Saturday, April 4, 2026
Dr. Martin Luther King's Last Moments
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| Civil rights leader Andrew Young (L) and others standing on balcony of Lorraine motel pointing in direction of assailant after assassination of civil rights ldr. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who is lying at their feet.Joseph Louw |
The woman who cooked MLK's last meal died from the sound of the bullet that killed him. Loree Bailey ran the switchboard at the Lorraine Motel. The rifle shot triggered a stroke.
She died the same day they buried him. Her dishes are still in his room. Read this.
The dishes are still in the room.
Not behind glass in some archive, not cataloged in a warehouse. They are right there on the dresser in Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where they have been sitting since the evening of April 4, 1968.
Two coffee cups in their saucers, plates, napkins from the kitchen downstairs. The food was catfish, fried Mississippi River catfish, prepared by Loree Bailey, the woman who co-owned the motel with her husband Walter.
Loree had cooked for Martin Luther King Jr. every time he came to Memphis, and he loved her catfish so much that it became a ritual between them. On the afternoon of April 4, when Reverend Billy Kyles came to take him to dinner at his home, King teased him, saying that if the food at Kyles's house wasn't as good as what Loree made, he was coming back to eat at the Lorraine.
He never made it to dinner. He never came back to that room.
The Lorraine Motel started as a whites-only establishment called the Windsor Hotel, built in the 1920s on Mulberry Street in downtown Memphis. In 1945, Walter and Loree Bailey bought it and transformed it into something else entirely.
They renamed it after Loree, a play on her name and the jazz standard "Sweet Lorraine," and they opened its doors to Black travelers at a time when Memphis offered almost nothing for them. They added a second floor, a swimming pool, air conditioning in every room, and charged a flat rate of thirteen dollars a night.
The Lorraine became a Green Book listing, one of the few places in the city where Black motorists could sleep safely. It also became a gathering place for the musicians who recorded at Stax Records nearby, artists like Otis Redding, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Count Basie, and Sarah Vaughan.
Martin Luther King Jr. stayed there so often that Walter Bailey called Room 306 the King-Abernathy Suite. King didn't come to Memphis in April 1968 because he wanted to.
He came because two men were killed in the back of a garbage truck on February 1 of that year, and the city that employed them acted like it barely mattered. Their names were Echol Cole and Robert Walker.
Cole was thirty-six years old. Walker was thirty.
They were sanitation workers for the Memphis Department of Public Works, earning about a dollar sixty an hour, which was low enough that many of their coworkers qualified for food stamps. On a rainy Thursday afternoon, near the corner of Colonial Road and Verne Road in East Memphis, Cole and Walker climbed into the barrel of their garbage truck to get out of the rain.
They did this because the city had a policy. Black workers were not allowed to take shelter in white neighborhoods during storms, and white supervisors could stay on the clock during bad weather while Black workers got sent home without pay.
So men like Cole and Walker had learned to press themselves into the only dry space available, the loading hopper of the truck itself. At about 4:20 that afternoon, an electrical wire shorted out and the hydraulic compressor activated.
The stop button was on the outside of the truck, beyond their reach. A woman named Mrs. C.E. Hinson watched from her kitchen window across the street and told a reporter it looked like the machine just swallowed him.
It took crews a gruesome amount of time to retrieve their bodies. Both men were pronounced dead at John Gaston Hospital.
Neither Echol Cole nor Robert Walker could afford the city's life insurance policy. The city classified them as hourly employees, which meant their families received no workers' compensation and were left with nothing.
The thing most people don't know is that two other men had died the same way four years earlier, in 1964, in the same kind of truck. T.O. Jones, a garbage collector turned union organizer, had already asked the city to retire the truck that killed Cole and Walker, telling them it was too old and too worn out, and the city refused.
Ten days after the deaths, on February 11, over four hundred sanitation workers packed a meeting at the Labor Temple and voted to strike. On February 12, 1968, nine hundred thirty of eleven hundred sanitation workers did not show up for work, and only thirty-eight of one hundred eight garbage trucks moved that day.
