A Spook History of FedEx - Pt. 1
In the first part of this series, I talk about the founder of FedEx's father, his connections to Georgia Tann and Boss Crump, and Fred Smith's early life.
The emergence of Fred Smith, of his company, of the corporate culture which Smith has created should suggest a series of questions which need answers. Who is Fred Smith? What kind of background created his drive? Is this successful Southerner a one-of-a-kind entrepreneur who has emerged from a region of the country not generally known as a spawning ground for founders of large nationwide corporations? Or is he simply a new version of an old breed? Is Federal Express really the forerunner of a new generation of company? Or is it the same old “Dark Satanic Mill” William Blake identified at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, albeit now dressed in high-tech finery? Who is this dynamic young business leader who conceptualizes his company as an heir to military strategist Von Clauswitz and the Marine Corps? Is he the prototype for a new generation of American business man? Or is he the rich kid, born to the purple, as the saying goes, managing an electronic plantation where cotton — now transformed into Courier-Paks, Priority 1 packages, and Overnight Letters — is still king?
(From Robert A. Sigafoos book, Absolutely, Positively Overnight!)
Anyone who has ever lived in Memphis will tell you that FedEx looms large over the city. The multinational conglomerate is Memphis’ largest employer, with more than 33,000 workers in the city itself and over half a million across the globe. The corporation has all but taken over Memphis International Airport, and their pilots make up a good portion of the local middle class. What they might also tell you is the famous story about how Fred Smith originally came up with the idea for FedEx as an undergraduate at Yale, only to be given a C on the paper by his professor. A few might also recount how Smith fled to Vegas and gambled the company’s last dollars to save it from bankruptcy. What they probably wouldn’t tell you, however, is how Smith was a member of a secret society at Yale, or about the multiple people he has killed over his alleged negligence, only to escape any responsibility or punishment. And they certainly wouldn’t describe him as a deep state actor or as someone who influences our government from the shadows.
In 1913, in the town of Marks, Mississippi, just south of Memphis, Walter Brownloe, a Black man, was imprisoned for the crime of attacking a white farmer’s wife. Before he could even be brought to trial, a mob entered the jail, took him to a barn and lynched him. At the time, opinion was divided on Brownloe’s guilt. This extrajudicial lynching was so heinous that, later that very day, the town of Marks gathered to vote to condemn the awful act.1 The following year, Brownloe’s widow was raped but the perpetrator was acquitted.2 This kind of racial violence was all too common at the time in Mississippi and unfortunately never really ceased. The state has always been an epicenter of racism in America. The University of Mississippi’s mascot was an old plantation owner until just a few years ago. Their football team is still known as the “Rebels,” harkening back to the treasonous confederacy. To this day, Mississippi is one of the poorest states in America, with its Black population disproportionately so.
It was in this same town that, 55 years after the lynching of Walter Brownloe, Martin Luther King Jr. chose to start his Poor People’s Campaign. In a visit to the town in March 1968, King saw poor black children starving and walking barefoot in the streets. This, he decided, is where he wanted to start his next march to Washington. It’s not clear if King was aware of the murderous history of the town when he made this decision. Less than a month after the visit, King was shot dead at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The Poor People’s Campaign began a month later without him in Marks and would continue all the way to Washington, DC, culminating in a protest camp on the mall that lasted for six weeks.3 It comes as no surprise, then, that this state and this town of Marks would produce a scion of the confederacy that would go on to become one of America’s spookiest business magnates, and a pillar of the white supremacist secret government.
Much of my research draws from journalist Vance Trimble’s book Overnight Success: Federal Express and Frederick Smith, Its Renegade Creator. The book’s intentions are not readily apparent – it vacillates between fluff piece and hit piece, with the hits not landing quite as hard as one would hope, at least in hindsight. It is, however, the most thorough book about Fred Smith I’ve come across. Trimble sourced much of his information from archives and in-person interviews with people from various parts of Fred’s life and Fred Smith himself. For those reasons and because of the nature of the details themselves, I have no reason to doubt the details I’ve included here, although one can only imagine how much has been omitted. The book does recall many details of Fred’s life that go unmentioned elsewhere. I would like to highlight those details here, given new understandings of the CIA and its role in drug trafficking and other multinational criminal enterprises. Limited hangout or not, Overnight Success gives us an incomparable look into the life of Fred Smith and his family.
