Glenn Vance

James Earl Jones and the Lauderhill, Florida MLK Day Celebration, 2002

In 2002 James Earl Jones was invited by the town of Lauder­hill, Florida to be their fea­tured speaker at their annual Mar­tin Luther King Day cel­e­bra­tion. As appre­ci­a­tion they wanted to pro­vide their guest with some sort of gift, so they turned to a local pro­mo­tions com­pany. The pro­mo­tions com­pany came up with a plaque that included an inscrip­tion thank­ing Jones for his par­tic­i­pa­tion sur­rounded by sev­eral postage stamps depict­ing promi­nent African-Americans, headed by one of MLK him­self. They sent the idea off to a com­pany in George­town, TX for pro­duc­tion of the plaque.

Four days before the MLK cel­e­bra­tion the city received the plaque, but instead of Jones’ name, the plaque read :

“Thank you James Earl Ray for keep­ing the dream alive. City of Lauder­hill, Jan­u­ary 19, 2002.”

Ray, of course, was the man who plead guilty to assas­si­nat­ing MLK at the Lor­raine Motel in Mem­phis in 1968.

Snopes¹ has some stuff about it, a lit­tle more about the reac­tion of the com­pany, Merit Indus­tries, that cre­ated the plaque -

AdPro hastily checked to ensure that the blun­der hadn’t been the result of a mis­take on their part:

Ger­ald Wilcox said he knew the error didn’t come from his com­pany, but he sent a com­pany sec­re­tary scur­ry­ing through order forms — just to be sure.

“In all my com­mu­ni­ca­tions with the ven­dor, I never used [the name James Earl Ray)). I almost fell off my chair when I saw it,” said Nor­bert Williams, 68, a for­mer mid­dle school prin­ci­pal who is an AdPro account exec­u­tive. The evi­dence pointed to George­town, Texas.

Even with his doubts, Wilcox said he was will­ing to call it an error but wanted Merit exec­u­tives to tell him what hap­pened. He said the first phone con­ver­sa­tion broke down when a Merit employee became unco­op­er­a­tive and cut the call short. On a sec­ond try, Ger­ald Wilcox talked to the owner, Her­bert Miller.

“I explained to him why this was so impor­tant. He said I was mak­ing a moun­tain out of a mole hill,” Wilcox said. “They had no sense of his­tory. First I was stunned, then the anger kicked in.”

Miller, appar­ently lack­ing any diplo­matic skills what­so­ever, assuaged nobody’s feel­ings by blam­ing the error on some of his poorly-educated employ­ees and terming the mix-up an inno­cent mis­take that had been “blown out of proportion”:

He said some of the company’s work­ers are barely in their 20s, pos­sess poor Eng­lish lan­guage skills and have lim­ited grasp of his­tory. “[They)) don’t know who James Earl Ray is from James Earl Jones from the man in the moon,’’ he said. Miller said the worker respon­si­ble for engrav­ing this plaque was han­dling another one about the same time bear­ing the name “Ray John­son.” He said the “Ray” from that plaque ended up on the Lauder­hill plaque, sup­plant­ing the word “Jones.”

He said the mis­take slipped through qual­ity con­trol because it was a rush job. “It was a stu­pid, stu­pid error,” he said.

Mr. Jones, to his credit, brushed it off. From CNN² -

James Earl Jones brushes off engrav­ing mistake

LAUDERHILL, Florida (AP) — James Earl Jones brushed off a mis­take by an engraver who erred while inscrib­ing a plaque meant to honor the actor dur­ing a Mar­tin Luther King Jr. tribute.

The plaque was engraved: “Thank you James Earl Ray for keep­ing the dream alive.” Ray was the man con­victed of assas­si­nat­ing King in Mem­phis, Tenn., in 1968.

Jones said the com­pany made a com­mon mis­take and he’s been intro­duced as James Earl Ray before.

“There’s no point in get­ting too sen­si­tive about it,” Jones said Sat­ur­day at the ceremony.

Instead of the plaque, the city gave Jones a col­or­ful Ashanti stool sim­i­lar to ones tra­di­tion­ally used as a throne in the African tribe.

Merit Indus­tries, the plaque’s maker, said the mis­take hap­pened when an employee was prepar­ing the Jones plaque at about the same time as one for some­one named Ray Johnson.

1. The link for the Snopes arti­cle is here. [↩]
2. The link for the CNN arti­cle is here. [↩]

16. January 2007 by Glenn Vance
Categories: History | 2 comments