The men who walked off the job earned so little that forty percent of them received welfare benefits despite working sixty hours a week. They carried garbage in leaking steel tubs balanced on their heads, came home smelling so bad their own families didn't want to be near them, and the showers at the end of the shift were for white workers only.
Their signs said three words. I AM A MAN.
Those words were a refusal of something so ordinary most white people in Memphis probably never thought about it, the decades-long practice across the Jim Crow South of calling grown Black men "boy." The signs, printed by Allied Printing on white poster board in stark black letters, drew a line borrowed from the opening of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," the idea that a person can be standing right in front of you and still not be seen.
Reverend James Lawson, the acting chairman of the strike committee, called King and asked him to come lend his voice. King arrived on March 18, 1968, and addressed a crowd estimated between fifteen and twenty-five thousand people at the Bishop Charles Mason Temple, the largest indoor gathering in the history of the civil rights movement.
He returned on March 28 to lead a march that started at the Clayborn Temple with over five thousand people, but it turned violent when a faction broke away and began looting storefronts. A sixteen-year-old boy named Larry Payne was shot and killed by Memphis police during the unrest.
King was devastated and left Memphis the next day, unsure whether he should return. But he decided that if the nonviolent struggle for economic justice was going to mean anything, he had to go back and prove that a peaceful march could work.
He returned on April 3, his flight from Atlanta delayed because of a bomb threat. He arrived at the Lorraine Motel around eleven in the morning and checked into Room 306.
That evening, he was supposed to speak at the Mason Temple again, but he wasn't feeling well, so he sent Ralph Abernathy in his place. When Abernathy got to the temple and saw the crowd, people who had walked through a thunderstorm to hear King speak, he called the motel and told King he had to come.
King came. And standing before that crowd of sanitation workers and their supporters, exhausted and sick, he delivered the speech that would become his last public address.
He told them he had been to the mountaintop and that he had seen the promised land. He told them he might not get there with them, but that as a people, they would get to the promised land.
The next morning, April 4, Walter Bailey later said that King seemed particularly happy. He went out to the balcony to smoke a cigarette, a habit he kept hidden from the public.
He attended an SCLC staff meeting that morning and had lunch with Abernathy, catfish from Loree's kitchen. Abernathy took a nap while King went down the hall to visit his brother, A.D. King, who had arrived from Florida and checked into Room 201, directly beneath him.
That afternoon, around four o'clock, King got into a pillow fight with Andrew Young. The tension broke into something almost childlike, grown men throwing pillows at each other in a motel room in Memphis because Young had been late getting back from court.
Reverend Billy Kyles arrived around five to take King to dinner. The meal had been prepared at Monumental Baptist Church by a group of women led by Virginia Boyland, who had cooked all of King's favorites, fried chicken, ham, sweet potatoes, two kinds of greens, crowder peas, and sweet potato pie.
King asked Kyles what was for dinner, and then told him a story about a preacher in Atlanta whose wife served cold ham, hot Kool-Aid, and hard biscuits on card tables because they couldn't afford furniture after buying a new house. They were laughing when King stepped out onto the balcony of Room 306 at about one minute after six.
He saw Ben Branch, a saxophonist, standing in the parking lot below. King leaned over the railing and asked Branch to play "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" at the rally that night, and told him to play it real pretty.
The shot came from a bathroom window at 422-and-a-half South Main Street, a rooming house run by a woman named Bessie Brewer. A man who had checked in that afternoon under the name John Willard fired one round from a Remington Model 760 Gamemaster rifle.
The bullet struck King in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. He fell backward onto the balcony, unconscious, and Ralph Abernathy rushed to his side.
King was taken to St. Joseph's Hospital and pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. He was thirty-nine years old.
When Reverend Kyles tried to call an ambulance from the phone in Room 306, no one answered the switchboard. The person who usually ran it was Loree Bailey, who had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage the moment the shot was fired.
She died five days later, on April 9, 1968. It was the same day as Martin Luther King's funeral.
