Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (17 page)

IN TRUTH, KING had conflicted feelings about Memphis, a town he had visited many times before. It was a very different city from Atlanta, rougher around the edges, funkier, with a population that was poorer and closer to the cotton fields. The last time King had stayed any length of time here was in 1966. In June of that year, James Meredith, who'd become nationally famous four years earlier as the first African-American man to attend the University of Mississippi, was leading a solitary march--the March Against Fear, he called it--from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, to protest brutality against blacks when he was struck down by a white sniper wielding a shotgun; seriously but not fatally hurt, Meredith had become a victim of the very thing he was marching against. King joined a clutch of civil rights leaders in Memphis to pick up where Meredith had fallen--and to trudge through sultry heat all the way to Jackson, Mississippi. Though they reached their destination, the march ended with tear-gas dousings and a deepening rift between King and Stokely Carmichael's emergent black-power movement. King's memories of the episode were not fond ones.

On that stay in Memphis, King had briefly lodged at his usual hangout, the black-owned Lorraine Motel, located a few blocks from the river on the south end of downtown. True to habit, King and his entourage returned to his old haunt on this night, after the speech at Mason Temple.

The Lorraine had long been popular
²¹¹
among Stax musicians, gospel singers, and itinerant ministers. Count Basie had stayed here, as had Ray Charles, the Staple Singers, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Cab Calloway, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong, and Nat "King" Cole. The old part of the lodge
²¹²
--the Lorraine
Hotel
--had once been a white whorehouse. In the mid-1940s the husband-and-wife team of Walter and Loree Bailey bought the place and worked hard to make it respectable, building a new wing that was a modern motor court.

King liked the homey feel of the place, the way you could wander into the kitchen at odd hours and order whatever you wanted. Over the years, King had stayed at the Lorraine at least a dozen times, and the Baileys had become like family. The room rate was thirteen dollars a night, but the Baileys refused to charge King.

King usually stayed in room 306, on the second floor of the motel in the middle of the long balcony. Abernathy referred to it as "the King-Abernathy suite."
²¹³
Furnished with twin beds, a television, cheap Danish furniture, and a black rotary telephone, 306 was a modest-sized paneled room appointed in a 1960s contemporary style that Andrew Young later described as "seeming so modern
²¹⁴
then and so frightful today."

King, Abernathy, Young, and the few others in the entourage stayed up far into the night, meeting with local ministers and planning the coming demonstration: it was decided that they would march down Beale Street, the fabled avenue of the blues. Lawson, along with AFSCME leaders, would organize the march, and King would drop into the ranks in the mid-morning to lead the procession. Given everything he'd seen at Mason Temple that night, King was tremendously optimistic. Not since Selma had he been a part of something that felt so auspicious.

The next morning King and his crew rose early and headed south into the poorest precincts of the Delta, to begin a brief whirlwind through Mississippi and parts of Alabama.

The day started in Clarksdale, in the heart of blues country--the town where, according to one version of the legend, the young Robert Johnson met the devil at midnight at "The Crossroads" and sold his soul to learn to play guitar. King was brought to tears by the poverty he saw in the plantation settlements of shotgun shacks, surrounded by wet, fallow cotton fields.

Later in the day, King and his entourage worked their way down to a rally at Jennings Temple Church in Greenwood, Mississippi, a town also steeped in the Robert Johnson story. Just outside of Greenwood, in 1938, the itinerant bluesman, still in his late twenties, died a horrible death, likely of strychnine poisoning, said to have been slipped into his whiskey by an angry juke-joint owner. A fellow musician said Johnson "crawled on his hands and knees and barked like a dog before he died."

It was, for King, haunted country, country just a few steps from slavery, and a natural place for his Poor People's Campaign to take root.

He would return to Memphis in three days.

ON THE BLUSTERY spring day of March 22, Eric Galt swung his Mustang into Selma, Alabama. He was exhausted from his transcontinental journey and eager to clean off the grunge of the road. The drive from Los Angeles had taken four days. He'd followed a southerly route across the prickly deserts of the Southwest, and then down into Texas. He stopped for one night in New Orleans, where, true to his promise, he dropped off the box of clothes for Marie Tomaso's family.

Entering the Selma city limits, he turned in to the parking lot of the Flamingo Motel,
²¹⁵
on Highway 80, not far from the heart of town--and checked in, signing the register book "Eric S. Galt."

Galt moved into his room and peered out the window at the traffic on the highway. The Flamingo was just a few blocks from the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where three years earlier Martin Luther King had helped lead several hundred marchers into the teeth of Governor Wallace's mounted state troopers.

