MONTGOMERY, Alabama -- Forty years ago, a small group of Black Muslims embarked on a crime spree in the city of Montgomery that made headlines for months and still resonates in the capital city's memory.

The spree culminated on Oct. 12, 1974 with the shooting death of retired Montgomery Police Officer M.E. Furr and the takeover of R&B radio station WAPX on Dexter Avenue, according to Montgomery Advertiser reports and witness accounts.

Three men held the radio disc jockey and secretary hostage for more than two hours that Saturday morning and engaged in a gun battle that eventually involved 200 local, state and federal law enforcement officers.

The three men spread their message over the radio waves for about 45 minutes until the transmitter was turned off. They called for Montgomery's black community to join them in a "revolution," the Advertiser reported.

Back then, Montgomery police had no heavy weaponry or bullet-resistant vests, and the department was only beginning to form a SWAT team.

Officers hid behind cars and mattresses while trading shots with the hostage-takers. They were even told to bring guns and ammunition from home.

The gunfire continued until the hostages, Al Dixon Jr. and Gloria Gilmer, managed to escape and the three men inside the station surrendered.

The crime events started that day at around 9:15 a.m. when five men were seen karate-kicking parking meters downtown, according to reports. Then, without provocation, they slashed the face of 78-year-old Aldron Parham with a machete.

Assistant Police Chief Roy Houlton witnessed the situation and fired shots on the men. At that same time, Furr, who was working security at H.L. Green downtown, came out of the department store after hearing the commotion. Two of the men grabbed him and fatally shot him in the back, the Advertiser reported.

The five men jumped into a car to race away, but didn't get far. Police Detective Jimmy Lisenby heard Houlton call for backup, spotted the fleeing car and rammed it head on.

Three of the men ran up Lawrence Street, circled around the Alabama Power Co. building on Washington Street and then ran back down to Dexter and into WAPX radio station, the Advertiser reported. The other men disappeared.

Implicated in the crime events that day were Arthur Lewis, Reginald Robinson and Julius Davis. They were also charged in the fatal shooting of a Delchamps store clerk in downtown Montgomery on Oct. 9, 1974.

Charged with related crimes were Charles Williams, Alphonso Davis and Amos Williams.

Lewis is serving a life sentence at Fountain Correctional Facility and is eligible for parole, according to the Alabama Department of Corrections. The rest of the men have served time and been released from prison.

On this 40th anniversary of the crimes that some say profoundly changed Montgomery law enforcement and politics, AL.com reached out to former lawmen, radio DJ's and regular citizens, asking for their accounts and memories of the day.

Here is a sampling of the responses:

Brian Bodine, now of Orange Beach, was a detective with the Montgomery Police Department at the time.

He said he was mowing the lawn when the phone rang. "My wife handed me the corded phone out the door," Bodine said.

The caller -- he doesn't remember who it was - told him to report to Dexter Avenue and bring all the guns and ammunition he had.

Bodine lived in Millbrook then, and without Interstate 65 it took him about 30-40 minutes to get to downtown. Arriving, he saw a perimeter had been set up about a block from Dexter Avenue. He'd brought a shotgun, rifle, two pistols and boxes of bullets and shells.

After arming and resupplying other officers, he moved his way to the front of the radio station, where he was shielded by a pickup truck.

Behind a nearby mattress, he said, were Montgomery Police Chief Ed Wright and Montgomery County Sheriff M.S. Butler.

The sound of a single gunshot on Dexter Avenue, he said, ignited a barrage of gunfire from both the hostage-takers and the officers outside. "The chief was trying to make demands behind the mattress. But when the shots fired out, that is when all bets were off," he said.

After it was all over, Bodine was a part of the investigative team that went into the station. "You couldn't put your hand on the wall that you didn't touch a bullet hole," he said. "It is hard to believe that they would survive."

Investigators learned that the gunmen were protecting themselves by retreating to a back courtyard, where they had their hostages.

Bodine retired from the Alabama Criminal Information Center in 2001.