The news of King's death spread and the country came apart. Riots broke out in over one hundred cities, more than forty people were killed, and President Johnson deployed federal troops to Washington, D.C., where fires burned within sight of the White House.
In Memphis, the sanitation workers kept going. On April 8, four days after King was killed, his widow Coretta Scott King came to Memphis with their children.
Harry Belafonte had called her and told her she had to go, even though her family begged her to stay home. She walked at the front of a silent march through the streets of the city, and an estimated forty-two thousand people walked behind her without making a sound.
Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, was in that march. He wrote a check for fifty thousand dollars to the sanitation workers' strike fund, the largest single contribution from any outside source.
On April 16, twelve days after King's death, the city of Memphis finally recognized the sanitation workers' union. The settlement included a wage increase and was almost identical to the proposal Mayor Henry Loeb had rejected weeks earlier.
The workers had to threaten to strike again later that year just to make the city honor the agreement. That is how little their labor was valued, even after a man died for it.
Walter Bailey never rented Room 306 again. He kept it exactly the way it was on the evening of April 4, the unmade bed, the dishes Loree had sent up from her kitchen, the coffee cups on the dresser, a can of pomade on the vanity, a Gideon Bible on the nightstand.
He ran the Lorraine for another fourteen years, but the motel never recovered. The neighborhood declined, the clientele changed, and in 1982 Walter Bailey declared bankruptcy.
A group called the Save the Lorraine Foundation bought the motel at auction for a hundred and forty-four thousand dollars. Walter Bailey died on July 7, 1988, at the age of seventy-three, and he never saw the Lorraine become a museum.
In 1991, the National Civil Rights Museum opened inside the Lorraine Motel. You can walk through exhibits that trace centuries of struggle, but at the end, you come to Room 306.
You cannot enter it. You stand behind a glass partition and you look inside.
The bed is still unmade. The coffee cups are still on the dresser, still in their saucers, next to plates and napkins from Loree Bailey's kitchen.
It looks like someone just stepped out for a moment. Like they might walk back in.
Martin Luther King Jr. was killed fighting for men who earned a dollar sixty an hour to carry other people's garbage on their heads. He was killed in a motel owned by a Black couple who named it after the wife, who cooked him catfish every time he visited, who charged thirteen dollars a night and treated him like family.
The woman who gave the motel its name died from the shock of hearing the shot that took his life. Her dishes are still in his room.
Fifty-eight years later, Room 306 remains frozen at the exact moment everything changed. The bed will never be made, the cups will never be washed, the meal will never be finished.
And every year, on April 4, people stand behind that glass and look at what a country did to a man who asked for nothing more than what those signs said. I am a man.
The dishes are still in the room. They are still waiting.
$1000 Needed To Buy Donation Food?
We earned $250 CAD at the last talk in Red Deer and another $200 coming from a talk in Edmonton. Last trip we paid over $1000 for food donations, so getting closer to that number.
Note* We also gave the January Kelowna talk scheduled but it will probably occur after my next trip to Thailand. I can not count those donation funds yet.
Earning Donation Money from the Kelowna Photography Club.
The Kelowna Photography Club will pay $200 CAD for the January, 2027 Social Documentary PowerPoint, ZOOM talk.
100% of that money will go to help the people in the pictures. We will probably use it to buy food for THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE UNDER THE FREEWAY.
Note* We already earned $250 CAD at the last talk in Red Deer and another $200 coming from a talk in Edmonton. Last trip we paid over $1000 for food donations, so getting closer that number.
LINK: Canmore Photo Club??
Possible Social Documentary talk interest from the Canmore Alberta Photo Club.
Nothing set yet. Hoping to set up a talk and combine it with a trip to make Ambrotypes for the AMBROTOS KANATA project.
We shall see, it might work out!
https://canmorecameraclub.com/
Friday, April 3, 2026
Nice Thai Room
$795 CAD plus power and water, $1000 plus a month, and a deposit. This place is 1 MRT stop away from Khlong Toei Station, near where I work on THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE UNDER THE FREEWAY photo/donation project.
