LiveWire 68 - LaGuardia Community College - CUNY

All Stories Do Not Get Told: Earl Caldwell at
LaGuardia
only could they not force me before a grand
jury investigating my sources, but that I
By Victor Rosa, Lecturer, English
Department
At the English Department’s Black Literature
Committee meeting on April 17, legendary
journalist, Earl Caldwell, the only reporter
present at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis
on the day Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was
assassinated, explained to a captivated
audience of LaGuardia students and faculty
how he reported on this devastating
moment in history.
“In the ‘60s, when I covered the riots, I
used to meet people who said, ‘you should
have been here last night and seen what
happened,’” he said to an overflowing
crowd. “’You should have been here this
afternoon. You’re always coming after whatever
it is has happened, so you don’t
know.’” He went on to say, “It happened for
me on the first week of April 1968, twilight
over the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, and I
got as close to being there as a reporter
ever does, at the assassination of Martin
Luther King, Jr.”
Looking back on the day of the assassination,
Mr. Caldwell, who was then a reporter
for The New York Times, said that when he
heard the fatal shot, he was in his room just
below the balcony where Dr. King was
killed. As he stood in the doorway of his
room, “I see this figure directly across from
me. This guy doing something…” a man in
overalls, crouching in the thicket. The person
he saw left right after the assassination.
Neither the police, nor the FBI, ever asked
him what he saw or ever conducted a doorto-door
investigation at the motel, which is
standard operating procedure in a case like
this. He said that shortly after the assassination
the thicket was “cut to the ground,” and
when I told them what I saw in this thicket,
they said, “What thicket are you talking
about?”
Mr. Caldwell believes that James Earl Ray,
who pleaded guilty right after the shooting
but later recanted, did not shoot Martin
Luther King. Ray, sentenced to 99 years,
died in prison and the case was never
reopened.
6 www.laguardia.edu
Legendary journalist Earl Caldwell was the
guest lecturer for the English Department’s
Black Literature Committee meeting.
He said he quit “the best job in journalism
he ever had to tell this story of what
happened to me.” He added: “We are in a
period of time when people are saying:
’Let’s be at peace with the official story.‘ But
that is not easy to do.” He was there, Mr.
Caldwell reminded the rapt audience, and
“you cannot argue that I didn’t see what I
saw.”
Another story that must be told, Mr. Caldwell
said, was about “one of the most
important cases involving reporters’ rights to
go to the Supreme Court, United States vs.
Caldwell. The case involved the national
police, the FBI, saying to me as a reporter
assigned to cover the Black Panthers that
you will be an undercover spy for us.”
How am I going to be a reporter and a
spy? Mr. Caldwell asked himself.
He refused, was subpoenaed by a grand
jury and asked to turn over his notes and
tapes of interviews with the Panthers. He still
would not budge and eventually it led to a
landmark First Amendment case studied in
journalism schools across the country.
An untold part of the story, he said, is that
it is not The New York Times that paid the
court cost, as many believe, but rather the
NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
“We made this case and won it,” Mr.
Caldwell said. “The United States Court of
Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that not
didn’t have to answer the subpoena.”
Although the case lost when it was
appealed to the Supreme Court, it inspired
the passage of state shield laws that offer
varying protection from forced disclosure of
a reporter’s sources.
Mr. Caldwell started his career in 1959
writing for the Clearfield Progress, his hometown
paper in Clearfield, Pennsylvania.
Later he joined the staff of the Democrat and
Chronicle in Rochester, N.Y. In 1966, he
went on to The New York Herald Tribune,
and briefly The New York Post, before
reporting for The New York Times.
After his tenure at The New York Times,
Mr. Caldwell wrote a column three times a
week for the New York Daily News from
1979 to 1994. He was the first black
columnist for a major daily newspaper. Mr.
Caldwell’s columns have been collected in
Black American Witness: Reports from the
Front (Lion House Publishing, 1995), and
they “illuminate events in the lives of people
both ordinary and famous. They constitute
the most comprehensive record available of
how American cities, children, unions,
health care, police and race relations got to
where they got today.”
A recipient of the National Association of
Black Journalists President’s Award, Mr.
Caldwell is a founder of the Reporters
Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Currently, he is the writer-in-residence at the
Scripps Howard School of Journalism and
Communication at Hampton University. Mr.
Caldwell is the host and producer of The
Caldwell Chronicles, a radio program on
WBAI-FM 99.5, which airs on Fridays from
3-5 p.m.
Jamie Davis, editor of LaGuardia’s student
newspaper The Bridge, found Mr. Caldwell
“charismatic and engaging” and said his
talk featured topics “relevant to both faculty
and students.” For Raquel Ramirez, president
of the Web Radio Club, “it was very
informative listening to someone who lived
in that era talk about it, instead of reading
about it. It gives it more feeling.”
The program was also sponsored by The
Bridge and the Web Radio Club.