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

King was less interested in determining the riot's precise cause than in ensuring that violence didn't break out again: he had already decided to return to Memphis.

"What can I do to have a peaceful march?" 254he asked. "Because, you know that I have got to lead one. There is no other way." King vowed that the SCLC would thoroughly plan the next event and that the Invaders would be included in the discussions. "You will be in on it," King promised. "You will not be left out."

The meeting concluded, and the three Invaders left the Rivermont touched with awe. Even if they didn't subscribe to King's philosophy of nonviolence, they agreed they had been in the presence of a great man. "He wasn't raising his voice," 255Calvin Taylor recalled. "He wasn't bitter. When he came into the room it seemed like all of a sudden there was a real rush of wind and calm settled over everything. You could feel peace around that man. He looked like peace."

A FEW HOURS later, Eric Galt drove his Mustang to a large sporting goods store 256in Birmingham called the Aeromarine Supply Company. Located by the Birmingham airport, it boasted one of the South's largest selections of firearms of all descriptions. As an avid newspaper reader, Galt had likely seen the large classified advertisement that Aeromarine had been running all that week in the Birmingham News . "Guns--Guns--Guns," the ad announced. "Browning, Remington, Colt. Over 1,000 arms in stock for your selection. Buy, sell, trade. 5701 Airport Hiway."

Now Galt wandered over to the Aeromarine counter and was met by a man named U. L. Baker (who would later relate the conversation in detail to authorities). This time, Galt seemed to have more definite ideas about what he wanted. "Let me look at that Winchester there," he said. It was a bolt-action Model 70 .243-caliber rifle designed for shooting deer at mid- to long range.

Baker pulled it off the rack for Galt to inspect. After a while, Galt set it aside and asked Baker to take down several other models. Galt studied the rifles for a few minutes but then declared, "I like that one there," pointing to a Remington Gamemaster .243 caliber. "You got a scope that'll fit it?"

Baker brought out a variable scope manufactured by Redfield. Galt liked the look of it and asked what the price tag would be for the rifle and scope.

Baker tallied it up. "That'll be $248.59, sir."

Galt said he'd take it, and while Baker went to work mounting the scope to the rifle, another customer, a local gun enthusiast and NRA stalwart named John DeShazo, sidled up to Galt and gave him a start. "What're you gonna do with that?" DeShazo said.

"Oh," Galt replied, "I'm going deer hunting ... with my brother."

DeShazo thought he smelled liquor on Galt's breath. "That one's powerful," he said.

Galt stammered something about going hunting up in Wisconsin. DeShazo thought the customer didn't look like an outdoorsman and concluded, after watching him handle other weapons in the store, that he didn't know much about rifles. "You've really got quite a gun there," DeShazo said. "You'll have to learn how to use it."

Galt chose some boxes of ammo for the rifle and told Baker he was ready to pay up. He signed the sales slip "Harvey Lowmeyer" and said he lived at 1907 South Eleventh Street in Birmingham. He opened his wallet and paid the bill in cash--all in twenties--and shambled out of the store with the rifle box under his arm.

Later that afternoon, Galt called Aeromarine Supply Company and said he wanted to exchange the rifle. "My brother says I got the wrong one," he told Don Wood, the storeowner's son, who answered the phone. "I'm going to need a heavier gun."

Wood told Galt he would gladly accept an exchange. However, the store was closing up, so Galt would have to drop by in the morning. Galt took a room at the Travelodge motel in Birmingham, with the intention of returning to Aeromarine with the .243-caliber rifle first thing the next morning.

AFTER HIS MEETING with the Invaders, King finished dressing and headed down to a Rivermont conference room to face the media. He looked sharp, dressed in a green-blue silk suit and a razor-thin tie, but Abernathy worried about his friend; King was too exhausted and too depressed to perform before hostile journalists. They were going to destroy him.

Once he entered the brightly lit room, however, King seemed to undergo a transformation. He was poised, forceful, brimming with cautious optimism. The cameras caught no hint of the doubts that had washed over him the previous night. Astonished, Abernathy thought King showed a "lion quality."

Why did you run away from the march yesterday?

"I did not run away from the march," 257King insisted in a level tone. It was a matter of principle: "I have always said that I will not lead a violent demonstration."

The trouble, he pointed out, was caused not by legitimate participants but by a few undisciplined young people on the sidelines. His decision to lend a hand to the Memphis cause was predicated on "a miscalculation," he said. "When I spoke here two weeks ago, thousands of people [were] assembled inside and outside. Nobody booed, nobody shouted Black Power. I assumed the ideological struggles that we find in most cities, particularly in the North, were non-existent here."

King said he now understood his mistake. If he could do it over again, he would sit down and confer at length with the city's black youth. They were "just angry," he said, "feeling a sense of voicelessness in the larger society and at the same time a sense of voicelessness in the black community."

One of the journalists asked King whether the Beale Street violence presaged another long summer of riots across the nation.

"I cannot guarantee anybody that Memphis or any other city in this country will not have a riot this summer," King replied. "Our government has not done anything about removing the conditions that brought riots into being last summer."

So you can't give the country a guarantee?

"I don't know what you mean by 'guarantee.' I don't want to put myself in the position of being omniscient. I can only guarantee that our demonstrations"--ones fully vetted and organized by the SCLC--"will not be violent."

What had happened in Memphis the previous day was disappointing and even tragic, he said, but he had not lost faith. The philosophy of nonviolence was still the only hope for America and the world--it was, in fact, the only alternative to human annihilation. "Nonviolence can be as contagious as violence," he insisted, and that was something he aimed to prove next month during the Poor People's Campaign on the Mall. "We are fully determined," he vowed, "to go to Washington."

After the reporters dispersed, King turned to Abernathy and Lee, relieved that the ordeal had gone as well as it had. "It was perhaps his finest performance 258with the press," Abernathy thought. Lee said that King "must be called 259to do what he is doing--he could not have changed as he did in one night if God had not put His hands on him."

Yet King's thoughts were already somewhere else. "Can you do something for me, Ralph?" King asked.

"What's that?"

"Can you get me out of Memphis?" 260

WHEN THEIR PLANE arrived in Atlanta early that night, Abernathy retrieved his car at the airport and dropped King off at the Butler Street YMCA. 261King hoped a steam bath and a rubdown from his blind masseur would lift his spirits.

Afterward, King, Abernathy, and their wives had a somber dinner at the Abernathy house. 262Juanita Abernathy cooked fish and a special casserole she prepared only once a year--a concoction made from pig's ears, pig's feet, and pig's tail. Following the heavy meal, they lounged around the house. Coretta and the Abernathys tried to cheer King up, to little effect. He was still licking his wounds.