Another book that I’ve sourced from is the original book about FedEx- Absolutely, Positively Overnight! by University of Memphis economics professor Robert Sigafoos. The professor offers a surprisingly and refreshingly grounded look at the economic forces behind FedEx’s success. Fred Smith gave Sigafoos unfettered access to the company’s archives and employees.
Like so many “self-made billionaires,” Fred inherited a vast estate from his father, James Frederick Smith. The son of a steamboat captain, James started his career working for Clarence Saunders, founder and pioneer of America’s first self-service grocery store, Piggly Wiggly.4 During WWI, James was recruited into the military and worked as a truck procurement inspector. Following the war, James hired two lawyers in Memphis who were a part of the corrupt Crump political machine. Boss E. H. Crump controlled the government and politics of the city of Memphis from the 1910s up until his death in 1954, very much in the style of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall in New York. While Crump initially came to power with the support of Memphis’s Black population (by paying for their poll taxes and improving some of the city’s basic services), he ultimately solidified Jim Crow as the city’s modus operandi towards Memphis’ Black population, as was the case in most of the southern US at the time, and oversaw the incorporation of the Ku Klux Klan into the Memphis Police Department. According to Professor Michael K. Honey, author of the book Going Down Jericho Road, “Crump put Ku Klux Klan leader Cliff Davis in charge of the police and then made him a congressman for thirteen terms. …white police officers, many of them straight from the plantation districts, functioned like Klansmen in blue uniforms, brutalizing and insulting African Americans and union organizers with support from white judges, FBI officials, and federal attorneys.”5
“Crump was first elected Memphis mayor in 1908; thereafter, he built his political machine by collecting money from illegal gambling dens, houses of prostitution, and, during Prohibition, from illegal liquor joints. Crump’s ward and precinct heelers used these funds to pay for people’s poll taxes and for city employees to get people out to vote for his candidates. Under Crump, “The colored people, they voted plenty,” recalled Republican black political activist George W. Lee. In fact, he said, “People’d vote four and five times,” and they voted just the way Crump wanted them to. Crump modernized city services while entrenching segregation, and his control over the most populated city in Tennessee increasingly gave him power over state and national elections and the Democratic Party.”6
Crump went on to make millions for himself in real estate, banking, insurance, and investments. Crump made it clear that his administration would be as hostile to unions as possible. Of course, this anti-union sentiment disproportionately affected black workers. Many white union workers, mostly from the American Federation of Labor (AFL), actually benefited from Crump’s Jim Crow policies and they even participated in the beating and killing of black workers to solidify their position within the Crump regime. “In 1919, 650 white railroad workers from Memphis led a five-day wildcat strike in an attempt to eliminate blacks from the industry. AFL unions routinely excluded blacks from skilled work, even in federally funded construction jobs during the New Deal.”7 When the mostly black-led Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) began organizing in Memphis, tensions boiled over. “Whites beat and nearly killed Thomas Watkins, a black longshoreman who led a strike of black and white Mississippi River workers in 1939, as Crump denounced the CIO as ‘nigger unionism’ and ‘Communism.’”8
Several years earlier in 1925, James was able to use his connections within the Crump machine to pass a state law making intercity bus lines a public utility. Conveniently, James was also in the meetings where these new bus lines were being planned and was able to secure contracts for himself to run the buses. The first of these bus routes was the “Governor’s Special,” a daily 450 mile round trip bus between Memphis and Nashville, the state’s capital, which also won James many favors with Governor Henry H. Horton. This business grew to dominate bus travel in the Mid-South. 9James built his own $100,000 plant to manufacture buses, and his wealth grew to $17 million at its peak.
After building his bus empire, James started another successful business, a chain of diners called The Toddle House. By the 1950s, Toddle House had exploded in popularity, with more than 200 locations in 90 cities across the country. The Toddle House business model was used by one of their former employees, Joe Rogers, to start Waffle House, one of the most successful diner chains in American history.10 Not all of James’ endeavors were successful, though. One idea that ultimately didn’t pan out was Golden Eagle airlines, an airline that would have operated short-haul flights between Memphis and Nashville. While this airline didn’t come to fruition, James’ attempt does anticipate his son’s future business ventures into aerospace.
