egypt [
“Yeah”
], and I would watch God’s children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather, across the
Red Sea, through the wilderness, on toward the Promised Land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn’t stop there. [
“All right”
]

I would move on by Greece, and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides, and Aristophanes
assembled around the Parthenon [
Applause
], and I would watch them around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality. But I wouldn’t stop
there. [
“Oh yeah”
]

… I would even go by the way that the man for whom I’m named had his habitat, and I would watch Martin Luther as he tacks
his ninety-five theses on the door at the church of Wittenberg. But I wouldn’t stop there. [
“All right”
]

I would come on up even to 1863 and watch a vacillating president by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion
that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. But I wouldn’t stop there. [
“Yeah.” Applause
]

I would even come up to the early thirties and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation, and
come with an eloquent cry that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” But I wouldn’t stop there. [
“All right”
]

Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty and say, “If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the
twentieth century, I will be happy.” [
Applause
]

… Well, I don’t know what will happen now; we’ve got some difficult days ahead. [
“Amen”
] But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. [
“Yeah.” Applause
] And I don’t mind. [
Applause continues
] Like anybody, I would like to live a long life—longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want
to do God’s will. [
“Yeah”
] And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. [
“Go ahead”
] And I’ve looked over [
“Yes sir”
], and I’ve seen the Promised Land. [
“Go ahead”
] I may not get there with you. [
“Go ahead”
] But I want you to know tonight [
“Yes”
], that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. [
Applause, “Go ahead, go ahead”
] And so I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the
coming of the Lord. [
Applause
]

Listen to all of that speech sometime. It covered the entire social fabric of the time. Then it was over. And then… pandemonium.
Fast-forward past him exiting Room 306 at the Lorraine at approximately 6
P.M
. the next afternoon, standing on the balcony, about to go back in the room for his coat, past the report of a single rifle
shot; then past infernos, and sirens everywhere; Bobby Kennedy shot in L.A.; Afros blooming, braiding, locking; Ali saying,
“I ain’t got nothing against them Viet Congs”; Uncle A.D., an expert swimmer, drowning; Jimi Hendrix showing “The Star-Spangled
Banner” could be done in amplified electric;
Superfly, The Godfather,
and
The Mack
all written, shot, or released within nine months of each other in ’72; my blessed grandmother, shot down from the pulpit
of my church where I grew up; George Clinton stepping out of a silk and wool double-vented suit and tie in the mid-’60s, cutting
the conk off his head, and becoming godfather of a new grooved nation—Puff Daddy’s daddy. No one has yet covered Clinton’s
“(I Wanna) Testify” (1967). James Earl Ray always did say he wanted to hum along to that.

The Staple Singers and Mavis (favorites of Daddy’s) came from gospel into secular with a purpose, a cause, with “Respect Yourself,”
then “I’ll Take You There” (1974). Their starchildren became the Winans, Kirk Franklin having church in “His Eye Is on the
Sparrow” and “Stomp.” “The Sweeter He Is (The Longer the Pain’s Gonna Hurt),” cried the Soul Children (1970); they begat BLACKstreet,
Jodeci—all out of the church. Louis Armstrong once told a videographer, “It all started in the sanctified church; how you
gonna get away from it? That’s where the beat started.”

Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” A seminal question coming out of assassinations, like Daddy’s, out of conflict like the Civil
Rights Movement, like the Vietnam War. Rafael Saddiq of the hiphop nation could sing “I Been Thinking of You” because Al Green,
Reverend Al, sang it from the pulpit of his church in Memphis; Green sang after my father was shot, “How Can You Mend A Broken
Heart?” Missy Elliott broke out in ’97 with “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),” beating a rhythmic raindrop, yodeling the hook. After
he was shot, a preacher’s child, Ann Peebles, all of four foot ten, kicked the same hook over the same raindrop, over the
same yodel, but not as hard a bottom line. Ann sang it hard in Memphis, in ’71: “I Can’t Stand the Rain.” I did my research.
I went to Memphis as a man. I saw. The Sound is what you can use. The Sound is what I shared with Memphis. The Sound was in
it, and in me. Only the Sound is there. That’s all that has to be there. Just the Way. Music is the Way. It holds the message.

I can’t stand the ra-in… ’gainst my window… bringing back sweet memories…

From mountaintop into the valley. The straight-up-don’t-give-a-damn-no-more attitude of mass creativity and material confusion—all
the Big Wave of hip-hop, from its saddest to its most materialistic and nihilistic forms—was born after our father Martin
Luther King, Jr., was shot!

The Sound began when Afrika Bambaataa scratched it up in the Bronx in the late ’70s. I had tried to take it into deejaying.
Deejaying had a purpose. The Sound was philosophy, the artists philosophers. So the Sound, it’s always there for me—for us.
But the Sound was not the reason.

