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

By the fall of 1967, Martin Luther King had become stressed to the breaking point. At age thirty-eight, he had been doing civil rights work, nonstop, for twelve years. His life was not his own. His punishing schedule, his late nights and endless traveling--what his aides called his "War on Sleep"--had taken a toll. He was smoking and drinking too much, gaining weight, downing sleeping pills that seemed to have no effect. He received death threats almost daily. His marriage was crumbling. His criticism of the Vietnam War had lost him nearly all his key allies in Washington. Increasingly, he was viewed as a once-great leader past his prime.

Certainly he was no longer welcome at the White House. Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson had made history together--collaborating on the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965--but now Johnson wouldn't even talk to King. The president viewed him as a traitor, once calling him "that nigger preacher."

Though still widely revered, King had slipped in stature, even among his own people. That year, for the first time in a decade, King didn't make the Gallup Poll's "Ten Most Popular Americans" list. His base of support had been slowly eroding for several years. In 1965, when he showed up in Los Angeles during the Watts riots, black folks booed him on the streets. His vision of nonviolent protest was losing purchase in the ghettos. Many young people called him "Da Lawd" and dismissed him as an out-of-touch Southern preacher, square and behind the times. The black-power movement, led by young radicals like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, was in the ascendancy. King seemed in constant danger of being outflanked.

At times he thought about quitting the movement altogether. Why should he keep going? He'd done and suffered enough. Ever since 1955, when he reluctantly agreed to become the spokesman of the Montgomery bus boycott, history had seized him and wouldn't let go. His bravery was staggering. He'd been jailed eighteen times. His house had been fire-bombed. He'd been stabbed by a deranged black woman, punched in the face by a Nazi, and struck in the head with a rock. He'd marched all over the country, in the face of tear gas, police dogs, cattle prods, and water cannons. No one knew how many times he'd been burned in effigy. And everywhere he went, the FBI was on his tail, watching, listening.

Sometimes he dreamed about following a simpler life as a full-time pastor, or an academic, or an author. Other times he talked about taking a vow of poverty, giving up his few belongings, and spending a year abroad. At the very least, he knew he should go on a brief sabbatical, 34get away from the movement and collect his thoughts. "I'm tired of all this traveling 35I have to do," he told his church congregation in Atlanta. "I'm killing myself and killing my health. I'm tired now." Living under the daily threat of death, he said, "I feel discouraged 36every now and then and feel my work's in vain. But then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again."

IN THE END, King couldn't extricate himself if he tried. The movement was, literally, his life. He had no choice but to take the struggle to its next logical phase.

As he saw it, the central issue had shifted from the purely racial to the economic. King likened the situation to a lifelong prisoner who is released from jail after the warden discovers that the man was falsely accused all along. "Go ahead, you're free now," the jailer says. But the prisoner has no job skills, no prospects, and the jailer doesn't think to give him money for the bus fare into town.

The Poor People's Campaign, then, would address the lengthened shadow of slavery, the economic shadow. King prevailed over his skeptical staff. The SCLC would devote the intervening months to organizing the great campaign.

King returned home to Atlanta buoyed by his decision at Frogmore. On December 4, he gave a press conference. "The Southern Christian Leadership Conference 37will lead waves of the nation's poor and disinherited to Washington next spring," he announced to a somewhat perplexed national media. "We don't know what will happen," he said. "They may try to run us out. They did it with the Bonus Marchers years ago, you remember."

King was the first to admit that his plan was risky. But not to act, he said, "represents moral irresponsibility. 38We were told when we went into Birmingham that Congress wouldn't move. We were told the same thing when we went to Selma. We have found throughout our experience that timid supplication for justice will not solve the problem. We have got to confront the power structure massively."

He was anxious to get started on what would be the most sweeping project of his career. "This," he said, "is a kind of last, desperate demand 39for the nation to respond to nonviolence."

3 THE MONTH OF THE IGUANA

ON AN EMPTY 40beach outside of Puerto Vallarta, brushed by the sibilance of Colima palms, Eric Galt aimed his camera at the young Mexican woman stretched across the sand. Fussing with his new Polaroid 220 Land camera, he tried to find the right plays of light, tried to frame a shot like the ones he'd seen in the pinup magazines.

It was a warm tropical day in November 1967. Through his viewfinder, Galt could see the waves tunneling in from the Pacific. At his back, the foothills climbed steeply toward a jungle of orchids and bromeliads, its canopy swarming with parrots.

The monsoon season had ended, and the atmosphere had taken on a new crispness, so that Galt could see across the Bahia de Banderas, the second-largest bay in North America, to the shaggy headlands of Punta de Mita far to the north. Along the great scallop of shoreline were scores of secret beaches like this one, some of them reachable only by boat, hidden places where tourists could linger all day and fry like wild Calibans in the sun.

The beach that Galt had found was so secluded that his model, a local girl named Manuela Medrano, had little cause to feel self-conscious; save for the ubiquitous fishing pangas bobbing in the distance, the photographer and his subject had the place all to themselves.

At one point, Galt told Manuela to climb behind the wheel of his Mustang, put her feet on the dashboard, and hike up her skirt. She giggled and smiled, but she was happy to oblige him, and he began to photograph her from different angles. Such exhibitionism was nothing out of the ordinary for her; though she was only twenty-three years old, Manuela had long worked in a brothel called the Casa Susana--Puerto Vallarta's largest--where she was considered one of the marquee attractions.

Galt played with the instant camera some more, coaching Manuela on her poses. He'd snap a shot, remove the exposed film, and watch the image resolve before his eyes.

A pale, nervous man in his late thirties with a lanky build, Galt knew nothing about the art or business of photography, but he was eager to learn. For some time, he'd been toying with the idea of getting into the porn industry, X-rated films as well as girlie magazines. It was one of several business schemes swimming in his head. He imagined that one day he would manage a stable of talent, with publishing connections, distribution connections, connections to buy off the law. He was ambitious and willing to work hard. He knew that if he ever hoped to become a player, he would first have to master all his new equipment.

Through a mail-order catalog, he had recently bought a Kodak Super 8 41movie camera, a Kodak Dual projector and splicing machine, a twenty-foot remote-control cable, and various accessories. He also looked into purchasing sound stripers, a sound projector, and an automatic cine printer to run off copies of the films he eventually hoped to make. He read Modern Photography magazine. He procured sex manuals and sex toys. He studied the smut magazines to learn what looks were selling and noted that publishers particularly liked to have pictures set in exotic foreign locales--like secluded beaches in the tropics.