Having divorced his first wife, James remarried to a woman named Charlotte Clark. A blood disorder had apparently left him sterile, so James and his wife adopted their first daughter Laura Ann Smith from the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, a criminal baby stealing operation disguised as a legitimate adoption service and orphanage, run by the infamous Georgia Tann.11 For decades, Tann and her associates would steal babies from poor mothers, sometimes within minutes of their birth. The operation was facilitated by Judge Camille Kelly, who approved the necessary paperwork for the adoptions. Tann trafficked children to high profile customers such as Joan Crawford, Albert Steele, June Allyson, Dick Powell, and NY Governor Herbert Lehman, among others. Famous wrestler Ric Flair was one of thousands of children trafficked to their new parents by Tann. Both Tann and Kelly were deeply enmeshed in Crump’s machine, which is the primary reason their operation was able to continue unabated until Tann’s death in 1950. Sources claim that James was unaware of these crimes when he adopted his daughter, but the fact that he was already connected to the Crump machine, as well as the fact that he donated $15,000 to the Society for a new building and even served on its board, raises questions about the true nature of his involvement.12 James was, unsurprisingly, not the most standup guy. Charlotte confessed that he hit her at least once, and he often philandered with other women, including the daughter of Tennessee Congressman (and Crump machine lawyer) Walter Chandler.13
His profits – and his morals – culminated in the decision to purchase two plantations in Mississippi, cementing his status as a true son of the confederacy. The plantations did not sit empty. James employed several hundred poor Black workers who lived and worked on the plantation amidst deplorable conditions. There was no running water, electricity, or bathrooms. This was a plantation in the truest sense, except it was almost a century after emancipation. Smith claimed to have built new facilities for his workers after he purchased the plantations, but these too fell into disrepair, and it was all too little, too late for his suffering laborers, whom he woke every morning at 4am to a loud air horn he had installed.14
Remarkably, Charlotte was able to get pregnant and had their first non-adopted child, Fredette Smith, but this good fortune wouldn’t last long for Charlotte. James was caught up in a Federal investigation for not paying his taxes and convinced her to divorce him so he could square up their finances. Charlotte did as she was told, willing to do anything for her husband and children,15 but after the divorce, James left her with nothing and moved on to marry his next wife Dorothy Dickman just three days later. Trimble writes:
In her rage, Charlotte Smith went to their home on East Parkway to collect her thoughts. She intended to stay there until she could find a suitable apartment in Memphis. She collected so much that when she signed a lease at the Parkview Apartments, she needed a moving van. When her ex-husband came back he discovered she had taken "without his knowledge or consent" furniture, rugs, ornaments, paintings, and a grand piano, all valued at $2,500. Fred Smith took her to court. "They belong to me," said Charlotte Smith. On May 23, 1940, the Chancery Court decided otherwise and let him send sheriff's deputies to bring it all back. Charlotte felt powerless – and bitter. "Memphis is full of in-trigue," she said. "Charleston, South Carolina, is the same way. If you belong to a certain clique, you can murder your own mother and nobody cares or will do anything about it. If you're not in that circle, you are in deep trouble."16
The marriage to Dorothy didn’t last long either, and they divorced a little over a year after their wedding. During WWII, James worked a “desk job” in Washington, despite also being commissioned as a lieutenant commander of the Eighth Naval District in New Orleans by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox.17 After resigning whatever commission this was, James returned to Memphis and married Sally Wallace West, a widow with two sons of her own. In 1944, they had their first child together, little Freddie Smith.
It was also in the mid-1940’s that James’ Dixie Greyhound bus drivers went on strike. Unsurprisingly, he did not immediately cede to their demands for higher pay and shorter work weeks and instead hired replacement drivers. Negotiations did not end there, however; at one point, the replacement scab drivers found themselves being shot at on the highway. One of the managers received a death threat shortly after. Within days, a new contract was signed with the union, granting drivers higher pay and shorter hours.
A few years later, James would die after having complications from a heart attack. His crimes did not cease with his death, however. Despite his total assets being worth roughly $22 million, his bankers and lawyers handling the will were able to convince the IRS of an appraisal of a little more than $700,000. His half-finished yacht, the Lysander, a former Navy patrol gunboat, was almost sold to King Paul of Greece. However, after an uproar within the State Department, who objected to the lavish purchase since the United States was currently funding much of the postwar reconstruction of Greece, the boat was sold to Smith’s Toddle House business partner, J.C. Stedman, instead.18 The vast majority of his assets were held in the Frederick Smith Enterprise Company, which was, unsurprisingly, incorporated in Delaware. Forty percent went to young Fred, with the rest split between his two half sisters.
