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

The questions were too detailed for Kopp to answer with authority. Galt started to leave, but then eyed the large bearded ungulate scowling from the wall and mused, "I once tried to bring down a moose, but I missed."

Kopp studied the pale, fidgety man and concluded to his own satisfaction that Galt had never hunted moose--or any species of big game.

J. EDGAR HOOVER had been monitoring the events in Memphis, and that morning, March 29, he came to work with a feeling of vindication. To him, the mayhem on Beale Street was a fulfillment of all his earlier warnings: King might talk nonviolence, but it was an act. The Memphis debacle only foreshadowed what would happen if King was allowed to march on Washington. Hoover's ties to the Memphis authorities were unusually close--fire and police director Frank Holloman had been an FBI agent earlier in his career, and had even served as Hoover's "office manager" in Washington. Hoover made sure his COINTELPRO agents were on the case, working with the Memphis police to gather all the information necessary to heap maximum blame on King--and make every accusation stick.

Early on the morning of March 29, the FBI field office in Memphis was in high dudgeon. The assistant director William Sullivan called from Washington and spoke with the second-in-command in the Memphis office, Special Agent C. O. Halter. Sullivan wanted Halter's men to find out if King had been sleeping around, drinking too much, or engaging in any other "improper conduct" or "activities both official and personal" while in Memphis. "Mr. Sullivan requested 242that we get everything possible on King and that we stay on him until he leaves," Halter later recalled. Among other things, agents tried to learn the identity of the woman whose Pontiac Lee and Abernathy had flagged down the previous day--presumably on the suspicion that she and King might have had a tryst.

Sullivan wanted the Memphis agents to prove that King was personally responsible for much of the Beale Street fracas. Agents were instructed to answer such questions as: "Did Martin Luther King do anything 243to trigger the violence? Did he make any statements which could have had an effect on the crowd? Did King do anything to prevent violence? ... Although Martin Luther King preaches non-violence, violence occurs just about everywhere he goes."

The FBI in Memphis was unable to find anything suggesting that King had in any way provoked the violence, but specialists with the Racial Intelligence Division did seize on one potential line of attack: King, who had urged Memphis blacks to boycott white businesses downtown, was "a hypocrite" for securing a room in the white-owned Rivermont when he could have stayed at the black-owned Lorraine Motel only a few blocks away.

The FBI sent out a blind memorandum to what it termed "cooperative media"--pro-Hoover newspapers around the country. "The fine Hotel Lorraine 244in Memphis," the memo stated, "is owned and patronized exclusively by Negroes, but King didn't go there from his hasty exit. Instead, King decided the plush Holiday Inn, white-owned, operated, and almost exclusively white patronized, was the place to 'cool it.' There will be no boycott of white merchants for King, only for his followers." (The memo made no mention of the fact that it was a Memphis motorcycle cop, on orders from police headquarters, who had chosen the Rivermont, led King there, and personally checked him in.)

In the end, the FBI succeeded in making only minor hay out of this "hypocrisy" charge, but the smear had a more consequential effect: it ensured that the next time King and his party came to Memphis, they would stay at his old hangout, the thoroughly exposed, open-courtyard (but black-owned) Lorraine Motel.

The violence in Memphis, meanwhile, prompted the FBI's leadership to renew its age-old request to wiretap the SCLC offices in Atlanta and Washington. William Sullivan sent a memo to Cartha DeLoach outlining "the gravity" of King's upcoming Poor People's Campaign and the need for enhanced intelligence on King. The Washington demonstrations, he said, "could end in great violence 245and bloodshed. This being the capital city, it would do us irreparable propaganda damage around the world. We have been girding ourselves for this task ever since King's announcement to march on Washington. We should leave no stone unturned."

DeLoach and Hoover concurred with Sullivan's assessment. A wiretap request signed by Hoover promptly landed on Ramsey Clark's desk, but the attorney general refused to dignify it with a reply.

LATER THAT MORNING, around 10:00, King awakened in his Rivermont suite and pulled himself together. He knew it would be a bad day. He cringed at the prospect of reading the morning papers. In fact, the reaction in the news that morning--and for several days to come--would be even worse than he'd feared.

The epithets were as prolific as they were colorful. The Memphis Commercial Appeal called him "Chicken a la King." 246The Dallas Morning News: "The headline-hunting high priest 247of nonviolent violence." The St. Louis Globe-Democrat: "A Judas goat 248leading lambs to slaughter."

Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia described King as "a man who gets other people into trouble 249and then takes off like a scared rabbit." The Memphis riot was "a powerful embarrassment 250to Dr. King," argued the usually sympathetic New York Times , calling the disturbance further indication that he should call off the Poor People's Campaign. Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee said that in view of the Beale Street violence, King's proposed march on Washington would be "like striking a match 251to look in your gas tank to see if you're out of gas."

King read enough of the offerings to get the gist of it. Disgusted, he took a shower and pulled on some clothes. He was just buttoning his shirt 252when Abernathy knocked on his bedroom door. "Martin," he said, "we have visitors."

King padded out to the common room to greet three young men in their twenties. "We're with the Invaders," one of them said. "We've come to explain what happened yesterday." They were Charles Cabbage, Izzy Harrington, and Calvin Taylor--leaders of the organization widely blamed for the Beale Street violence.

King took a seat with his guests. He offered cigarettes, and they had a smoke. Bright light from the balcony streamed in through the sliding glass doors. The Mississippi River swirled eight stories below them. The conversation got off to an awkward start when Charles Cabbage mentioned that a man had knocked on his door the previous night and warned him of a plot 253on King's life.

King replied dismissively that he got those kinds of threats every day. "If someone really wants to kill me, there's nothing I can do about it," he said. Indeed, Cabbage was amazed that King had no security at the Rivermont--and that no one had bothered searching him or his fellow Invaders for weapons.

They finally circled around to the subject at hand. The Invaders claimed they had not caused the previous day's violence. None of the Invader leaders was even present on Beale. But they knew the young militants who had started the trouble, and they had done nothing to discourage it. This was because Jim Lawson had insulted them, they said. He'd refused to allow the Invaders to be part of the planning; he'd kept them out of the discussions altogether. The ministers didn't understand the young brothers and what was really going on in the streets.

King listened with a sorrowful expression. He seemed to see right through them. He wasn't entirely buying their story, but he appreciated the spirit of their gesture--dropping by and speaking face-to-face. He was puzzled, though. He said he couldn't believe anyone would resort to violence. "We should have sat down and talked before the march," he said. "Jim didn't tell me about the black power elements in the city. He led me to believe there were none."