Non-Fiction Interlude: MLK Assassination & Sides' Hellhound on His Trail

From today's BBC article "Long-lost video of Martin Luther King killer James Earl Ray unearthed:"

Long-lost video showing Martin Luther King's killer in police custody has been posted online, 45 years to the day after the civil rights leader's murder. 

Officials in Tennessee unearthed the tapes of James Earl Ray in 2011 but had no way to view the old technology. Ray is seen in 1968 on a plane after extradition from Britain and as he is searched and given a medical exam and a bulletproof vest at a Memphis jail. 

King, a Baptist minister, was shot in Memphis on 4 April 1968, at age 39. Ray, a racist drifter and theretofore bungling career criminal, was captured in London by Scotland Yard detectives on 8 June.

For a good non-fiction book about MLK and his assassination, try Hellhound on His Trail by Hampton Sides:

On April 23, 1967, Prisoner #416J, an inmate at the notorious Missouri State Penitentiary, escaped in a breadbox. Fashioning himself Eric Galt, this nondescript thief and con man—whose real name was James Earl Ray—drifted through the South, into Mexico, and then Los Angeles, where he was galvanized by George Wallace’s racist presidential campaign. 

On February 1, 1968, two Memphis garbage men were crushed to death in their hydraulic truck, provoking the exclusively African American workforce to go on strike. Hoping to resuscitate his faltering crusade, King joined the sanitation workers’ cause, but their march down Beale Street, the historic avenue of the blues, turned violent. Humiliated, King fatefully vowed to return to Memphis in April. 

With relentless storytelling drive, Sides follows Galt and King as they crisscross the country, one stalking the other, until the crushing moment at the Lorraine Motel when the drifter catches up with his prey. Against the backdrop of the resulting nationwide riots and the pathos of King’s funeral, Sides gives us a riveting cross-cut narrative of the assassin’s flight and the sixty-five-day search that led investigators to Canada, Portugal, and England—a massive manhunt ironically led by Hoover’s FBI.

Racist Alabama "Trial" & Feldman's Scottsboro

From yesterday's Guardian article "Scottsboro Boys pardon nears as Alabama comes to terms with its past:"

Sheila Washington vividly recalls the day she first learned about the terrible events that occurred in her small town in Alabama almost three decades before she was born. 

She was 17 years old and, rooting around for something beneath her bed, she discovered a dusty old book that bore the town's name in its title. Scottsboro Boy was a memoir by Haywood Patterson, one of nine young black boys who in 1931 became entangled in one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice of the Jim Crow era. Wrongfully accused of raping two white girls, the nine came close to being lynched by an angry mob, were rushed to trial in front of an all-white jury, and ended up serving many years in jail, eight of them on death row... 

[T]oday Washington is on the verge of making her own history in relation to the Scottsboro Nine. A campaign she started four years ago to clear the names of the nine is bearing fruit – the Alabama senate has already voted unanimously to introduce a new law that would pave the way for the posthumous pardon of the men, and this week the state's House of Representatives is expected to follow suit.

For a novel about this trial, try Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman:

Alabama, 1931. A posse stops a freight train and arrests nine black youths. Their crime: fighting with white boys. Then two white girls emerge from another freight car, and fast as anyone can say Jim Crow, the cry of rape goes up. One of the girls sticks to her story. The other changes her tune, again and again. A young journalist, whose only connection to the incident is her overheated social conscience, fights to save the nine youths from the electric chair, redeem the girl who repents her lie, and make amends for her own past. 

Intertwining historical actors and fictional characters, stirring racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism into an explosive brew, Scottsboro is a novel of a shocking injustice that convulsed the nation and reverberated around the world, destroyed lives, forged careers, and brought out the worst and the best in the men and women who fought for the cause.