A gritty agribusiness town on the Alabama River, Selma had been a major Confederate rail hub and manufacturing center for war materiel--including shells, saltpeter, even ironclad warships. Nathan Bedford Forrest led a doomed effort to save the town's munitions factories from the Union torch in the very last days of the war. But it was the civil rights movement that had made Selma famous around the world, a fact that Galt must have known. The spirited marchers had tramped by this very motel, down this very road--Highway 80--en route to the state capitol in Montgomery to lay their grievances at the feet of Galt's beloved Governor Wallace. The Selma-to-Montgomery march was in some ways the acme of the civil rights movement. The confrontation at the Pettus Bridge shocked the nation and resulted in President Johnson's signing of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Why had Galt come to Selma? What business did he have with this racially freighted burg in the Black Belt of Alabama, this arsenal of the dead Confederacy, with its crumbling antebellum mansions and live oaks gauzed in Spanish moss? He was no Civil War buff, and certainly no fan of the civil rights movement. One didn't easily wander into Selma on the way to someplace else; it was not on the main roads between New Orleans, Birmingham, and Atlanta, Galt's ultimate destination. Yet something about Selma interested him enough to make a detour--of nearly sixty miles--to stay the night here.

There is one clue. That morning Galt had awakened in New Orleans, where the
Times-Picayune
reported a curious fact: Martin Luther King was scheduled to make a public appearance in Selma that very day to drum up recruits for his Poor People's Campaign. Other newspapers and TV stations across the South reported King's plans as well.

The conclusion was unavoidable: in making his detour and speeding his way up to little Selma on this particular day, Eric Galt appeared to be
stalking
Martin Luther King. But stalking him for what purpose? Armed only with his Japanese-made Liberty Chief revolver, he surely was not thinking of killing King--at least not yet. That was far too risky. With a handgun, he would have to shoot close in, and unless King was entirely alone, Galt would run a high risk of being captured.

Yet the potent symbolism of killing King in Selma must have registered with him. To many who thought as Galt did, it would seem a delicious irony that George Wallace's nemesis should be cut down in the very spot where the most famous insult to the governor's authority, and to the honor of his state, had taken place.

Far more likely, though, Galt had come to Selma just to get a sense of King's entourage. He wanted to take note of the style in which the minister traveled, his habits of movement, the presence or absence of bodyguards or police details. What were King's most obvious vulnerabilities? What car did he ride in, and in what sort of convoy? How long did he linger with the crowds? King's appearance in Selma would be, for Galt, a kind of dry run.

On a deeper level, it is also possible that Galt wanted to see King for himself and hear his message firsthand, to stoke his rancor for the man and his movement. But Galt's anticipated encounter with his target was not to be. King never reached Selma that evening, and his talk was canceled. Mustering recruits for the Poor People's Campaign, he was delayed in the tiny town of Camden, thirty-eight miles away, and ended up spending the night there. (It's possible, of course, that Galt somehow learned of this late-breaking revision in the SCLC itinerary in time to catch King's appearance in Camden, but there's no evidence for it.)

When a frustrated Galt woke up the next morning in Selma, he began to weigh his options. The papers were now reporting that the Nobel laureate would be heading home. If King would not come to Galt, then Galt would go to King. So Galt checked out of the Flamingo Motel the next morning and headed northeast, on dry roads, in the direction of Atlanta.

ON MARCH 22, the day of the proposed march down Beale Street, Memphis awoke to an extraordinary spectacle. Overnight, seventeen inches of
snow
had fallen, and the city was a wonderland, with a heavy wet slurry smothering the jonquils, freezing the azalea blossoms, and bending the branches of magnolia trees. Serious snow was a rarity in Memphis, especially in the month of March, but this one was for the record books: it was the second-largest snowstorm in the city's history. Memphis shut down. Schools and factories and government offices closed, with power outages reported throughout the region. Nature, as one wag put it, had gone on strike.
²¹⁶

Lawson told King the news: an act of God had intervened, and the march would have to be postponed. "We've got a perfect work stoppage,
²¹⁷
though!" he quipped. Lawson and King set a new date for the march--Thursday, March 28.

The papers called it, simply, "The Day of the Big Snow." A prominent black minister in Memphis said, "Well, the Lord has done it again
²¹⁸
--it's a white world." While many people in Memphis welcomed the great storm and the respite it provided from civil tensions, others saw it as a bad omen. "It had never snowed
²¹⁹
that late in March," said one strike supporter. "And some of us felt that something was just in the air, and that something dreadful was going to happen."

TWO DAYS LATER, Eric Galt rolled into Atlanta, and though he knew nothing about the city, he soon found his kind of neighborhood--which is to say, slatternly, sour smelling, and cheap. No matter where he was in the world, his radar for sleaze remained remarkably acute. It was March 24, a Sunday. He located a rooming house
²²⁰
at 113 Fourteenth Street Northeast, just off Peachtree Street near Piedmont Park in midtown. It was a somewhat disheveled part of Atlanta that had lately been turning into a hippie district--or at least what
passed
for one in this starched-collar, business-oriented, Baptist-conservative boomtown, which a few years earlier had adopted the boosterish slogan "The City Too Busy to Hate." Home of Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines, among other large national companies, Atlanta had become the proud epitome of the New South; it was a city of unapologetic commercialism and an often ersatz sophistication, but also, in many quarters, a city of surprising racial tolerance--so much so that one prominent Southern essayist, John Shelton Reed, would remark: "Every time I look at Atlanta,
²²¹
I see what a quarter million Confederate soldiers died to prevent."