Larry Payne

Larry Payne was sixteen when a Memphis police officer shot and killed him at the Fowler Homes public housing project on March 28, 1968, the day the sanitation workers' march led by Martin Luther King Jr. broke apart on Main Street. The march had set out from Clayborn Temple that morning and ended in broken windows, tear gas and nightsticks, with some 280 people arrested and about 60 hurt. By evening 4,000 National Guard troops were in the city under a curfew. Payne was shot at the door of a basement boiler room at the east end of the building at 878 South Fourth Street. What happened at that door is still disputed. Police said officers chased Payne and his friends over a television from a looted Sears, and the officer, armed with a personal sawed-off shotgun, said Payne came at him with a knife. About two dozen civilian witnesses gave statements, and most said his hands were raised and that they saw no knife in them, though the Justice Department found that some accounts contradicted the physical evidence or each other. A butcher knife was found near the body. The police department later disposed of it in the Mississippi River under a court order, so it was unavailable at the civil trial. The medical examiner ruled the death a homicide. A Shelby County grand jury declined to charge the officer, and in 1971 a federal jury found for him in the family's civil suit. The Justice Department closed its file that year. The FBI looked again from 2007 in a federal cold-case initiative, and the department closed the case a second time, citing too little proof for a federal charge and the statute of limitations. King telephoned Payne's mother, and the funeral was held at Clayborn Temple on April 2. Fowler Homes was demolished in 2004.