THE KNEELING MAN

As reconstructed by his daughter, the life of an undercover police officer present at the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

The famous photograph of a mortally wounded King on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis shows three people pointing at the window where the bullet came from and one man kneeling at King’s side. The kneeling man was Marrell “Mac” McCullough, then an undercover agent for the Memphis Police Department, later a CIA officer. “Dad came and went, but the black-and-white image of horror remained, unalterable and mute,” writes litigator and essayist Seletzky, who excavates the facts of her father’s life, many of which he was reluctant to discuss for reasons both personal and professional. Many questions remain: Mac, for instance, remembers the smell of gunpowder at the site of King’s murder, leading him to suspect that an exploding bullet was involved. At the time, that material was only available to the military, leading eyewitness Andrew Young to tell the author, “I don’t want to be in a position to think that high officials in our government arranged to kill my friend.” Mac was called before congressional investigators who questioned whether he himself was involved in the assassination. We will likely never know whether the government or Memphis police had anything to do with the murder, and, to judge by his daughter’s account, Mac is the kind of man who will take secrets to his grave. Fully aware through hard personal experience of Southern racism, why was McCullough so willing to act as a spy among Black Power student groups? Seletzky’s approach is nuanced, weaving her father's story and its many loose threads into her own—e.g., when she considers the racism of his era in light of the present and “the creeping feeling that I had more neighbors supporting Trump than I’d ever imagined.”

Students of 1960s anti-war movements and civil rights history will find useful information in this revealing footnote.