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

"I'm so sorry 437it had to happen like this," he told the black city councilman Fred Davis. Tears rolled down the mayor's cheeks.

"We tried to comfort him," Davis later recalled. "He talked about God. He was just stunned."

A LITTLE LATER, Loeb rose from his gloom, stuffed a pearl-handled .38 revolver in his pocket, and ventured out in a convoy of unmarked police cars for a tour of the anguished city. The white neighborhoods, he found, were ghostly quiet. Most families were locked inside their homes, many with newly purchased shotguns and handguns at the ready--during the previous weeks, gun shops in Memphis had enjoyed a sensationally brisk business, especially among white customers. "Our neighborhood was like a tomb," 438one white city councilman later recalled. "We were armed, ready for anything. If a Negro had stopped to change a tire, I don't know whether he'd be left alive or not."

Most white Memphians seemed genuinely shocked by the murder--or at least shocked that it had happened in their city. ("This is the darkest day I've ever seen," 439said the city council chairman, Downing Pryor. "I am sad, sad, sad.") But there were already a few hints of celebration in the white community, too. Through the night, racist wags repeatedly called in a song request to a popular white radio station: "Bye Bye Blackbird." Lucius Burch, the Memphis attorney who'd successfully argued the SCLC position in court that day, received repeated hate calls from a half-demented white lady who gleefully chastised him for representing "that nigger King." 440

When Loeb's police convoy passed through Orange Mound and other black neighborhoods of Memphis, he found hundreds and then thousands of people emerging onto the streets. Most were simply seeking to absorb the shock of the news, to grieve in the safety of numbers, but others were clearly hunting for trouble. Fires were starting to break out around town, including one at a large lumberyard. The night air shrieked with sirens and burglar alarms. Across Loeb's police radio came reports of sniper shootings, smashed window fronts, rock-throwing clashes. People were reportedly shooting at police cars--even police helicopters --and several city buses had been stoned.

Much of the rage was aimed directly at the mayor himself: a Molotov cocktail exploded at a Loeb's dry cleaner, and city hall received numerous death threats. It was all Loeb's fault, many declared in the loudest tones: if he hadn't been so intransigent in his Old South ways, so tone-deaf to the cry of history and the irreproachable dignity of I AM A MAN, then King would never have needed to come in the first place, to be made a martyr on Memphis soil.

Loeb took the death threats seriously and arranged to have his family moved from the mayor's residence to an undisclosed location.

At Mason Temple, where King would have appeared after dinner for yet another garbage strike rally, hundreds gathered in despair. A number of black militants showed up, and the mood turned ugly, especially after rumors began to circulate that the Memphis Police Department had orchestrated King's assassination. An elderly church lady, crippled with arthritis, told people she was ready to go out and fight. "The Lord," she said, "has deserted us." 441One unidentified member of the Invaders tried to intervene, pleading for calm--at least until Dr. King was in the ground. "Just respect the man 442enough not to go out and do it tonight," he told the growing crowds. "Wait till he's buried. That's just what the honkies want us to do. Come right out there like a bunch of wild Indians, and they could wipe us out like they did the Indians."

At police headquarters, Director Holloman, closely monitoring news of the events erupting across the city, grew alarmed to the point of panic. He reported that "rioting and looting is now rampant 443... we are in a very critical emergency situation--the city is under attack." The feeling of panic was made worse by a general breakdown in telephone communications. The lines were so jammed that many callers found it difficult to get a dial tone; during the first few hours after the assassination, more than thirty thousand long-distance calls went out of Memphis. As the first units of what would amount to four thousand National Guardsmen began to roll into the city, the situation seemed to be spiraling out of control.

Police shot a twenty-six-year-old black man named Ellis Tate nine times and mortally wounded him--the officers claimed he fired a rifle at them from the shadows of a liquor store. Fearing that an all-out racial war was imminent, T. O. Jones, leader of the garbage strike, barricaded himself in a room in the Peabody Hotel. A black worker at the Memphis Firestone plant grabbed a rifle and some ammunition, went to a cemetery near his house, and took charge of a hill, commando style. "That's what I thought 444everybody else was going to do," he later said. "I just expected to go to war."

The Reverend James Lawson, anticipating the mayhem from the moment he heard of King's shooting, went straight to WDIA, Memphis's most popular black radio station, and began to broadcast messages through the night. "Stay calm," 445Lawson urged. "It would be a compounding of this death if people around our country should decide that now is the time to let loose an orgy of violence. It would be a denial of Dr. King's life and work. Stay calm. Stay calm."

At Billy and Gwen Kyles's house, meanwhile, the soul food dinner still simmered on the stove. The dressed-up guests gathered in silence, in rooms heavy with succulent smells. No one had an appetite. "I went numb," 446Gwen Kyles said. "I felt like somebody had knocked all my senses out." She paced the floor of her dining room, past the long line of empty chairs, crying, "They've torn it now--they've torn it."

ERIC GALT KEPT driving through the Mississippi night, hewing to back roads wherever possible, putting miles between himself and the turmoil emanating from Memphis. The news on the radio surprised him--there were scattered reports of riots and looting, not only in Memphis, but all across the country. Federal troops and National Guardsmen were now marching into major cities, the president had made a televised statement, the nation's capital was on fire. The sheer magnitude of what he'd done must have begun to dawn on Galt. He could feel the heat of the whole country coming down on him: he was, he realized, the most wanted man in America.

Sleep was certainly not an option now--he would have to stay up through the night and make a beeline for Atlanta, where he planned to pick up whatever belongings he'd left at Garner's rooming house. What he would do after that was uncertain, but given his familiarity with Mexico, he was probably thinking of driving south , perhaps toward Puerto Vallarta. Lit with the success of his deed, and the adrenaline rush of flight, Galt didn't need amphetamines to keep him burning around the clock.

Although he was headed for Georgia, and possibly Mexico, Galt's larger goal was to reach southern Africa. "Rhodesia"--the word dangled before him like a banner. He knew that under the pariah government of Ian Smith, Rhodesia observed no extradition treaties with the United States. Galt had been toying with the idea of immigrating there for several months, ever since he first moved to Los Angeles from Puerto Vallarta. Galt liked what Smith was doing in Rhodesia, and he had an idea that if he could ever reach Salisbury, the people there would welcome him as a hero, grant him instant citizenship, and harbor him from any American attempts at prosecution. "I thought I was going to get away," 447he later said. "I thought I could get to Africa and those folks over there wouldn't send me back." And because it was an English-speaking country, he thought he could "blend in with the population." He wasn't exactly sure what he would do once he got there. Become a bartender, perhaps? A locksmith? Serve in a mercenary army? But the idea of Rhodesia burned in his imagination, the promise of sanctuary and refuge, the possibility of living in a society where people understood.