Thrift Show Book Buy
Today’s Thrift Store buys. The Printed Picture” the best book, quite wonderful, from MOMA. Total cost for the 5 books, $22 CAD.
*Bonus points.
I got asked for my ID when I wanted the OLD GEEZER discount. It starts at 60 and I turn 62 in 6 days.
Kelowna Photo Club Talk
I have a new talk scheduled with the Kelowna Photography club on January 12th, 2027. It will be a ZOOM talk, money earned will be used to help the people in the pictures. I would have preferred an inperson live talk, but they do not do them. So ZOOM is what will happen.
https://www.copsphotography.ca/
Wednesday, April 1, 2026
My Favourite Fanny and Freddy Pic
Always loved this picture of the motor home Fanny and darkroom trailer Freddy. It makes me want to head out and make Ambrotypes! Go, go, go, AMBROTOS KANATA project.
Tuesday, March 31, 2026
Video: Wee Kai
Wee Kai is now a young woman. In this video, the last I took of her with her father, she is with him in his shack on the garbage, 2018. Her father passed in 2021.
I often think back to this young girls life, and wonder what will become of her in the future. Here father has died, her brother and mother can only do so much. Poverty most often begets only more poverty. Will she end up back in the dump, a mother at 14, like so many others before her. Last I heard from here mom, she was in Mae Sot working.
In the video, I speak the little Burmese I know, to ask her father, his daughters name.
Extending and Expanding my Social Documentary PowerPoint Talk
Am working on a new revised version of my Social Documentary talk on the projects THE FAMILIES OF THE DUMP and THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE UNDER THE FREEWAY. I am adding 10-15 photographs and removing 1 of the videos. Plus cleaning up a couple of title typos.
I have an extra 15 minutes (1 hour and 15 minutes total) at THE IMAGES ALBERTA talk, so hope to use that time fruitfully!!
Monday, March 30, 2026
IMAGES ALBERTA Talk to have a ZOOM Element!
The coming IMAGES ALBERTA photography club talk on April 9th will also be broadcast on ZOOM. Not sure how it all works but 2 ladies from the CAPS Red Deer photography club talk, said they would re-watch it on ZOOM.
Modern tech is rather amazing. I like the ability to do video talks but LIVE seems the better way to go. I sure enjoy speaking more to real people versus a computer camera.
Looking forward to the IMAGES talk, I am a former member of that group.
LINK: Another POSSIBLE Talk
Nothing is confirmed yet but there might be another possible Social Documentary Artist Talk. The possible talk is a camera club in Kamloops British Columbia.
That makes talks in Halifax, Nova Scotia and Kamloops British Columbia as maybes. Not sure if they will be ZOOM talks or live.
https://www.copsphotography.ca/
Vinegar Buy
Wetplate trailer opening soon! Got my supply of diluted Glacial Acetic Acid (White Vinegar) Will use it to make developer!! $3.59 CAD (50 cents off a bottle)!!
Developer Formula
1000 ml Vinegar
20 ml Bio Ethanol
30 gr Iron
40 gr Sugar
Saturday, March 28, 2026
Got a Brett Weston Monograph!!
Got a supersized book of Brett Weston’s work this Calgary trip. 131 pages/Aperture Monograph. Was a $3.60 CAD Thrift Store find.
I like the simplicity of the design. Photographs alone with white borders and no distracting text. Like pictures mounted and framed in a gallery exhibition. The straightforward power of photography on display. Letting the photos speak for themselves.
If I ever get a book published, I would go this way.
Thursday, March 26, 2026
Trying for More Talks!
The Red Deer CAPS social documentary talk went so well it encouraged me to try other clubs in Canada.
Some of these talk would have to be via ZOOM but there is also a possibility to visit the clubs personally as part of the wet plate, cross Canada project, AMBROTOS KANATA.
Contacted clubs in Lethbridge, Osoyoos, Whitehorse, Vancouver, Edson and Ottawa!!
Note* I have a talk in Edmonton scheduled for April and a tentative unscheduled talk in Halifax.
