THE WITNESS
Clara Ester, the Lorraine Motel and the legacy of Martin Luther King
MEMPHIS – It’s 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968. In a minute, on a motel balcony, America’s greatest civil rights leader and most famous advocate of nonviolence will be shot to death.
This story is about what it was like to witness the death of Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel. And about how, over the 50 years that follow, it will change the lives of those who heard the shot or saw him fall or touched his blood.
Some of the witnesses at the Lorraine — Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson — are, or soon will be, famous.
Most are not. They’re like Clara Jean Ester, a college student caught up in a local sanitation workers’ strike.
In a minute she’ll be on the balcony, standing with the others around a dying King. But you can’t see her in the famous photo of that scene. And, although her life will be changed as much as anyone’s by King’s assassination, her story will
“I was no longer the same person. I was trying to live my life as a normal person who’d not witnessed an assassination.” Clara Jean Ester
go untold for 50 years.
On this Thursday, Clara Ester is increasingly distressed by the sanitation workers’ plight. After seven weeks, they have little to show for their strike. Some of their families are living on donated Wonder Bread; some of their homes’ electricity has been cut off.
King has come to Memphis to support the strikers. But Clara is torn between the non-violence he espouses and the militancy of a local black power group.
Several nights she has borrowed her father’s car to drive the militants on missions to try to torch white-owned commercial buildings and pressure city officials to settle. She has collected Coke bottles for Molotov cocktails. In frustration, she has thrown a few herself; they exploded harmlessly on the sidewalk.
But on Sunday mornings, she feels that her pastor — a strike leader adamantly opposed to violence — can see through her.
Today, she has just arrived at the Lorraine to have the diner special: catfish. Instead, she’s about to witness an epic act of violence.
In time, King’s followers will come to understand his death as a crucifixion. And crucifixion, as defined by the Roman Empire 2,000 years earlier, is a public event. It always has witnesses; it is, in large part, for the witnesses. Its impact spools out in their lives, and through them in the lives of many others.
We know how King’s life changed America. This, in microcosm, is how his death changed it — and how violence rends the fabric of history.
A troubled prophet
King is exhausted.
For 15 years, he has kept a presidential campaign pace — preaching his message, planning strategy, raising money, going to jail (about 30 times), keeping peace among his fractious, headstrong deputies.
He has led a movement that has guaranteed blacks the right to vote, access to public facilities and much else. In 1963, he was Time magazine’s man of the year. In 1964, he became the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. He was 35.
But now his campaign to extend the civil rights struggle to the racially segregated cities of the North, such as Chicago, is faltering.
His plan for a mass march on Washington to dramatize the plight of poor people of all races poses such challenges that it was, until recently, opposed even by his own staff.
His insistence that protest be non-violent is challenged by the Black Power movement and leaders such as Malcolm X (assassinated three years ago), Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, who says violence “is as American as cherry pie.”
His opposition to the Vietnam War, expressed most dramatically a year ago today at Riverside Church in New York City, is alienating crucial civil rights movement allies, including President Lyndon Johnson.
Now King is in Memphis: to support 1,100 striking garbage collectors; to prove he can still lead a peaceful protest march, unlike one here last week that turned into a riot; to show the movement has a future outside the Deep South and beyond the black middle class.
And, although it is not his intent — but as he seems to sense — he is here to die.
The night before, in an impromptu speech at a strike rally, Clara Ester and thousands of others heard King all but give his own eulogy. He said that, like Moses, he had been to the mountaintop and seen the Promised Land. But, he warned, “I may not get there with you.”
‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord’
Shortly before 6, King emerges from his $13-a-night room, No. 306, and walks onto the second-floor balcony. He benignly regards those in the courtyard parking lot below. They include Clara Ester and a fellow student, Mary Hunt, whom she has given a lift in her father’s white Pontiac Tempest.
Jesse Jackson is among those in the courtyard. He introduces King to Ben Branch, a saxophone player whose band will play at the strike rally tonight.
King loves the gospel classic Take My Hand, Precious Lord, which Thomas A. Dorsey wrote after the death of his wife and infant son. He looks down at Branch. “Ben, play Precious Lord in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty.”
