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

The writer Ambrose Bierce, who fought here as a young man, described the woods around Shiloh as a "smoking jungle" 287so deep and dark that "I should not have been surprised to see sleek leopards." Now, behind a scrim of similar woods just south of the battlefield, Galt cut the engine and opened the trunk. Studying the Gamemaster in the filtered light, he familiarized himself with its components, with the contour of its walnut stock, with the heft of its butt and the feel of its pump-action mechanism. The moving parts of the gun worked seemingly without friction, thanks to a proprietary burnishing process the Remington company called "vibra-honing."

Galt was loath to draw attention to himself--a farmer, a Civil War buff, or even a Mississippi state trooper could be within earshot--but he knew he had to test the Gamemaster's accuracy. He needed to make sure the Redfield scope was properly aligned and showing no idiosyncrasies. He wanted to acquaint himself with the rifle's powerful kick, and examine the trajectory to see for himself how much the bullet dropped over long distances.

Galt leveled the Remington and trained his scope on a target off in the hazy woods. Then he curled his finger around the trigger.

Deer hunting season had ended months earlier, so any knowledgeable sportsman who happened to be passing through that drowsy stretch of the Magnolia State might have been surprised to hear, in the first week of April, the ragged concussions of a high-powered hunting rifle as a succession of .30-06 shells whined through the trees.

19 TORNADO WARNINGS

AT 7:00 ON the morning of Wednesday, April 3, Ralph Abernathy dropped by the house on Sunset to pick up King and drive to the Atlanta airport. Coretta offered breakfast, but the men were late for their plane to Memphis. King tossed some books into his briefcase, packed a few suits, and headed for the kitchen. "I'll call you tonight," he said, giving his wife a kiss.

King was nursing a slight cold, but other than that Coretta didn't sense that anything was amiss. "It was an ordinary goodbye," 288she later recalled, "like thousands of other times before."

The two men hopped into Abernathy's 1955 Ford and sped to the airport, arriving just in time for the flight. At the gate, they met a few other SCLC staff members--Dorothy Cotton, Bernard Lee, and Andy Young--and they all scurried aboard the Eastern Air Lines jet.

They needn't have rushed: for nearly an hour the plane remained idling at the gate. People began to grumble and crane their necks to learn the cause of the holdup. Eventually, the pilot's voice broke over the intercom to apologize. "We have a celebrity 289on board this morning," he said, "and we're required to check every piece of luggage in the entire cargo hold for explosives." An anonymous caller had phoned Eastern Air Lines with a threat to blow up Martin Luther King's plane.

King cut a worried look at Abernathy. "Ralph," he said, "I've never had a pilot say that before."

Eastern Flight 381 finally pushed off from the gate and taxied down the runway. "Well," King said with a mordant grin, "looks like they won't kill me this flight."

"Nobody's going to kill you, 290Martin," Abernathy replied. He could tell the episode had rattled his friend. King stared pensively out the window as the plane rose over Atlanta and circled west.

The jet landed at 10:30 Memphis time and pulled up to Gate 17. King stepped off the plane and was met by a small entourage that included the Reverend Jim Lawson and a chauffeur named Solomon Jones, who was driving a big white Cadillac provided for King's use by the R. S. Lewis Funeral Home. King moved briskly through the terminal, walking a gauntlet of television cameras, police officers, undercover detectives, and FBI agents. Lawson did not trust the cops, though they were ostensibly there for King's protection. When one of the Memphis Police Department officers stepped forward to ask Lawson where they were headed, the minister tried to shoo him away, saying, "We have not fully made up our minds." 291

Among the plainclothes policemen posted in the terminal were two black officers, Detective Edward Redditt and Patrolman Willie Richmond. They had been assigned to work as an undercover team and follow King everywhere he went during his Memphis stay. But some of the Memphis strike organizers were onto Redditt (he had been conducting surveillance on strike activities for weeks), and they took him for a spy if not a traitor to his race. That morning, a prominent female activist named Tarlease Mathews approached Redditt in the airport and fairly hissed at him: "If I were a man 292I would kill you."

KING AND HIS party stepped outside and approached a waiting convoy of cars. The weather was turning blustery--thunderstorms were in the forecast, and meteorologists announced that the mid-South was under a tornado watch. With plainclothesmen Redditt and Richmond following close behind, the motorcade drove downtown so King and Abernathy could check in to the Lorraine Motel.

Nearly all of King's staff members were lodging at the Lorraine--James Bevel, James Orange, Jesse Jackson, Hosea Williams, Chauncey Eskridge, Bernard Lee, and Dorothy Cotton, as well as Young and Abernathy. A South African filmmaker named Joseph Louw, working on a PBS documentary about the Poor People's Campaign, was also staying in the motel, as was a black New York Times reporter named Earl Caldwell. A few rooms had been reserved for the Invaders, with whom King's staff was intensely negotiating. Then, too, King was expecting the arrival of his younger brother, A. D. King, who was a minister in Louisville, Kentucky. AD had been on a road trip with his girlfriend, Lucretia Ward, in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. They were driving her baby blue Cadillac convertible, and were bringing along a young black state senator from Louisville named Georgia Davis, one of Martin Luther King's mistresses. They were supposed to arrive late that night.

Now a cameraman from Channel 5, the NBC affiliate in Memphis, took a shot of the SCLC entourage standing on the balcony, in front of 306, the brass numerals gleaming in the sun. King was set up in his familiar digs--if not in his favorite city, at least in his favorite room at his favorite hotel, with his staff and closest confidants around him. Whatever might happen in Memphis that week, his world was in place at the Lorraine.

SHORTLY AFTER LUNCH, King and much of the staff took off in a convoy for the Reverend James Lawson's Centenary United Methodist Church to discuss strategies for the coming march. There King learned that the City of Memphis had succeeded late that morning in obtaining a federal injunction effectively preventing him from staging any demonstration for the next ten days. Among the many arguments raised by the city attorney, Frank Gianotti, was the legitimate worry that King could be in mortal danger should he lead another march down Beale Street. "We are fearful," 293Gianotti said in U.S. District Court, "that in the turmoil of the moment someone may harm King's life, and with all the force of language we can use we want to emphasize that we don't want that to happen."

Despite the city's profession of concern for his safety, King was dejected by this new obstacle. Over the course of his career he had violated many local injunctions, but never a federal one, and he was uncertain how to respond. "Martin fell silent 294again," Abernathy recalled. "Nothing was going right in this town."

Soon reporters found King and pressed him for a response to this latest development. King put on a game face. "Well," he said, "we are not going to be stopped 295by Mace or injunctions. We stand on the First Amendment. In the past, on the basis of conscience, we have had to break injunctions and if necessary we may do it in Memphis. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."