Wednesday, March 25, 2026
Talk went Well!
Did my hour and a bit talk and it went very well. Had maybe 12 questions during and after. 15 or 16 people attended.
4 different people came to talked after, called it moving etc. Thanked me and all that nice stuff. One gentleman even said he got so emotional that he almost left the room. He said many kind things.
All good stuff. I hope the next talk is even better at Images Alberta Camera Club Edmonton!!
Note* The emotional response in some, was surprising. I guess there is some power in the photos, videos and stories. We are on the right track.
Note** I need more talks!
Note*** $250 to buy food for the people in the pictures
Preparing for Red Deer Talk at CAPS Photo Club
Ready for my Social Documentary talk in Red Deer for the CAPS photo club. All ready to go an hour early. Hope someone shows up!!
Earning $250 CAD tonight, will use this donation money to buy food for the people UNDER THE FREEWAY in Khlong Toei slum, Bangkok, Thailand!!!
Tuesday, March 24, 2026
Nice Free Table
Picked up a heavy, well built, wooden table today. It is quite tall and very solid. I got it FREE. Will put it in the back woodworking yard and use it this spring/summer/fall. It should allow me to work more easily. You can never have too many table worktops!
Note* I am wondering if I can use this design, or a variant of it to hold my large metal darkroom sinks, when I transfer them from the other darkroom.
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| My new free and HEAVY/TALL table, 4x4 feet, 42 inches high |
Link; Possible Talk in Halifax, Nova Scotia
Got some positive feedback today from a photo club in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The Sackville Photography club.
https://sackvillephotoclub.com/
Will work towards scheduling something that allows me to do a talk when we are in the area with the motorhome and trailer working on the SMBROTOS KANATA Ambrotypes project!!
They pay $200 CAD, which I can use to buy food for THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE UNDER THE FREEWAY.
Saturday, March 21, 2026
The Importance of the Film, THE KILLING FIELDS
Sometimes
movies change the course of your life. This film led to my trips to
Southeast Asia. Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Nepal, India, China,
Singapore and Japan. 30 years of travel, photography, friends and
experiences.
THE KILLING FIELDS!! Picked up a Blu-Ray copy for $10 today.
Note* The film THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY was also hugely important to my travels to Asia. The photographer played by Linda Hunt (Billy Kwan) was inspirational.
Wednesday, March 18, 2026
A Bit of Money To Help the People In the Pictures
Will be earning a bit of money soon. !00% of the mopey will be used to help the people in the pictures, in the form of goods and food. I will take the money with me when I travel to directly help the subjects in the projects.
This is a WE thing not an I thing. We being myself and the people who gave the money to help those in need.
- $200 USD from FRAMES Photography Magazine, for publishing 7 images from THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE UNDER THE FREEWAY PROJECT.
- $250 CAD Social Documentary Artist Talk, Red Deer.
- $200 CAD Social Documentary Artist Talk, Edmonton.
The PowerPoint Presentation is Ready
I have two talks scheduled, one in Red Deer March 25, another in Edmonton Apirl 9.
Videos: Garbage Men at Work
Garbage workers in Bangkok. Thinking of doing a project on their work and lives. Maybe a project detailing 1-2 trucks or Bangkok wide. If possible both the workers street and home life.
I would need to continue to improve my Thai language skills and my overall physical condition. These people work hard and move fast.
Videos from 2025 trip.
Tuesday, March 17, 2026
Some Old Photos of Workers
If and when I return to Thailand, I will start work on a new series on the garbage workers of Bangkok. Need to figure out a title yet. If I go back for a couple of months I need 2 projects, can do THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE UNDER THE FREEWAY and this new unnamed series. Will also try to do donation work.
Their story is important, needs to be told. Maybe I can visit their homes as well, and photograph the workers families.
Shot 1 truck in 2025, but have not found or edited those photos yet. Will try to post some later, maybe the beginning of this project. The pics below, are old images.
