The Invisible Floor: The Black Men Who Ruined A Conspiracy

“It is someone shooting at the President, and I believe it came from up above us.”

-James Jarman, November 22, 1963

The black men kept each other company in the mostly white building. They were all in the same boat. A minority working inside of it. The Texas School Book Depository sat on the corner of Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. In the very same spot where the mid 1800’s the public lynchings of Black people were held. Despite the little contact they had with one another they had less with others. The men rarely speaking much to any of the white people also working there including angry man Lee. The little brooding Caucasian curmudgeon who worked throughout the building. The three men went on about their work. All three men got to the book depository that morning around 8AM. James Jarman, Jr was 34 years old at the time. He worked as a wrapper in the shipping department. Bonnie Ray Williams was 20. He worked in the warehouse and was temporarily assigned to laying a plywood floor on the sixth floor where Oswald fired the shots that killed The President. Harold Norman was 26. He worked in the book depository as an order filler. Harold and James decided earlier in the day that they would watch the parade during the lunch hour from the fifth-floor windows. From the ground floor they took the west elevator to the fifth floor. Bonnie had gone up to the sixth floor where he had been working all morning, laying the floor to eat the lunch that he had brought from home on the south side of that same floor. Since he saw no one around when he finished his lunch, Bonnie started down on the east elevator, looking for company. Bonnie found company when he went down to the fifth floor and joined Harold and James to watch the parade together looking out the fifth-floor windows at approximately 12:20 p.m. Harold was in the fifth-floor window in the southeast corner, directly under the window where witnesses saw the rifle. He could see light through the ceiling cracks between the fifth and sixth floors as the motorcade went by. Harold had thought that the President was saluting with his right arm. In the form of a white man from Massachusetts who rose to be the most powerful man in the world going by them in a convertible top that day these three men saw the past, present, and future of the country that would majorly affect their lives as much as anyone going forward and just seconds later, they observed as the future was blasted to pieces on the streets of Dallas. They are the closest witnesses to one of the most famous historical events in world history and the most notable assassination of a world leader in world history and yet very little is known about them. Very few people know of them or who they were. Personal information on them is scarce but as Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots into the motorcade killing President John F Kennedy in Dealey plaza in downtown Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, Nobody was close than the three men sitting below his Sniper’s nest on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository on the fifth floor looking out of the windows and watching the parade. Their testimony is some of the hardest and most damning evidence against Oswald in the case. All three men worked in the book depository all three heard three shots being fired and three shell casings hitting the floor above their heads. All three were black and mostly invisible as they worked in a mostly white building in a mostly white town in a mostly white country. All three remain just as invisible today. Having deliberately been kept as much as possible away from the public’s view and knowledge by conspiracy buffs who have turned into conspiracy businessmen all conspiring to keep the lies of the JFK assassination going. Only in an alternate reality can Lee Harvey Oswald be innocent of killing John F Kennedy and only in an alternate reality can there be a conspiracy involving anyone else but Lee Harvey Oswald. The reality is that Lee Harvey Oswald murdered the president of the United States and between witnesses who saw him and who heard him do it he was busted cold. Conspiracy theorists should have never made a dime on pushing the drug of conspiracy involving the murder of John F. Kennedy and if the three men who sat mere feet away from Oswald as he fired the infamous deadly shots were white, I doubt we would ever be having the conversation. The fact that they were black was an effortless way into a mass conspiracy. There are no questions left unanswered or anything to figure out. We know what happened. We know everything that happened and how it happened. Looking at the case through the three black men who heard the murderer killing above them that day we get to the cold hard truth about the assassination and the truth about America. Bonnie Ray had a few debris in his head. The power of the rifle shaking the floor beneath Oswald caused fragments to fall from the ceiling below and onto Bonnie’s head. James quickly noticed white stuff easily spotted in Bonnie’s short afro. Bonnie has stated that he “really did not pay any attention” to