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The two brothers agreed to keep in touch from this point on. They would write each other ... Jerry even promised that he would come to wherever Jimmy was if Jimmy needed him badly enough ... Jimmy was pleased to have a confidant, and Jerry was excited, fascinated by the chance to have even a secondhand view of something so big...
It took some of the loneliness out of both of their lives.
"Jimmy was going to Birmingham to take out citizenship papers [establish state residency] in Alabama," says Jerry. "He believed that if he killed King in Alabama or if he killed him anywhere in the South, it would help him if he showed he was a resident of Alabama ... Of course, if he killed King in Alabama, he believed Wallace would eventually pardon him, not at first but after a few years, when things had cooled off."
The presidential campaign of Alabama Governor George C. Wallace was beginning to be taken seriously outside the South. "Jimmy was getting caught up in the Wallace campaign," says Jerry. "He was talking as much that night in Chicago about getting Wallace in as he was about rubbing King out. He had it in his head that it would help Wallace if King wasn't around."
Admiring Hitler Jimmy had thought Hitler was right and President Roosevelt wrong about World War II ... To a young man like Jimmy, for whom so many things are unsettled, troubling, unresolved—not the least problem of which is his own personal sexual definition—Hitler was powerfully alluring ... The Nazis had a strong, decisive way of dealing with threats. They knew how to put an end to Jews, Negroes. The regimentation of Nazism was comforting; that everyone knew exactly who he was, where he belonged in the scheme of things, was reassuring to a young man whose family was always slipping and sliding around the borders of social class, a family more often than not collapsing into deviance and criminality. Besides, the Nazis were clean, not dirty, not lazy and not sex-ridden. Speedy [Ray's father] had once said that "niggers just lay around and f____ all the time."
A Merchant in Jeff City It is a misconception to assume that the status a man has in prison depends upon his status or rank as a criminal. It doesn't. The fact that James Earl Ray was a small-time criminal didn't keep him from becoming a "Merchant" [prison term for one who deals in contraband] in Jeff City ... [He] understood prison life, and he knew how to operate with "Big Shots," guards and other prisoners.
The history of Ray's illegal dealings as a Merchant in Jeff City has been very difficult to document. The prison authorities are not helpful. Just the opposite. They can no more admit that they have lost control of the prison, that the prisoners are running it, than they can fly to the moon.