Klandestine by Pate McMichael

Author:Pate McMichael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2015-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

24

A Sick White Brother

Memphis, April 4, 1968

The evidence suggests that Ray spent three months in L.A. mentally preparing himself for a life in hiding. He tried hypnotism and read self-help books. He underwent plastic surgery, altering the tip of his nose, so “when the FBI put me on the Top Ten and circulated my old pictures, and stressed my nasal tip and low-hanging ear, then nobody would recognize me.” In hopes of finding work abroad, he “graduated” from a six-week bartending school on March 2. He also continued to study locksmithing.

The war in Vietnam escalated that winter as the Viet Cong broke the Tet Truce, but Ray continued to obsess on another conflict. That February he wrote to “Friends of Rhodesia,” asking for a subscription to “Rhodesian Commentary” and thanking the director of the organization for clarifying “most of my questions regarding immigration. Such as Passport.” Ray apparently dreamed of boarding a steamer bound for White Africa while foreign headlines, in foreign tongues, roared with the news of his masterful crime.

Before leaving California, Ray almost threw it away trying to spread the Wallace religion to barflies. In February 1968 at the Rabbit’s Foot Club, another watering hole where Ray enjoyed fifty-cent screwdrivers, a bartender named Bo Del Monte observed Ray in a “heated discussion” with a “Caucasian female” over Alabama’s reputation of racism. Del Monte “acknowledged that Ray often spoke support for Governor Wallace” and on this occasion lost his cool, telling the liberal young woman, “I’ll drop you off in Watts and we’ll see how you like it there.” Del Monte remembered the incident because Ray claimed to be from Alabama. It did not strike him as a coincidence that shortly afterward “a Negro patron of the Rabbit’s Foot Club, and his date, were struck on the head by a rock or brick while in a nearby parking lot.”

Another bartender at the Rabbit’s Foot recalled a “political discussion” with Ray concerning “Robert F. Kennedy and George Wallace.” The bartender said Ray “became rather incensed and vehemently supported Wallace.” He too remembered the Watts incident, but with more theatrics. He said Ray lost his cool and “another customer who knew the girl separated them.” In what became a pattern, Ray vigorously denied that Wallace or racism had anything to do with the incident. Rather, he simply remembered getting jumped by two men in the parking lot for no reason. “Everybody was stirred up out there at that time over politics or something,” Ray later testified, “and somebody said something about my driver’s license, the tags on my car, and something about blacks in Alabama and I didn’t say much because I didn’t want to get in no kind of brawl in a tavern and get arrested.”

Ray’s motivation to leave California suddenly matured on the very weekend that Martin Luther King Jr. appeared in L.A. to recruit for the Poor People’s Campaign. This massive civil rights occupation of the nation’s capital was planned for summer, and critics of Dr. King, like Governor Wallace, were framing the initiative as a Communist plot.

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