the first shot because I did not know what was happening. The second shot sounded like it was right in the building, the second and third shot. And it even shook the building, the side we were on. Cement fell on my head. Cement, gravel, dirt, or something, from the old building because it shook the windows and everything. Harold was sitting next to me, and he said it came right from over our head.” Bonnie, testified that Harold said, “I can even hear the shell being ejected from the gun hitting the floor.” “It’s not backfire, someone is shooting at The President. “I could hear the action of the bolt, and I could hear the cartridges drop on the floor.” “I can’t remember what the exact time was but I know I heard a shot, and then after I heard the shot, well, it seems as though the President, you know, slumped or something, and then another shot and I believe James or someone told me, he said, “I believe someone is shooting at the President,” and I think I made a statement “It is someone shooting at the President, and I believe it came from up above us.” Well, I couldn’t see at all during the time, but I know I heard a third shot fired, and I could also hear something sounded like the shell hulls hitting the floor and the ejecting of the rifle. Bonnie Ray said that he “really did not pay any attention” to the first shot “…because I did not know what was happening. The second shot, it sounded like it was right in the building, the second and third shot. And it sounded — it even shook the building, the side we were on. Cement fell on my head. Cement, gravel, dirt, or something, from the old building because it shook the windows and everything. Harold was sitting next to me, and he said it came right from over our head. Bonnie testified that Harold said, “I can even hear the shell being ejected from the gun hitting the floor.” When James heard the first sound, he thought that it was either a backfire or an officer giving a salute to the President. And then at that time I didn’t, you know, think too much about it. Well, after the third shot was fired, I think I got up and I run over to Harold and Bonnie and told them, I said, I told them that it wasn’t a backfire or anything, that somebody was shooting at the President. James testified that Harold said “that he thought the shots had come from above us, and I noticed that Bonnie Ray had a few debris in his head. It was sort of white stuff, or something.” James stated that Harold said, “that he was sure that the shot came from inside the building because he had been used to guns and all that, and he said it didn’t sound like it was too far off anyway.” The three men ran to the west side of the building, where they could look toward the Triple Underpass to see what had happened to the motorcade. After the men had gone to the window on the west side of the building, James “got to thinking about all the debris on Bonnie Ray’s head” and said, “That shot probably did come from upstairs, up over us.” James testified that Harold said, “I know it did, because I could hear the action of the bolt, and I could hear the cartridges drop on the floor.” After pausing for a few minutes, the three men ran downstairs. Harold and James ran out of the front entrance of the building, where they saw Brennan, the construction worker who had seen the man in the window firing the gun, talking to a police officer, and they then reported their own experience. This is a key piece of evidence against Oswald. He was spotted in the window of the sixth floor firing his own gun. He was heard on the sixth floor firing his own gun out the window. This was all reported to police within an unbelievably brief time period. Oswald’s description quickly goes out to all other police cars. Police soon find out that Lee Harvey Oswald is the only one working at the book depository that day who leaves the building after the President is shot. The only one. There is almost no doubt in the Dallas Police Department’s mind that they have their man. Units begin circling Dealey plaza and are headed to the neighborhood where Oswald lives in a boarding house. Oswald is seen by witnesses outside of the book depository trying to hail down taxi cabs to get out of there. Oswald eventually boards a city bus that takes him back to his boarding house. Once inside his boarding house Oswald gets another one of his guns. A revolver and leaves the boarding house once again on foot. In minutes Oswald is already stopped by the Police. A Dallas Police Officer named J.D Tippet who has patrolling the area looking for someone who has Oswald’s description as the man who shot Kennedy stops Oswald. Tippet has found his man and as Tippet exists his car to question him Oswald pulls his gun and fires three shots into Officer JD. Tippet killing him. Oswald takes off and eventually makes it to the Dallas movie theater where the police are now headed before Oswald takes a seat in the chair, he didn’t even buy a ticket for after the manager of a nearby store see’s Oswald pass his store on the way to the theater and calls the police. The president of the united states has been murdered and a police officer has been murdered and the man who did it is inside the Texas movie theater