“OK, Doc, I will,” Branch replies.
It’s dinnertime. Billy Kyles, a local minister, is there to lead King and his entourage back to his house for a soul food feast. He leaves King at the balcony railing and walks toward the staircase to the lot.
Suddenly, a loud sound. To Clara it sounds like a truck backfiring, or maybe a firecracker.
She sees King lifted off his feet and thrown back down onto the balcony. She and Mary Hunt run up the stairs. They find King bleeding from a huge wound in his neck, barely breathing. Clara undoes his belt buckle. She thinks, He’s not going to make it.
But King’s face looks relaxed — peaceful. There’s a hint of a smile on his lips. His eyes are open, as if he’s looking to heaven.
In Room 309, a young black South African documentary filmmaker named Joseph Louw hears the shot. He steps out onto the balcony, sees King and returns to his room for a camera.
As police rush into the courtyard, asking where the shot came from, Louw begins shooting pictures. In what will become his most famous image, those on the balcony point in the direction of the gunshot.
At Kyles’ home, the phone rings. The preacher’s children are excited: Dr. King is coming! Then they hear their mother gasp, and they know something has gone wrong. Something has changed.
The girl on the balcony
Except for a shoulder, a penny loafer and some white bobby socks, you can’t see Clara Ester in Louw’s famous photo of the Lorraine balcony. Her obscurity is ironic, because outside King’s immediate orbit, it’s hard to find anyone more dramatically affected by his death.
She was born in Memphis in 1947. Her father worked on the railroad. She happily grew up in what she’d come to think of as “our little black world.’’ She went to black schools, worshiped at a black church, shopped at black stores and went to the city zoo on the one day of the week when blacks (and, implicitly, not whites) were allowed.
At a Methodist Church-run community center where her mother cooked and cleaned, Clara became close to two white Methodist deaconesses (lay ministers), who sometimes took her on visits to the infirm and impoverished.
One day they visited an old blind woman in a public housing project. When they walked in the apartment, Clara saw cockroaches on the floor, walls and furniture. But her two companions seemed not to notice. They accepted their host’s invitation to sit and indicated that Clara should, too.
She was squirming even before she saw what looked like a rat emerge from under a chair. Again, the deaconesses focused on their host.
After they left, Clara asked them: Did you see the roaches? Why did you just sit there? Why did we even go there?
The women explained that as visitors, they did not want to embarrass their host. As to why they went, one explained, “That’s what you’re supposed to do.”
A strike and a choice
Clara graduated from high school in 1965 and entered LeMoyne College. She was a good student and athlete. With opportunity opening up to blacks in corporations and government, she seemed primed to succeed.
Then came the strike.
It began Feb. 12, 1968. An electrical malfunction in a garbage truck compactor had crushed two sanitation workers to death, exacerbating long-simmering resentment of low wages, poor working conditions and racial discrimination. Those who collected the garbage were all black; their supervisors were almost all white.
Earlier attempts at union organizing and collective bargaining had been rebuffed by the city. But this time, when the city refused to negotiate, the work- ers walked out.
Each noon they’d meet at a church on the outskirts of downtown and march to Main Street. One day, a strike leader, the Rev. James Lawson, told them: “At the heart of racism is the idea that a man is not a man, that a person is not a person. You are human beings. You are men.”
Soon the strikers held signs saying, “I AM A MAN.”
Lawson was already famous in the national civil rights movement, and he was particularly esteemed by King, as a trainer in non-violent protest techniques. He was also Clara’s pastor. He warned from the pulpit that he had better not see anyone in his congregation violating the boycott of white-
owned businesses.
Clara, a junior at LeMoyne, worked afternoons in the strike office, attended rallies and marches, and organized students at other colleges and high schools to join the boycott.
But she was frustrated by the stalemate. And she was listening to voices besides Lawson’s.
The shadow of violence
The Invaders were Memphis’ version of the Black Panthers — young black militants with dark glasses and Afros who believed violence was an option in the struggle for equality. At one strike rally, they handed out recipes for Molotov cocktails. “Get your guns!’’ an Invader told strikers.
Charles Cabbage, a founder of the group, asked Clara to join them. (In retrospect, she would conclude her main attraction was that she had access to a car; her main worry was that her father would take the car away if he found out.)