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| Vee, Dom and Champoo scavenging garbage, THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE UNDER THE FREEWAY, Bangkok, Thailand 2016 |
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| Old images from Khlong Toey slum Bangkok, 2012 |
Garbage Workers Series?
Thinking more and more of doing a Garbage Workers series in Bangkok.
I have been fascinated in a strange way to their lives dating back to the year I spent in Bangkok in 2003. I used to live in an apartment with a long soi (alley/road), that led to a bigger road. I used to walk down that road over and over again, often walking behind a garbage truck with workers picking up garbage. The workers worked so hard, the smell was overpowering, beyond disgusting. Heat and food waste is not a good combo. There were rats, dogs, cockroaches all over the garbage. The men I saw worked hard and fast, it was exhausting just to watch them.
Since that time, I have thought about their lives, wanted to tell their stories. In 2025, I photographed 1 group for a few hours. Thinking of gong back to do more.
Need a good title for the project, after that, I can dig in.
The literal translation would be คนเก็บขยะ or KHON GEB KAH-YAH, a person who collects garbage. But that is too literal, need something more abstract and meaningful, more heartfelt.
Note* We could do something to help these hardworking lives, donations of some kind. Need to figure that out as well.
Note** The garbage workers of Bangkok deserve to have their stories told. Often people in what is considered the bottom of society are ignored and forgotten. It is important to show our shared humanity with compassion and empathy.
FRAMES Magazine will Arrive on Time?
I am awaiting my 3 copies of FRAMES magazine, that were promised me. I hope to take one of the copies along with the B&W magazine publishing of the work to the coming talks (March 25 and April 9). I also have 2 other mags with the photos, but did not want to take them.
It might be fun for people to browse the mags.
Note* I also did some digi print portfolio images, that I might take, not sure just yet.
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| Khun Oy from THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE UNDER THE FREEWAY |
Invoice to FRAMES Magazine Sent
I sent out the invoice to FRAMES photography magazine for $200 USD tonight. We will use the money to buy food for THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE UNDER THE FREEWAY, when I return to Thailand. We need to give them more help.
Two Talks Approaching Quickly
I have my 2 social documentary talks quickly approaching. In Red Deer on March 25 and in Edmonton on April 9.
Its strange how when I was younger I feared speaking in public but now, I look forward to it, relish it, want to do more and more of these things!
New Thrift Store Buy
Today’s nice thrift store find. A nice large 16x19 inches professionally framed print (?) of “Lady with a fan. “ Amedeo Modigliani $20.50 CAD.
Always loved Modigliani, there is a beautiful peace to his art.
Interesting fact, the original was stolen in 2010, value 100 million Euro. Hopefully not destroyed.
Background:
This painting, Woman with a Fan (Lunia Czechowska), is one of the may paintings painted by Modigliani about this woman Lunia Czechowska. Modigliani met this lady one year before his death and painted this portrait at 3 years after he met Lunia Czechowska. The Polish woman and her husband, Casimir, were old friends of Modigliani's patron/dealer Leopold Zborowski. other's out-of-wedlock daughter, only his death caused the artist to cease attempting to seduce Lunia.
Here Modigliani shows his firm friend posed gracefully, her seated body in its yellow dress forming lithe curves against the scarlet background. Later in life, Czechowska vividly recalled sitting for Modi as he drank cheap brandy, sang, lapsed into Italian and, eventually, fell so far into the act of painting that he became oblivious to the presence of another human being. And then, there she was on canvas, left with " ... the impression of having the soul laid bare and of being in the strange position of being able to do nothing to disguise her feelings.".
Saturday, March 14, 2026
June 1963, Vietnam, Buddhist Monk Self Immolation
Quảng Đức's last words before his death were documented in a letter he had left:
David Halberstam wrote:
Friday, March 13, 2026
New Card
Got my new photo cards. They look good. 250 for $50+ CAD. Might order more from this company. Photo is of Khun Nit, THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE UNDER THE FREEWAY. Am glad I have some nice cards for the talks.
Like the QR code on the back. It makes everything easier. Takes you directly to the website.
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