Fred Smith’s Early Life
Having lost his own father at the age of four, Fred's childhood was shaped by various military personnel who served as surrogate fathers for him -- figures who were deeply enmeshed in imperialist projects. Early on, Fred spent time at Fort McClellan, Alabama (not far from Huntsville), with Fred’s uncle (Sally’s brother), Major General Sam T. Wallace in the Tennessee Guard Encampment around 1952. At this time, Ft. McClellan was being used as a training ground for various states’ National Guard regiments. Interestingly, it was also where the US military’s Chemical Corps conducted their chemical warfare training. As part of Operation Top Hat, unwitting soldiers at Ft. McClellan were subjected to radioactive material, vesicants, phosgene, and nerve agents such as napalm and agent orange. This was very much a predecessor of the experiments conducted at Edgewood Arsenal outside of Baltimore after the Chemical Corps relocated there in 1973.19 Veterans who trained at Ft. McClellan have started to suffer serious health effects as a result of their time spent on the base. Some members of Congress have been pushing forward a bill that would create a registry of veterans impacted by the chemicals they were exposed to at Fort McClellan,20 although this effort has been unsuccessful due to pushback from the Department of Defense.21 We know that Nazi Paperclip scientists were working on mind control experiments at Edgewood.22 Were they also at Fort McClellan? Wernher Von Braun was working closeby in Huntsville, AL at Redstone Arsenal and according to the military, there are 26 German and 3 Italian “POWs” buried at Ft. McClellan.23
Fred’s mother elaborates on the role her brother had in her son’s life and her own influence over his worldview. From Trimble:
"My brother was in the National Guard forty years, and Freddie's interest in the military came from our family background. That goes back a long way—Wade Hampton, the Confederate general over in South Carolina, was a relative of ours," said Sally Smith.
His mother encouraged him to read the history of the War Between the States, saw to it that he acquired a large collection of toy soldiers with which he could reenact the famous battles between the North and South, and took him several times to the Shiloh battlefield on the Tennessee River. As a boy he considered a military career via West Point.24
A friend of Sam Wallace, Colonel Fred Hook, a Memphis air force officer and Pentagon liaison to the Air National Guard, encouraged young Fred to follow his dream of becoming a pilot. Fred’s mother would go on to marry Col. Hook in 1965. A seasoned pilot himself, Col. Hook’s resume included barnstormer, crop duster, pilot for Chicago and Southern airlines, and most interestingly as a Flying Tiger in China serving under General Claire Chennault.
As an air force officer in the Pentagon, Hook was sent to Cuba as an American military attaché, became friendly with President Batista, and got involved in the 1959 Castro revolution. For his efforts to save a Cuban officer from the firing squad, he gained Castro's hatred. Dictator Fidel reportedly ordered him assassinated, but Hook, his wife, Jewel, whom he married right out of high school, and his daughter, Linda, who was born in Havana, safely escaped.25
Fred Smith wasted no time starting his own business endeavors in high school. While he was a student at Memphis University School, he had already learned to fly crop dusters by the age of 15. With the help of some of his friends, he also started Ardent Records, a music label and recording studio. Even though Fred quit the label before graduating high school, Ardent would go on to become a significant label in Memphis under the direction of his friend, John Fry. Their studios were used by big names such as Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, James Taylor, ZZ Top, R.E.M., Stevie Ray Vaughan, Al Green, the Allman Brothers Band, B.B. King, the White Stripes, the Replacements, and Three 6 Mafia. Stax Records would also utilise their studio, sending over any overflow work they had. Roughly 1/5 of Stax’s artists recorded there, including Cat Power, M.I.A., and Big Star.26
Shortly after turning 18, Fred Smith gained another mentor, Lucius E. Burch Jr. Burch was a well-respected lawyer in Memphis who represented MLK in the Memphis sanitation strike case27 and was a staunch opponent of the Crump political machine.28 Burch invited the 18-year-old Smith to his lodge in Ireland where he was apparently hazed by the family. Smith and Burch would end up growing close, spending much of their time hiking, hunting, diving, and engaging in philosophical debates.29 I wonder if Burch, a liberal through and through, was trying to influence young Smith, who was clearly very intelligent but was also still holding onto his father’s dream of the confederacy. One of Fred’s peers, Jeanne Coors, recalled of their youth together, “Fred was very respected by his peers. Very interested in history. He collected and painted those little lead toy soldiers, and he would study great battles. He was particularly interested in Napoleon, and General Nathan Bedford Forrest…”30 Fred’s first experience with real-life politics would come just before he left for college and also at the hands of Democrats, flying around Bill Farris, the Memphis City Commissioner who was campaigning for Governor, and current Governor Browning, to campaign events across the state. Even though Farris would lose that election, he would go on to become a political kingmaker for Democratic politics in Tennessee. He is credited with bringing the 1978 Democratic National Convention to Memphis.31 Bill Farris was also, probably unsurprisingly, a member of the Al Chymia Shriners Temple and the Park Avenue Masonic Lodge in Memphis.32