hiding in the dark as police are finally going to get him before he kills anyone else. As police move in on Oswald in the theater, he pulls his revolver, but police are able to wrestle it away from him and get him in custody before he can kill anyone. Now could a black man get away with all that before he was taken down in a hail of police issued bullets. Likely not. But Oswald is taken alive having been allowed to run amuck all of his life always heading toward committing these horrible acts of violence and tragic moments for the fallen and the country. Oswald’s complexion has protected him all this time where it would not have someone of a darker pigmentation. Despite the overwhelming amount of evidence that buries Oswald as the single killer there are still crazy people and con artists who insist he’s innocent or just the victim of some wild conspiracy that has no facts behind it whatsoever and has just been completely pulled from the raptures of imagination. Those same people however question the testimony of the three black men who heard the whole thing. Why? On March 20, 1964, preceding their appearance before the Warren Commission, Bonnie, James and Harold were interviewed in Dallas. At that time members of the Commission’s legal staff conducted an experiment. Harold, Bonnie, and James placed themselves at the windows of the fifth floor as they had been on November 22. A Secret Service agent operated the bolt of a rifle directly above them at the southeast corner window of the sixth floor. At the same time, three cartridge shells were dropped to the floor at intervals of about 3 seconds. According to Harold, the noise outside was less on the day of the assassination than on the day of the test. He testified, “Well, I heard the same sound, they sound similar. I heard three something that he dropped on the floor and then I could hear the rifle or whatever he had up there.” The experiment with the shells and rifle was repeated for members of the Commission on May 9, 1964, on June 7, 1964, and again on September 6, 1964. All seven of the Commissioners clearly heard the shells drop to the floor. On the morning of November 22, Bonnie Ray Williams went to work at 8:00AM. He saw Oswald for the first time that day at just past 8:00AM on the first floor. Shortly after, he went up to the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository where he continued his work of cutting and laying wood for the floor, a continuation of the past two days’ work. Five other people were working with him on this project on the sixth floor they were William Shelley, Charles Givens, Danny Arce, Billy Lovelady, and Harold Norman, the last of whom joined them later to help out. That morning, they were working on the floor of the entire west side, “from the elevator to the window facing Elm Street.” Sometime between 11:30AM to 11:50AM, Bonnie finished his work and got ready to take the elevator down to the first-floor lunchroom. He and his co-workers raced to descend to the first floor, and on the way down, Williams saw Oswald on the east side of either the fifth or sixth floor. Bonnie heard Oswald tell Charles Givens to “close the gate on the elevator and send the elevator back up.” At approximately 12:00PM, Bonnie Ray Williams took his lunch a chicken sandwich and a Dr. Pepper up to the sixth floor via elevator to watch the Presidential motorcade. That Friday, Williams’s wife had mentioned that the President would be coming, and he had also thought that Arce, Lovelady, and others would also be on the sixth floor to watch the upcoming Presidential motorcade. Bonnie ate his lunch near the southeast corner of the sixth floor sitting against some boxes. He did not see anyone else on that floor. In his Warren Commission testimony, he indicated his position by drawing on a floor plan of the sixth floor by marking the two windows he was near as “W3” and “W4”; this area was to be the assassin’s perch. Williams finished his lunch within a couple of minutes and left the remnants there, placing the Dr. Pepper on a box. In a photo later taken, it is shown on the ground, indicating that someone must have moved it, and making it further likely that someone was in that spot after Bonnie. Somewhere between five to twelve minutes after 12:00PM, Bonnie left the sixth floor. He took an elevator to the fifth floor, where he convened with Harold and James. The three moved to the south end of the building facing Elm Street so they could watch the motorcade. The three were organized, from left to right, James, Bonnie, and Harold, the last of whom was positioned directly below the window Oswald fired his shots out of. “The President came around, we remember seeing him standing up and waving. And he’s turning to go down Elm Street…we heard a shot and saw the President slump.” Bonnie testified that, as the President’s car passed, he thought Kennedy was simply brushing his hair back. He then heard two to three shots nearby and had thought that the noise was fireworks or motorcycle backfire. Bonnie did not pay attention to the first shot, but by the second, had some idea of what was going on, as the shot shook the building and windows, causing concrete debris to fall onto his head, which he