Lawson noticed her flirtation with violence. “I know who you’re running with,’’ he told her. But he did not condemn her.
Lawson and his fellow ministers invited King to come to Memphis to support the strike. He announced plans for a march March 28.
Clara heard there would be trouble. An Invader told her that when the march turned a corner, “something is going to go down. Just follow suit.’’ She warned Lawson, but he said the march would go on.
It was a disaster. Some young men broke storefront windows; police responded, sometimes indiscriminately, with clubs and pepper spray. King, who had joined the march in front at the last minute and had no major role in its organization, was hustled away.
Clara saw him at a hotel a few hours later. He looked frustrated, disappointed and tired. In the past, his supporters had always been the targets of violence. This time, they had caused it.
Now, King’s aides wanted nothing more to do with Memphis. What King called the Poor People’s Campaign — the march on Washington — was scheduled later that spring. It was a political and logistical stretch as it was; another fiasco in Memphis could kill it.
But King had to prove he could still lead a non-violent march. He had to go back to Memphis.
He arrived April 3, ready to march the following Monday.
The afternoon of April 4, Clara was working at strike headquarters. James Orange, a King aide, invited her and Mary Hunt to the Lorraine for supper.
Years later, when she finally started to talk about it, Clara would attribute her presence at the Lorraine to coincidence — and appetite: “I just wanted some catfish.’’
The aftermath
After the shooting, the police would not let anyone leave the Lorraine.
Unknown to her, Clara was photographed standing next to James Orange by Ernest Withers, a prominent civil rights movement photographer.
Withers had been at his Beale Street studio when he heard King was shot. He ran to the Lorraine, where he met Louw and took him back to his darkroom to develop his film before returning to the Lorraine.
Over the next few days, rioting erupted in dozens of cities. Now, federal officials pressured the city of Memphis to settle the strike and avoid more violence. On April 16, the strike ended with recognition of the workers’ union and wage increases.
But Clara was angry: with her hometown, which had allowed King to be murdered and let his murderer escape, and with white people.
King’s aides had vowed the Poor People’s March would proceed. So Clara joined a caravan heading to Washington. She met poor Hispanics and Native Americans, and rural whites poorer than most black people she knew.
The marchers formed a tent city on the National Mall. But King’s death left a leadership vacuum; official Washington was unresponsive; and the rains flooded the settlement. Clara, unused to such conditions, caught a cold that turned into pneumonia. Organizers put her on a plane back to Memphis.
When it was over, “I was no longer the same person,” she would recall. “I was trying to live my life as a normal person who’d not witnessed an assassination.’’
There was doubt — “Were we worshiping the right God?” — and despair: “Our attitude was, ‘You have taken our leader.’ If we get another one, you can take him, too.”
And there was this: For her, violence was no longer an abstraction, and no longer an option.
She had seen King lying in his own blood. Yet the face that was so troubled after the March 28 march looked at peace on the balcony. She was sure King had died doing what he was meant to do, even though he had to give up a comfortable, settled life of an Atlanta pastor.
In the strike, and at the Lorraine, she had learned something about herself. She felt the pain of other people, and wanted — needed — to alleviate it. Her role was clear: “To pick up the cross, and carry it.”
Fighting the good fight
When Clara graduated from college in 1969, she wanted to be a lay minister who “could demonstrate the love of God.” King reached beyond the church walls. So would she.
She took an assignment at a Methodist Church community center in an impoverished part of Mobile, Ala. The neighborhood had turned from white to black, but the community center, still run by white staffers, was doing almost nothing for the new residents.
Meanwhile, in Memphis, the Invaders faced a leadership vacuum (Cabbage was imprisoned for draft evasion) and a police crackdown. Dozens of members were arrested on a variety of charges; others scattered.
In Mobile, Clara went door to door to gain neighborhood residents’ trust. Some houses were ramshackle; sometimes there were roaches or mice. She knew what to do.
In her 36 years, she transformed the center into a social services powerhouse, including a wing with transitional housing for homeless mothers and children.