After high school, Smith went to Yale to study economics and political science. According to Vance Trimble, “Fred Smith arrived in the Yankee precincts of New Haven, Connecticut, somewhat sensitive about being a southern boy. He took along a Confederate flag, which he proudly hung on his dormitory wall… His ebullient Confederate panache won him important student friendships.”33 He joined the Marine Corps reserve as a freshman, which would require him to spend every summer at Quantico. At the end of the summer after his Freshman year, while he was home, he and a group of friends headed to Pickwick Lake, not far from Memphis, for a weekend. At some point, the car flipped and crashed, killing his passenger and friend, Mike Gadberry. Mike had previously told his father that “Fred drives too fast. I tell him to slow down,” so his father, Dr. Gadberry, had made sure to tell them before they left, “You all boys be real careful now and don’t get yourselves hurt.”34 The scene was gruesome, and Fred reportedly seemed in shock. Fred claimed someone turned in front of him, causing him to crash. His story became more elaborate once he made it to the hospital, telling his mother, "that he had just a split second to decide-either to hit a car full of children that was making a big ole country left turn in front of him, or leave the road.”35 No criminal charges were ever filed in the case.
Dr. Gadberry filed a damage suit in McNairy County, scene of the fatal wreck, and a settlement was reached without a trial. "I won't say how much I was paid," the physician said.
Even twenty-eight years later the Gadberrys felt bitter pangs. "I think that boy was going at least one hundred and ten miles an hour," said Mrs. Gadberry. "Mike's neck was broken; the driver didn't even get a scratch. Please don't try to talk to Dr. Gadberry anymore. Mike was his only son. Bringing this all up again is so painful. Last night he couldn't sleep at all."36
His second year at Yale, he started an aviation club and wrote the famous paper on a hub-and-spoke style package delivery service that would eventually become FedEx. Smith said he was inspired by the way telephones worked at the time, in which all calls are routed through a central switchboard. However, there may have been another influence from a technology that was even newer than telephones, as pointed out by Dr. Richard Corbin Porter, the Chair of the Yale Econ Dept. when Fred was a student.
By the mid-sixties computers were quite capable of handling linear programming. We now teach it to our students as kind of an archaic joke. Computers will do nonlinear programming now. But linear programming was much talked about in the late 1950s and up through the mid-1960s. One problem was known as "the traveling salesman problem." The traveling salesman problem required setting up a computer program that speedily solved the following: What is the route that takes the least number of miles for a salesman to travel to every state capital in the United States? And you can start 'em anywhere; obviously it doesn't matter where. So as to minimize, you don't go back and forth across the continent-from Washington to Maine, to California, and back to Georgia. This set up a whole lot of transport costs, minimizing problems that could be handled linearly. This whole airline hub business would have fallen in neatly. You could show that with a hub and with people going to the hub and then out again, you could somehow minimize the total cost in terms of flights and miles and so forth. A good student might well have picked that up and worked that out. Not something that a weak student would have done. The discovery that a hub system somehow reduced costs would have been something that you could have worked out in linear programming in the 1960s. I have no idea who first worked it out. But now with twenty-twenty hindsight, sure, put me back in the mid-1960s and I'll write you a nice paper about how hubs will be cheaper. Now it's easy. Always any discovery in economics, any uncovered theory, or whatever— everybody sees it afterward. "My God, why didn't I think of that!"37