The reason, the stimulus, the jump-start that began all the Noise of Big Wave hip-hop, can be traced back to Memphis, where
a luckless man with no skills named James Earl Ray is said to have brought down a great man who was my father. James Earl
Ray, who could screw up boiling water; James Earl Ray, who was uncomfortable in the military, not a trained sharpshooter,
who had never drawn down on a person before with a rifle in his life that we know of or that was ever proved; James Earl Ray,
escaped con doing time in Missouri for a $150 grocery store knockover, who later said he bought a rifle on orders from a man
named Raul, who supposedly had connections with the Mafia’s Memphis branch; James Earl Ray, who woke up screaming one night
at age ten because he thought he’d lost his eyesight (the room was dark), whose prison warden said he was “fearful,” who fellow
inmates called “Trembler.” After a lifetime of failure, you mean to tell me that completely on his own James Earl Ray pulled
off a skilled expert sniper’s shot—one shot only—that blew off our father’s jawbone, severed his spinal column, and broke
thirty million hearts that kept living, giving birth, making music? All that’s happened since is the same thing, over and
over again—the best hooks sung, the good brothers shot, over and over again. Somebody had to try to interrupt that deadly
cycle. Somebody had to say or do something. Or it would just be the same thing, over and over, until somebody confronted what
happened and asked, “Why?” And maybe “How?”

It began with my initial face-to-face contact with Dr. William Pepper, which came in February of ’97, with Isaac and Phil.
My first encounter via correspondence was probably ’95, when he had sent
Orders to Kill
to each one of my family members individually with letters saying, “I would like you to consider what I’ve written here.
I really want an opportunity to bring the truth out, to bring it to life.”

At that point, I think nobody could get beyond the fact that though he’d known and worked with our father, he was still Ray’s
lawyer. He’d written a book about the assassination, in that respect possibly being no different from Ray’s first lawyer,
Arthur Hanes, who authorized a book called
He Slew the Dreamer,
by William Bradford Huie. Huie and Hanes had a deal. Huie didn’t want Ray to even testify in his own defense because it would
take away from Ray’s comments in the book. This paved the way for the next lawyer, Percy Foreman, who put down Hanes and then
cut his own deal with Huie after Ray dumped Hanes and brought him in. Foreman insisted that Ray plead guilty.

Later on, there were several more books about my father’s assassination. Dozens of them, actually. Mark Lane, another of Ray’s
lawyers, Taylor Branch, and even Dick Gregory, wrote about it. Ray also had many lawyers over the years. All along, I don’t
think we focused on it very much because we were unconsciously not ready to deal with it. Then that blue-green laser light
hit me on the balcony of the Lorraine, and I had this feeling that I wanted to know. Why? How? Who?

At first, we hadn’t responded to Pepper, feeling we should “just leave it alone.”

Fast-forward to December ’96; Ray went into the hospital for liver disease and entered a coma. Immediately we started getting
calls from the media. Over the years, every time something would happen with Ray, we would get some type of call from the
media. Like when he was stabbed in prison and almost killed. Okay, well you’re a victim, the victimizer is in prison and something
has happened to him, how does that make you feel? In this case, it was “James Earl Ray is in the hospital and there’s a chance
he may die. Any comment? Do you believe Ray actually killed your father?” This question I remember being asked almost all
my life.

I hadn’t been there. I was seven years old at the time. So what was I expected to say?

We took the standard approach—“No comment.” We really didn’t deal with it. Then Ray would recuperate for a time. Three weeks
later he’d have a relapse and go back in. Every time that happened, we got a call—not a call, we got bombarded with calls.

I was traveling, on vacation, down to Negril in Jamaica. I happened to call in, and it probably was a mistake to call in and
check my messages; I had a number on there. It was a
New York Times
reporter who said, “We’re trying to reach you because we have been contacted by the Ray family behind the scenes, off the
record.” They were making a plea, they wanted to make an appeal to my family; their loved one was about to die; while they
know it’s awkward that they never bothered in the past, they feel it’s now or never, but would we please consider making a
statement in support of a new trial for James Earl Ray so that his guilt or his innocence could be fairly determined once
and for all?

The Atlanta bureau chief of the
New York Times
had interviewed me in the past, which is how he got my pager number. I had to respond. Now it went beyond just “No comment.”
I spoke to a woman reporter, following up. The bureau chief was out of the office. I said I’d run it by my family, but to
bear with me, because I was traveling overseas. My brother and sisters were traveling; getting everybody on one call would
take some doing; be patient, I’ll get back.

My brother and sisters and mother and I had a conference call and took a consensus. I went around to everybody and asked,
“What do you think?” Bernice was indifferent. She said, “God will judge, brother.” But Yolanda said, “… I’ve been wanting
to know, Dexter. I feel like we should know what happened. And why.” She sounded expectant. Never have I loved her more or
felt more powerless to comfort her. Long ago she was exasperated with me for asking why. Now…