Hampton Sides - Hellhound on His Trail - The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. And the International Hunt for His Assassin

As it happened, King was already scheduled to travel through Mississippi all the next week. A brief detour through Memphis wouldn't be too taxing on his itinerary, King agreed.

Even as he said this, Lawson could hear some of King's staff members grumbling in the background. Andrew Young, the executive vice president of the SCLC, was one of the grumblers. He worried that Memphis was a distraction, if not a trap. King needed to stay focused on the main goal, the march in Washington. Their month was already seriously overbooked, and King was exhausted from ceaseless traveling. Young knew that King had an incorrigible habit of ensnaring himself in local conflicts by accepting "just one little invitation to give just one little speech."

But King overruled Young and the rest of the staff. He told Lawson what he wanted to hear. They would rework the itinerary, and King would fly to Memphis the next day in time for the mass meeting. It would only be one night--what could be the harm in that?

AT THE SAME moment that King was giving his Sunday sermon only a few miles away, Eric Galt walked down to the front desk of the St. Francis Hotel and gave notice that he would be vacating his room. He filled out an official postal service card 209to have his mail forwarded to "General Delivery, Atlanta." This venue change was more than a little strange: Eric Galt had no personal connection to the state of Georgia. Apparently, he'd never been to Atlanta in his life.

It had been one week since his last appointment with Dr. Hadley. The stitch marks on his nose were almost gone, and Galt felt more comfortable out in public. That day, he took care of a number of last-minute errands in preparation for his cross-country trip. The next morning, Monday, March 18, he threw all his belongings in his car--the Channel Master transistor radio, the portable Zenith television, the photographic equipment, the sex toys, and the self-help books. He stopped by Marie Tomaso's place and picked up a box of clothes that she'd asked him to drop off for her family in New Orleans.

Then he pointed the Mustang east, toward Martin Luther King's hometown.

14 SOMETHING IN THE AIR

KING FLEW EAST late in the afternoon of March 18, landing in Memphis just in time to speak to the rally that had assembled at Mason Temple, a massive black Pentecostal church downtown. Lawson hadn't lied about the turnout--in fact, he'd significantly underestimated it. When King entered the cavernous hall and stepped up to the podium, he found more than fifteen thousand cheering fans packed inside.

After the roar subsided, King greeted the sanitation workers and congratulated them for their struggle. "You are demonstrating," 210he began, "that we are all tied in a single garment of destiny, and that if one black person is down, we are all down. You are reminding not only Memphis, but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages."

King was invigorated by this crowd. The energy in the great hall was intoxicating. No one booed, no one heckled. This audience unequivocally loved him, and everyone seemed united behind the strike--in lieu of collection plates, enormous garbage cans were passed around and filled with donations. "I want you to stick it out," King said, until "you can make Mayor Loeb say 'Yes,' even when he wants to say, 'No.'"

King spoke for an hour, almost entirely without notes. He explained that the Memphis strike fit into the larger fight that was now central to the movement--the fight for economic justice symbolized by his upcoming Poor People's Campaign. "With Selma and the voting rights bill," he said, "one era came to a close. Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't earn enough money to buy a cup of coffee?"

King moved toward a broad indictment of American society--how could a nation so rich and technologically innovative fail to recognize the misery of its poorest citizens? "We built gigantic buildings to kiss the sky," King said, and "gargantuan bridges to span the seas. Through our spaceships we carve highways through the stratosphere. Through our submarines we penetrate oceanic depths. But it seems I can hear the God of the universe saying, 'Even though you've done all of that, I was hungry and you fed me not. I was naked and ye clothed me not. So you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness.'"

King left the microphone for a moment to confer with Lawson, then returned to the podium to close his address with an announcement that did not please his staff: he was coming back to Memphis in a few days to conduct a massive march downtown on behalf of the garbage workers. "I will lead you through the center of Memphis," he said. "I want a tremendous work stoppage, and all of you, your families and children, will join me."

The crowds went wild, and King's face lit up. He loved the spirit here in Memphis. It seemed that everyone in the vast hall was smiling--everyone except Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young, who could only roll their eyes and think: Just one little speech .

IN TRUTH, KING had conflicted feelings about Memphis, a town he had visited many times before. It was a very different city from Atlanta, rougher around the edges, funkier, with a population that was poorer and closer to the cotton fields. The last time King had stayed any length of time here was in 1966. In June of that year, James Meredith, who'd become nationally famous four years earlier as the first African-American man to attend the University of Mississippi, was leading a solitary march--the March Against Fear, he called it--from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, to protest brutality against blacks when he was struck down by a white sniper wielding a shotgun; seriously but not fatally hurt, Meredith had become a victim of the very thing he was marching against. King joined a clutch of civil rights leaders in Memphis to pick up where Meredith had fallen--and to trudge through sultry heat all the way to Jackson, Mississippi. Though they reached their destination, the march ended with tear-gas dousings and a deepening rift between King and Stokely Carmichael's emergent black-power movement. King's memories of the episode were not fond ones.

On that stay in Memphis, King had briefly lodged at his usual hangout, the black-owned Lorraine Motel, located a few blocks from the river on the south end of downtown. True to habit, King and his entourage returned to his old haunt on this night, after the speech at Mason Temple.

The Lorraine had long been popular 211among Stax musicians, gospel singers, and itinerant ministers. Count Basie had stayed here, as had Ray Charles, the Staple Singers, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Cab Calloway, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong, and Nat "King" Cole. The old part of the lodge 212--the Lorraine Hotel --had once been a white whorehouse. In the mid-1940s the husband-and-wife team of Walter and Loree Bailey bought the place and worked hard to make it respectable, building a new wing that was a modern motor court.

King liked the homey feel of the place, the way you could wander into the kitchen at odd hours and order whatever you wanted. Over the years, King had stayed at the Lorraine at least a dozen times, and the Baileys had become like family. The room rate was thirteen dollars a night, but the Baileys refused to charge King.

King usually stayed in room 306, on the second floor of the motel in the middle of the long balcony. Abernathy referred to it as "the King-Abernathy suite." 213Furnished with twin beds, a television, cheap Danish furniture, and a black rotary telephone, 306 was a modest-sized paneled room appointed in a 1960s contemporary style that Andrew Young later described as "seeming so modern 214then and so frightful today."