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Montgomery native Jeff Blake was 16 years old at the time and was "a radio freak," he said. Cruising around town in his mother's car, switching through the radio stations to check out what they were playing and saying, he heard the extremists delivering their message over the airwaves on WAPX.

He got to the phone and dialed his friend, Reid Spann, an engineer for the station. Spann told Blake to pick him up, and they headed downtown at the very moments that officers were massing.

They let the officers know they could turn the transmitter off.

Immediately, an officer put them in an unmarked car, and they barreled along North Decatur Street to the transmitter location, Blake said.

They were ordered to lie down in the backseat. Officers were concerned that accomplices of the hostage-takers might be guarding the transmitter. But, no one was there.

"We cut the phone lines to cut the signal to the transmitter first," Blake recalled.

Blake and Spann entered the transmitter room after an officer shot off the door lock. They had the radio station off the air within 45 minutes, Blake estimated.

"When you are 16 and there are bullets flying around you think it's pretty cool," he said. "I didn't feel in danger."

Blake said he was near WAPX when Al Dixon Jr., the station's disc jockey that morning, made his escape. "Al Jr. came busting out the front door, and sliding. I thought (police) were going to take him out," he said. "They didn't know who he was."

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Radio newsman Jim McDade was at home when an urgent call came. WAPX engineer Reid Spann, on the other end of the line, told him to begin recording the station's transmission.

"That is a very vivid memory - that terrible morning," he said.

McDade, who was 20 at the time, said that the men who had seized WAPX were calling for a revolution and for a rally around the radio station.

"It was a frightening time," he said. "Immediately, adrenaline started pumping when I realized what was going on."

When the station went silent, McDade took his tape and headed downtown, he said. About a block from the radio station, he encountered the police barricade, but officers let him through.

McDade became one of the first people to re-enter WAPX. "The looks in the faces of the people who were held hostage were so memorable," he said. "These were people who were faced with sheer terror."

McDade turned a copy of his recording over to police, but said he still has the master somewhere in his Vestavia Hills home.

McDade said the events of that day changed politics in the city and led to law-and-order conservative's Emory Folmar rise to the mayor's office.

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Carolyn Wright had been a police dispatcher for only a short while, having served the city earlier as a communications clerk.

After the WAPX take-over, Wright, then 24, was summoned to duty and assigned to call off-duty Montgomery police officers, telling them to come immediately and bring all the firearms and ammunition that they had at home.

She aspired at the time to be an officer herself, so it was an opportunity to demonstrate that she could do a good job.

"I had confidence in our police department that they could handle it," Wright said.

Police had no idea how Montgomery's black community might respond to the hostage-takers' message, she said. "They were calling for other blacks to come down to join them in their revolution, but no one did," she said.

Wright worked as a police dispatcher for 23 years before retiring in 1998.

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Jerry Hankins, now a special agent with the Alabama Securities Commission, was 21 years old and a rookie officer with the Montgomery Police Department on Oct. 12, 1974.

He wasn't scheduled to work that day, but he rushed downtown after getting a call from his sergeant, reaching the corner of Dexter Avenue and McDonough Street. There, he said, he and other officers were told to evacuate the nearby Brown Printing building during a lull in the shooting.

"I had never seen anything like it at 21 years old. I was doing what my superiors told me to do. I did no shooting that day," he said.

He said he remembers tear gas wafting through the streets.

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George Howell, was 26 at the time and worked for the Alabama Department of Revenue. He said he was home washing his car and listening to WAPX when the takeover occurred.

Howell said he often tuned in to the station because he liked the soul music that it played.

"I heard something stop and I heard dead air," he recalled, "and then there was this voice that said, 'Come on down brothers and sisters, the revolution has begun.'"

He said his wife stepped over to hear, too. He said that he told her, "Someone is in the radio station that doesn't know what they are doing."

The graphic below shows what Dexter Avenue at the corner of North Lawrence Street looked like in 1974 compared to today. The retail shops that once lined the streets are now the RSA Activity Center.