It was also at Yale that Smith met and befriended both George W. Bush and John Kerry through their membership in the Skull & Bones secret society.38 Skull & Bones is a thread for another time but, briefly, the secret society at Yale was founded in 1832 by William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft. Alphonso was President Taft’s father but perhaps more importantly, Russell was from the same family that started Russell & Company, the largest American trading house of the mid-19th century in China. Russell & Company made their fortune in the illegal smuggling of opium into China,39 led primarily by Warren Delano jr, FDR’s grandfather, who brought the organization to the peak of its power.40 I mention this only because the theme of China and drug smuggling will become important later. To this day, the Russell Trust Association is the official name for the business end of the society. Besides the Tomb, their on campus meeting hall, the society also owns Deer Island on the St. Lawrence River, which it uses as a retreat for alumni.41
After enlisting in the Marines, Smith served two tours in Vietnam, where he enrolled in flight school and subsequently flew more than two hundred ground support missions. Smith served his first tour and left traumatized but felt compelled to return to Vietnam. Before he left for the second time, he spent time in California learning the Vietnamese language. During his second tour, Fred was hit by shrapnel twice, once in the eye and once in the back, but suffered no lasting consequences from either. In 1968, Smith was promoted to be an aide to the Division Commander by Major General Carl Albert Youngdale. Later that year, he was offered a “‘very interesting’ high-level G-2 (intelligence) job” but apparently opted instead to return to combat. He was then stationed at Marble Mountain Air Facility in Da Nang in the marine observation squadron.42 Throughout his service, Smith was awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts, and was honorably discharged in 1969. He married Linda Grisham on June 7, 1969 in Honolulu.
Upon returning to the states, he got in contact with his sister Fredette, who had just moved to McLean, VA with her husband Bryan Eagle. Eagle had just gotten a job with the Central Intelligence Agency as an “electronics expert.”43 Eagle was more than just a brother-in-law to Fred, he was a close advisor and confidante in the days and weeks leading up to the inception of FedEx. As the husband of one of the inheritors, Eagle served on the board of the Fred Smith Enterprise Company, the holding company of Fred Sr.’s trust, which consisted mostly of $13 million of Squibb-Beechnut stock. Eagle later divorced Fredette but Fred and Bryan remained friends. Bryan was his nephew’s father and Fred would become a mentor to young Bryan Eagle III.
After his return to the States, Fred went to live in Little Rock where he and his stepfather, Col. Hook, invested into Arkansas Aviation Sales Co., a relatively small aviation outfit. The company operated out of Adams Field, a joint civil-military airport, now known as Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport. A December 11, 1961 AP article in the Batesville Guard reported that Wernher von Braun, the Nazi Paperclip scientist who was now the head of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL, exclusively flew planes from Arkansas Aviation to get around the country on official government business.44 The company’s success didn’t last long, however. Smith and Hook were both duped by the former owners into buying a failing company but Smith was able to turn it around by selling used airplane parts at a time when that market was growing rapidly. This business didn’t leave a good taste in his mouth, however, remarking, "I really didn't like this business. It was full of shady characters. I just didn't feel comfortable dealing with a lot of these people."45
"Lynched Negro, Condemned Deed". The New York Times. September 27, 1913.
https://marxists.architexturez.net/history/usa/workers/civil-rights/crisis/0200-crisis-v07n04-w040.pdf
Elliott, Debbie (May 13, 2018). "How A Mule Train From Marks, Miss., Kicked Off MLK's Poor People Campaign". NPR.org. National Public Radio, Inc. Retrieved December 4, 2024.
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https://www.ajc.com/news/joe-rogers-profile-the-cornerstone-waffle-house/A3Fzs0PhbRUIpGle0Gu61N/. Retrieved December 4, 2024.
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Graff, Gary (December 18, 2014) "Ardent Studios Founder John Fry Dies at 69". billboard.com. Retrieved December 4, 2024.
W. J. Michael Cody (2011), King at the Mountain Top: The Representation of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Memphis, April 3–4 1968 Archived 2012-04-25 at the Wayback Machine, The University of Memphis Law Review, vol. 41, pages 699-707. Burch, Porter and Johnson website, accessed December 6, 2024.
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Downs, Jacques M (1968). "American Merchants and the China Opium Trade, 1800–1840". Business History Review. 42 (4): 418–442. doi:10.2307/3112527. JSTOR 3112527. S2CID 153582226.
Hamilton, Peter E (2012). May Holdsworth & Christopher Munn (ed.). Dictionary of Hong Kong Biography. Hong Kong University Press. ISBN 9789888083664.
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Great read, excited for the next parts!