wiped away shortly after. According to Bonnie, James was the first to state, “Man, someone is shooting at the President.” Furthermore, Harold also said to Bonnie that he saw the President slump, and that he could hear the rifle shells hitting the floor just above him. Bonnie himself did not hear the rifle shells being discharged or see President Kennedy slump over. Immediately after the President’s assassination, Bonnie became a key witness due to his unique proximity to Oswald’s location. There is a photo of Williams being escorted into a police car on November 22, 1963, to be taken in for interview. This photo shows debris on Williams’s shirt consistent with the fallen concrete he testified to coming from the shot. On the left is Williams’s affidavit taken that same day, mere hours after having witnessed the President’s assassination. This was his first formal account of what he witnessed. Bonnie’s testimony, both what he told the FBI immediately after the President was assassinated, and what he testified to in the Warren Commission several months later, has little that can be called into question, yet there are small discrepancies in his story. First, certain statements Williams made while testifying before the Warren Commission on March 24, 1964, contradict statements he’d made prior to the FBI. In particular, Williams’s placement of Oswald differs. In an FBI statement (top), Williams claimed that Oswald was definitively on the 6th floor of the TSBD at around 12:00PM. However, his testimony before the Warren Commission (bottom) does not match that; Williams said that Oswald might have been on the 5th or 6th floor. The fact that he saw Lee Harvey Oswald in the building that Lee Harvey Oswald worked it cannot be controversial. Second, Williams’s original affidavit, taken the day of the assassination is inconsistent with his later testimony, both through omission and by outright contradiction. In that affidavit, Williams never mentioned going to eat lunch on the 6th floor by himself; this matters because he testified that he was alone on the floor, and Oswald being potentially on the 6th floor would negate that. He also stated that he did not see Oswald after 8:00AM, when later testimony to both the Warren Commission and the FBI indicated that he did see Oswald at least once more, around or before 12:00PM, which would be just before President Kennedy was assassinated. Finally, Williams originally told the FBI that he only heard 2 shots. He later recanted, conceding that he was “excited” and “couldn’t remember too well” during that initial interview, but that “later on, as everything began to die down, [he] got [his] memory even a little better than on the [sic] 22d” and more accurately remembered that he had heard 3 shots. Conspirators will completely reject the small discrepancy in Bonnie’s testimony that he heard two shots and then said he heard three shots, but they will also completely believe and build up witnesses who were outside who said they heard, four shots, five shots, six shots even eight shots. In his 1991 fantasy movie JFK which is the standard barer of conspiracy movies. Director Oliver Stone portrays his dream world of what he and Jim Garrison think happened that day. The only one of the three men mentioned or portrayed is Bonnie Ray Williams. Stone shows Bonnie eating his chicken lunch on the sixth floor before he went down to the fifth floor to watch the parade with Harold and James. Nowhere in his three hour plus long movie is it even mentioned that the three black men were right below Oswald and heard the shots being fired above them. The testimony from these three men is death to any and all conspiracies still being circulated like snake oil around the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Most conspiracy theorists don’t even bring them up. Instead of constantly having to argue against them because their testimony is so strong and iron clad, they were simply erased from history. Exactly the way Conspiracy Theorist Conspirators erase all the facts of the case from history in favor of lucrative lies. which is partially why the warren report was so rejected by the majority of Americans. Why? Because these men were black and regardless of any intended Racism by Garrison, Stone or other conspiracy conspirators or not the fact remains that because they were black, they were easy to dismiss. Effortlessly deleted from the already fleeting memory banks of the American public without a second thought or a care in the world. Easy to be made to forget about by white con men who just want them not to exist. Ignoring seems to be the best certain white people can do for black people. Ignoring is almost a favor to them compared to lynching. There were no way black men were going to be the ones to put a white man away and ruin a lucrative money-making white conspiracy. Lucrative as a money maker but just as lucrative to keep rage at the government leading to actions and the consequences of those actions that mostly hurt the marginalized going forward. The Texas School Book Depository sat on the corner of Dealey Plaza in Dallas Texas and in the very same place in the mid 1800’s the public lynchings of Black people were held.