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

Now the Continental nosed through the crowds outside Clayborn Temple, the African Methodist Episcopal church that was the starting point of the march, a few blocks off Beale Street. People pressed their noses against the car windows to get a look at King, and for a while he and Abernathy were pinned there in the backseat.

Once he was able to dislodge himself from the limo, King looked around and immediately sensed that something was "off" about the crowd. The atmosphere, he told Abernathy, was "just wrong." 228People trampled on King's feet and swarmed all around him. The garbage workers were dutifully lined up, carrying their I AM A MAN posters, but King could sense that this was no longer the garbage workers' show. The event was all but hijacked by young rowdies who sang and shouted expletives and seemed generally to have come to raise hell. Many thousands were teenagers playing hooky. Cries of "Black power" filled the air. Though it was still morning, people were drinking. A number of kids wore shirts that said "Invaders," a local organization of militants. Some had scrawled their own signs--LOEB EAT SHIT, one of them read. One firebrand carried a noose in his hand.

The crowds were growing hot and irritable. "All the police would have to do 229is look the wrong way and the place would have blown up," recalled a spokesman for the Invaders. "Some youngsters in high schools had been led to believe this could be the day, man, that we could really tear this city up."

King and Abernathy found Lawson and pointedly asked him what was going on. Where were the marshals? Why were all these young folks so riled up? Lawson didn't know, exactly, but he said some of the crowd's restiveness could be attributed to a false rumor, spreading like a virus, that the police had killed a high-school girl.

King and Abernathy briefly considered canceling the march, but they worried this might precipitate the very thing they most feared--a riot. So much spite surged through the crowd that it seemed imprudent to try to stop it now. King's experience was that usually these things worked themselves out; simply putting one foot in front of the other had a way of dissipating negative energy.

THE MARCH BEGAN. King, Abernathy, Lee, and Lawson locked arms in the front, and began walking, as police helicopters whirred overhead. They left Clayborn Temple and slogged along Hernando Street for a few blocks, jerking and halting, trying to find the right pace. Then they turned left onto Beale, the avenue of the blues, and marched west, in the direction of the Mississippi River.

In the rear, no one bothered to form orderly lines. The kids were jostling and shoving, sending forward wave after wave of people stumbling and stepping on heels. "Make the crowds stop pushing!" 230King yelled. "We're going to be trampled!"

Soon they passed W. C. Handy Park, named for the prosperous bandleader and composer who first wrote down the blues and shaped the form into an internationally recognized genre. As it happened, this very day was the tenth anniversary of W. C. Handy's death, and someone had laid a wreath beside the bronze statue of the beaming bluesman standing with his trumpet at the ready.

But this Beale was a faded version of the street that the Father of the Blues had known; had he been alive to see it now, he would have despaired at its mirthless state. In Handy's heyday, it was the Main Street of Negro America, a place of deep soul and world-class foolishness, of zoot suits and chitlin joints, of hoodoos and fortune-tellers, with jug bands playing on every corner. The street smelled of tamales and pulled pork and pot liquor and lard. Day and night, Beale throbbed with so much authentic and sometimes violent vitality that, as Handy put it in one of his famous songs, "business never closes 'til somebody gets killed."

For more than a century, blacks from across the Mississippi Delta came to Beale to experience their first taste of city life. Workers came from the levee-building camps, from the lumber and turpentine camps, from the cotton fields and the steamboat lines. The only confirmed studio photograph of Robert Johnson was taken on Beale--a ghostly image of the long-fingered bluesman posing in a fedora and pin-striped suit with his well-worn guitar. Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and B. B. King came here to play some of their first city gigs. The South's first black millionaire, Robert Church, made his real estate fortune on Beale. Black doctors, black photographers, black dentists, black insurance companies, black mortuaries, black newspapers, hotels and restaurants "for coloreds only," African-American parades as a counterpart to the all-white Cotton Carnival--Beale was a place where the concept of "separate but equal" had one of its more spirited and convincing runs.

"If you were black 231for one Saturday night on Beale, you'd never want to be white again," the Stax Records legend Rufus Thomas once quipped.

By the spring of 1968, however, most of the great clubs and theaters--the Daisy, the Palace, the Monarch, P. Wee's Saloon, Club Handy--were boarded up or gone altogether. Though there were still reputable businesses closer to Main, much of Beale had become a drab drag of busted concrete and liquor stores and pawnshops, populated by winos and petty thieves. As King tramped west on Beale, past Handy's statue, separate was most assuredly not equal. The blues was on its sickbed, it was said--a moribund music, an era dead and gone. Now a column of proud but anxious men carried signs in the direction of city hall, headed for an uncertain future.

THE TROUBLE STARTED when King, Lawson, and the others in the vanguard approached the intersection of Beale Street and Main. King heard a crashing sound somewhere behind him and jumped reflexively. They turned right onto Main Street and King heard it again. It sounded to him like shattering plate glass--and it was.

Some of the younger marchers had taken their placards, ripped off the wooden pickets, and started smashing store windows along Beale. This ignited a chain reaction. Now people hurled bottles, bricks, stones, any projectile at hand. Someone yelled, "Burn it down, baby! " Screaming bystanders bolted in all directions. The sidewalks glittered with glass shards.

Then came the looters, dashing into stores, grabbing whatever they could on the run, and dashing back into the chaos. Abe Schwab's dry-goods store was robbed and vandalized, as were Uncle Sam's Pawn Shop, Lansky Brothers men's clothing store, York Arms sporting goods, and dozens of other businesses along Main and Beale. Soon incongruous objects from the storefront windows lay about the sidewalks--a broken violin, a washboard, a naked mannequin.

King couldn't see all of this, and he didn't know exactly what was going on behind him, but he smelled trouble. The march had become a mob. He turned to Lawson. "Jim--there's violence breaking out."

Lawson looked worried. Up ahead, a line of policemen in riot gear blocked Main Street. By their implacable stance, they indicated that the march would go no farther. Some of them fastened on gas masks.

Grabbing a bullhorn, Lawson wheeled toward the crowd and made his displeasure known: "Turn around! 232All marchers, young and old, go to the temple! You have hurt the cause--we don't want violence!"

Then Lawson said to Lee and Abernathy, "Take Dr. King out of the way." 233

King balked. "Jim, they'll say I ran away."

"I really think he should go," Lawson yelled to Abernathy, this time in an adamant tone. Lawson was worried that King's life might be in danger--and if not his life, certainly his reputation.

King soon realized how ruinous it would be for him to appear to be leading a riot. "You're right," he finally said. "We got to get out of here."