Truth at Last (1 of 3 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
Truth at Last by John Larry Ray and Lyndon Barsten. Copyright 2008 by John Larry Ray and Lyndon Barsten.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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TRUTH AT LAST
The Untold Story Behind James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

John Larry Ray and Lyndon Barsten


DEDICATION
http://www.dailylit.com/books/truth-at-last/dedication


PREFACE
http://www.dailylit.com/books/truth-at-last/preface


ONE

THE MOLE AND THE MULE

“The family had it pretty poor,” remembers a local resident. “I’ve seen times when they had a sack of potatoes to eat—that’s all, just a sack of potatoes.”
—“The Revealing Story of a Mean Kid,” LIFE magazine, May 3, 1968

Please let me put the Ray family into perspective for you. It will greatly help in understanding why our family was a natural breeding ground for a man who could be made into a black-ops victim without a hue and cry from the public.

My brother and I spent our formative years in the Mississippi River Valley, the land of Mark Twain. As we grew from children to young adults, our hometowns were river towns. For the most part we lived in Ewing, Missouri; Quincy, Illinois; and Alton, Illinois, which has since been absorbed into the suburbs of St. Louis. Alton is where my oldest brother, James Earl, was born, five years before me, on March 10, 1928.

Our father’s side of the family, the Rays and the Mathews, have lived in Quincy since before the Civil War. The old man’s family, like much of Quincy, was Irish-American. During the Civil War, many citizens of Quincy were strong abolitionists, and Quincy was a vital part of the Underground Railroad, which aided the escape of Southern slaves.

Alton became home to our mother’s side of the family, who are also of Irish descent. Many of their people fled to the United States to escape the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, and settled in that area, along the river. Very few members on either side of the family voted, as we never really trusted many of the candidates. We were not social in an outward way. Although we were Catholics, we were generally not religious, but we tried to be ethical.

My maternal grandparents were John Maher and Mary Fitzsimmons. They had two children: my mother Lucille, who was often called Ceale, and my uncle, Willie. My grandfather, John Maher, blew glass for a living, while my grandmother had a rooming house in Alton. John’s family also came from Ireland, and he married an Irish-American girl. Although she was our grandmother, we always referred to her as “Mom.”

The Mahers were left-wing liberal Democrats; Mother thought the Roosevelts were gods. My mother would stand up for her rights against anyone—this from a woman who was afraid of the dark.

On the Ray side, in Quincy, my grandparents James and Louise had three children: my uncle Earl, my aunt Mabel, and my father George, who would sometimes sarcastically be called “Speedy,” because he was anything but quick on his feet.

My eldest brother was named after my paternal grandfather, James Ray. Both my grandfather James and father George had been in trouble with federal agents during the U.S. involvement in World War I. They avoided the draft—they weren’t going to go over to Europe and kill people just because the government told them to. Fortunately, U.S. involvement in the European conflict only lasted a little over a year, and since the war ended before action could be taken against the Rays, their resistance was soon forgotten and the charges were dismissed.

My grandfather, James Ray, who had a bar in Quincy on Fifth Street, started organized crime in that area. When I use the term organized crime, I mean he answered to the Chicago rackets bosses. This only lasted so long, but at one time he made so much money that it was stored all over the house in fruit jars and the like. My grandmother Louise was able to take frequent vacations all across the United States because of these funds. My grandparents lived at 413 Vermont Street, and Ted Crowley, who lived across the street from them, was what you would call then the local rackets boss, or, in my adulthood, “the godfather.” Sometimes, when I close my eyes at night, I can almost hear the metallic ring of the brass spittoons knocking against my grandfather’s hardwood bar, or the beer glasses slammed on his bar, louder and louder still as the night progressed.

Many of the Rays came from out West. My grandmother Louise was married twice, which was unusual in our family, as divorce still doesn’t occur much to this day, and her prior family was out in California. Her father had been a West Virginia preacher and religious leader.

I want you to know these things, these trivial details, of an unusual yet unremarkable family of independent Americans. Certain authors who support the official story of the death of Dr. King—authors such as Gerold Frank in the 1960s, to the more contemporary author, Gerald Posner—have put a negative spin on the Ray family, painting us as a loose group of convicts and thieves. While there is some truth to that, the same thing could be said about many of the families living up and down the Mississippi at that time. Although it may surprise most Americans, at least one of the authors putting a negative spin on our family, Gerold Frank, has documented ties to the FBI leadership in 1969, and indeed, he was chosen by the FBI to write the James Earl Ray story. If you wanted to put another spin on the Rays, you could say that I’m a relative, through my Irish family, of the respectable film star of How Green Was My Valley, Maureen O’Hara.
Her real name was Maureen Fitzsimmons, spelled FitzSimons in Ireland.

The feds and their contacts in the press might choose to make up a few things, but we were never sexual predators; we were never stool pigeons or informants; and we never testified against anyone. We certainly never put anyone behind bars. We never went along with the all-too-often corrupt criminal justice system. With only one or two exceptions, if anyone in the Ray family went behind bars, it was for a nonviolent act. Inside of the criminal justice system, none of us ever informed on a codefendant to receive leniency. Nobody in the family ever served in the military, except for our indelible black sheep, James Earl Ray. And in doing so, I say that he proved the rest of us right about placing blind trust in the federal government. He would later repeat to me, “The army put me on the road to ruin.”

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