She fought for causes ranging from creation of a state King holiday to integration of the Azalea Trail Maids, Mobile high school seniors who serve as city ambassadors while wearing antebellum style dresses.
There was none of the drama of the Memphis strike. There was no Nobel Prize. But she changed lives, as she believed hers had been changed.
She warned students that if you were black, a B was not good enough. She ordered young men to pull up their pants. On the center’s field trips to Atlanta, she took kids to see Stone Mountain, with its huge sculptures of Confederate heroes — “history you need to know about,’’ she said.
Her own life after Memphis was punctuated by tragedy. In 1970, her fiancé was killed in an auto crash. In 1985, heading back to Memphis for her father’s funeral, she suffered massive head injuries when her car was crushed by a jackknifing 18-wheeler. She was in a coma for weeks and hospitalized for months.
A 4-year-old boy she adopted in 1981 would become the joy of her life. But he had been in five foster homes, and he later suffered from attention deficit disorder, seizures and bipolar disorder. He had to be institutionalized at 17 after a psychotic incident and has lived mostly in group homes.
Sheltered in obscurity
Given Clara’s talents, her family wondered what might have been. “She could have done much better for herself materially,” says her older brother Ronald, who himself became head of personnel at a major railroad. He’s not complaining: “When you have a sister who does what she’s done, it makes you puff out your chest.”
The sister says she just wanted to help people. “That’s what Dr. King would have done. That’s what Christ would have done.”
If asked about her involvement in the civil rights movement, Clara will talk about her role in the sanitation workers strike. If pressed, she’ll concede, “I just happened to be at the motel.”
Even in Mobile, her adopted home, few people know she was at King’s side. “You’d think someone (who was at the Lorraine) would run around tooting their own horn. That’s not something she felt she needed to tell people about,” says Ronald Ester. (Relatives have always called her “Jean”; friends call her “Clara”; most younger people call her “Miss Clara.”)
There were reasons for her reticence. For one thing, it was hard for her to talk about it; even today, she chokes up.
For another, she staked her claim as King’s disciple on her actions after he died, not her presence when he died.
And there was little proof she was at the Lorraine. One of Louw’s photos captured the horror on the face of Mary Hunt, Clara’s companion. But she almost totally obscured Clara, standing next to her.
Then, in 2013, the Memphis Commercial-Appeal disclosed that Withers, who had photographed Clara at the Lorraine (and who died in 2007), had been a paid FBI informant. The newspaper published his photo of Clara with James Orange (although the FBI file did not explain why she was there.
“After that,” she says, “I felt there was some proof.”
Many of the other witnesses have died, including Ben Branch, the bandleader, in 1987; Abernathy, King’s successor, in 1990; Orange in 2008; Pastor Billy Kyles in 2016. Mary Hunt died of cancer in 1992, a few days before she had been scheduled to speak in public for the first time about what it was like to be at the Lorraine.
Joe Louw, who took the Lorraine balcony photo, left America after Memphis. He returned to his native Africa, where few people connected him to the famous photo. He died in 2004; no U.S. newspaper seems to have had his obituary.
The Lorraine itself survived. After a long decline, it opened in 1991 as the National Civil Rights Museum. Here, through a pane of glass, visitors can see the room where Martin Luther King last laid his weary head.
In the end, an understanding
Fifty years later, Clara Ester is among those who understand King’s death as a crucifixion. King on the balcony looked “like Christ, hangin’ on that cross,” eyes open, as if looking up. She hears him saying, the night before, “I may not get there with you …”
She has come to understand that she was a witness, and that her testimony was in action rather than word.
She also wonders what would have become of her if King had not been shot, and the strike had not ended quickly and peacefully. Would she have thrown more Molotov cocktails? Would her life have taken a different direction?
If she sees King’s death as a crucifixion, she also believes in a resurrection.
“Dr. King has lived on. He is still alive today. He is the driver behind Black Lives Matter, women’s rights, gay rights. You can kill the dreamer, Scripture says, but you can never take away the dream.
“And he gave us that dream of a better world where we could live in harmony. He lived that, and it still lives in a lot of us.”
“Dr. King has lived on. He is still alive today. ... You can kill the dreamer, Scripture says, but you can never take away the dream.” Clara Ester