Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • February 2, 2011 a new car, a new wardrobe, a nose job, and dance lessons. Where did the money come from? Where did a paragon of misguided selfishness and squalor like Ray get the idea he could make friends and influence people by murdering a far better man? Who stuffed his fist with wads of cash? This was not a “lone gunman” in his early 20s, a virgin and would-be intellectual who wanted to impress the girl of his dreams. This was a 39-year-old whose mother had been a street-walker. He had had plenty of pay-as-you-go women, and made his living as a thief when he wasn’t a jailbird. Ray was obviously too old and jailhouse cynical to see himself as a racist Robin Hood. He was in it for the money, and his racism was a secondary factor at most. Many members of Dr. King’s family believed Ray when he swore he was not the actual killer, and I think almost nobody in the black community believes Ray paid his own way to Memphis. The rich status-quo racists who wanted black citizens politically and economically marginalized had little more regard for bottom-feeder whites like Ray than they did for educated black men like King – maybe less regard. Ray almost certainly pulled the trigger, but somebody else bought him the gun. Remember the Kingfish? Senator Huey Long, gunned down in September of 1935 after rumors circulated that he was bracing for a try at the White House, was said to have been the victim of yet another “lone gunman.” Long has long since been turned into a sort of down-home dunce by the Spin Doctors of Hollywood. Frank Capra introduced movie viewers to a sort of homegrown fascist dictator wannabe played by Edward Arnold in “Meet John Doe” opposite Good Guy Gary Cooper. In “All the King’s Men,” Robert Penn Warren presented an even more obvious Long clone played by Broderick Crawford. The real Long, though he sometimes sounded rather silly to urban sophisticates, was not as sinister as Capra or Warren’s versions of him. Willam Howard Taft once said that Long had one of the finest legal minds he had even confronted. A descendent of Revolutionary War veterans, educated partly at Oklahoma Baptist University, Long won a debating scholarship to Louisiana State University, but could not attend because he could not afford the textbooks. Free textbooks for all students in Louisiana became one of his proudest policies as governor of that state. He also supported night schools that taught an estimated 100,000 adults how to read. Long admittedly built up an infrastructure based on the spoils system and nepotism, but his nepotism was for poor people rather than the sons of privilege. Long was an anomaly in Southern politics. He didn’t conjure up the misty glories of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, and he didn’t hate or demean black people. He was called the Kingfish because he loved the “Amos ‘n’ Andy” radio show. Long was an1880s Populist out of season, a man who wanted to “soak the rich” through a system of inheritance taxes and fair minimum and maximum wages. His ideas were extreme, but he was not a communist or under communist influence. He said his policies were based on the Bible and the Declaration of Independence. The official version has Long being assassinated by Dr. Carl Weiss. The doctor was intermarried with the powerful Pavy family, who hated Long for stirring up the rabble and admittedly cutting into their power base. One story claims Long had threatened to circulate rumors that the Pavys were of remote African lineage: the kiss of death in Southern politics. Weiss, a successful, 29-year-old physician with a new baby, approached Long indignantly at the Louisiana state capitol at Baton Rouge. After that, the stories differ. The official version is that Weiss pulled a pistol and shot Long once, after which the senator ran down four flights of stairs while his bodyguards pumped 30 to 60 bullets into Weiss, who died without explaining himself. One alternate version is that Weiss slapped Long across the mouth when Long brushed past him, and the bodyguards opened fire, hit Weiss 30 to 60 times, and hit Long once or twice, but Weiss had not fired at all. Another alternate version is that one of Long’s overzealous bodyguards, either Murphy Roden or Joe Messina, spotted Weiss approaching Long and took inappropriate action with a couple of warning shots that triggered a fusillade. Whether the fatal shot was fired by Weiss, Roden, or Messina, Long died four days later and was not around to contest Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s third term. While we should not read too much into that, and it would be more responsible to ascribe the death of the Kingfish to sheer bad luck or Louisiana politics than FDR’s White House, terminating a socialist program based on the Bible and the Declaration of Independence rather than Marx and Lenin doesn’t sound like an alibi for murder. Once upon a time, a little kid was told that a U.S. President had died. “Really?” the kid asked. “Who killed him?” Sad to say, that is still a good question. We have had four presidents murdered since 1865, along with a number of other political figures. The assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, and the accidental deaths of some of their male relatives, have been extensively researched. While most Americans no longer believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, and some wonder why an empty-headed dropout from Islam murdered Bobby as a purported act of Muslim vengeance, there are a couple of fishier stories to be reviewed: Who really killed Dr. Martin Luther King, and who really killed Senator Huey Long? A PBS documentary based on a new book by Hampton Sides makes a rather conclusive case for James Earl Ray as the gunman in Dr. King’s murder in Memphis. Ray was a career criminal with two brothers who were also career criminals. He was an Army-trained marksman, and he was a supporter of the segregationist wild-card presidential candidate, George Wallace, who was himself shot and crippled by a “lone gunman” named Arthur Bremer. Wallace was running with vice presidential candidate Curtis LeMay, and LeMay liked to brag about how many Japanese women and children his B-29 pilots had roasted, broiled, and barbecued. A man who could support this ticket, as Ray did, was capable of just about anything in defense of “white supremacy.” Politicians with similar views on race had not been widely available since 1945. Perhaps Ray saw this as his last chance to support someone on his own level of morality and integrity. More to the point, Ray owned a high-powered hunting rifle with a seven-power telescopic sight that vectored on the target. Ray also left latent fingerprints on the rifle he is known to have purchased. The PBS documentary left no plausible doubt that Ray pulled the trigger on King, an idealist so sincere and gentle that he wouldn’t let his own bodyguards carry guns. If you watch Dr. King’s eyes during the speech, “I have come to the mountaintop – free at last,” you can marvel not only at his eloquence, but also at the courage he showed facing constant danger. He knew, I think, by some intuitive power or perhaps simple logic, that he did not have much longer to live, and he accepted that with dignity and nobility. My economic envy for Sides may now become palpable, at least in terms of sales figures, but while Sides and the PBS crew did a superior job of accurately portraying Dr. King as noble and good, and Ray as a loser, they fell apart on the one question they didn’t ask: Who paid Ray to murder King? Ray escaped from Jeff City, a maximum security prison, cuddled up in a box beneath loaves of bread from the bakery where he worked, and ran off. There was no getaway car - or was there? Ray roamed all over the country and into Canada and Mexico. He dabbled in making pornography. With no visible means of support, he traveled around paying cash, one supposes, for motel rooms, a high-powered rifle, Who killed Dr. King and the Kingfish? Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: The rash of pedestrian/vehicle accidents in Ridgewood has more to do with the lack of respect of each other’s domain rather than the physical characteristics of intersections. It is the primary responsibility of the pedestrian to wait until traffic is clear before attempting to cross any street. The pedestrian’s domain is the sidewalk. The motorist’s domain is the roadway. Before a motorist or pedestrian enters the other’s domain, each is responsible to ensure his or her own safe way of passage. When a motorist encroaches onto the sidewalk to enter parking areas behind buildings, he or she should proceed with extreme caution and maintain eye contact with any pedestrians to ensure it is safe to proceed. Unfortunately, the New Jersey crosswalk law gives the pedestrian undue preference and a false sense of security. It gives some the impression that all traffic must stop because they have decided to step into the roadway. They forget they are intruding into the domain of the motorist. It is the pedestrian’s responsibility to make sure traffic is Urges courtesy clear before stepping off the curb. If vehicles are observed, the pedestrian must make eye contact with the motorist and await their response to stop before proceeding. Often, it is difficult to determine if pedestrians actually desire to cross a street as they chat or wander near the curb. In addition, especially at night, many erroneously think that their dark clothing enhances their presence when, in fact, it makes them invisible. The bottom line is: We do not need laws, financial penalties, or points. What is needed is mutual respect for each other’s domains. Violate that respect at your own peril. George W. Shabet Ridgewood It is the policy of the Villadom TIMES to have a signed copy of letters to the editor in our files. Please fax a signed copy to (201) 670-4745 or drop a signed copy in the mail to Villadom Times, P.O. Box 96, Midland Park, NJ 07432. Signed letters may also be dropped off at our office located at 333 Godwin Avenue in Midland Park. Thank you.