Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (19 page)

THE TROUBLE STARTED when King, Lawson, and the others in the vanguard approached the intersection of Beale Street and Main. King heard a crashing sound somewhere behind him and jumped reflexively. They turned right onto Main Street and King heard it again. It sounded to him like shattering plate glass--and it was.

Some of the younger marchers had taken their placards, ripped off the wooden pickets, and started smashing store windows along Beale. This ignited a chain reaction. Now people hurled bottles, bricks, stones, any projectile at hand. Someone yelled,
"Burn it down, baby!
" Screaming bystanders bolted in all directions. The sidewalks glittered with glass shards.

Then came the looters, dashing into stores, grabbing whatever they could on the run, and dashing back into the chaos. Abe Schwab's dry-goods store was robbed and vandalized, as were Uncle Sam's Pawn Shop, Lansky Brothers men's clothing store, York Arms sporting goods, and dozens of other businesses along Main and Beale. Soon incongruous objects from the storefront windows lay about the sidewalks--a broken violin, a washboard, a naked mannequin.

King couldn't see all of this, and he didn't know exactly what was going on behind him, but he smelled trouble. The march had become a mob. He turned to Lawson. "Jim--there's violence breaking out."

Lawson looked worried. Up ahead, a line of policemen in riot gear blocked Main Street. By their implacable stance, they indicated that the march would go no farther. Some of them fastened on gas masks.

Grabbing a bullhorn, Lawson wheeled toward the crowd and made his displeasure known: "Turn around!
²³²
All marchers, young and old, go to the temple! You have hurt the cause--we don't want violence!"

Then Lawson said to Lee and Abernathy, "Take Dr. King out of the way."
²³³

King balked. "Jim, they'll say I ran away."

"I really think he should go," Lawson yelled to Abernathy, this time in an adamant tone. Lawson was worried that King's life might be in danger--and if not his life, certainly his reputation.

King soon realized how ruinous it would be for him to appear to be
leading
a riot. "You're right," he finally said. "We got to get out of here."

Abernathy and Lee linked arms with King and pushed through the crowds to McCall, a side street. There they flagged down a white Pontiac driven by a black woman, who, upon recognizing King, waved them inside the car. A police lieutenant on a motorcycle rolled up and offered to escort them from the chaos. They wanted to go to the Lorraine Motel, but the officer said that would only take them into the teeth of the riot once again.

"Just get us away from trouble," Lee yelled.

"Follow me," barked the policeman, and he led them to the Holiday Inn Rivermont, a new high-rise luxury hotel on the city's south bluff overlooking the Mississippi. The policeman promptly checked King and his entourage in to a suite, room 801. King switched on the television and morosely watched the live coverage from Beale Street. He couldn't believe what flickered across the screen.

Looters darting from buildings ... canisters of tear gas ... riot police in wedge formation ... nightsticks ... blood streaming down faces ... squirts of Mace. At Lawson's urging, the garbage workers had fallen back to Clayborn Temple and taken refuge there to plan their next move while bathing one another's burning eyes with wet sponges. They remained disciplined and true to their cause--one police official freely admitted that his cops "never had trouble
²³⁴
with the tub-toters." But some of the young hellions, wanting more of what they'd tasted on Beale, ventured out into the streets in search of trouble. When some of them threw rocks at the police and then ran back into the sanctuary, officers fired tear-gas canisters at the church, staining the walls and sending people gasping.

The rioting on Beale soon spread to other precincts. It took police another hour to gain control of the city. When the mayhem finally smoldered out, scores had sought treatment at local hospitals, and hundreds had been arrested. Two hundred buildings were vandalized, with total property damages that would later be estimated at $400,000. A policeman killed--some said cold-bloodedly murdered--a suspected looter named Larry Payne, shooting the teenager at point-blank range with a shotgun. Numerous cases of police brutality were reported. Many responding officers clearly had overreacted in a show of overwhelming force, but others had performed bravely and practiced restraint in a situation they'd never encountered before, a situation that could have escalated into a Southern reply to Watts.

Mayor Henry Loeb, arguing that "the march was abandoned
²³⁵
by its leaders," announced on television that three thousand soldiers of the National Guard would soon take control of downtown Memphis to restore order and enforce a seven o'clock curfew. "We have a war
²³⁶
in the city of Memphis," added the fire and police director, Frank Holloman, in a fit of hyperbole. "This is a civil war." So tense was the atmosphere around Memphis that a spokesman for the Panama Limited, the Illinois Central passenger line running between Chicago and New Orleans, announced that the train would forgo its customary stop in Memphis. On this night, the Panama Limited's engineer would speed right through the troubled city.

King spent the afternoon watching his nightmare unfold on the screen. He crawled under the bedcovers with his clothes on, smoked cigarettes, and kept his eyes locked on the television. He'd never been so depressed, never so unable to move or speak or react in any way. For hours, he lay in an almost catatonic daze.

Everything he had worked for was in jeopardy, he realized. His marches had always attracted violence, had always served as magnets for turmoil and hate. That was their purpose, in fact--to expose through choreographed drama a social evil for all to see, preferably with cameras rolling. One could only hope for the appearance of a Bull Connor and his police dogs, or redneck Klansmen on the sidelines, burning the usual "nigger" in effigy. Violent opposition only bolstered the demonstration's message.

But in all of King's marches, the participants had never before
caused
violence. This was a new and troubling turn. He realized that what had happened in Memphis that day played right into the hands of the critics of the Poor People's Campaign. How could he stage a peaceable mass protest in Washington when he couldn't bring off a modest-sized march through a modest-sized city in his native South? Memphis had become a litmus test--and he'd failed.

LATE THAT AFTERNOON, King came out of his shell long enough to begin a postmortem on the march. He spoke to James Lawson and another prominent Memphis minister, the Reverend Billy Kyles. They told King about the Invaders, a group of young black-power militants who had the reputation and aura of a gang but also aspirations to be a grassroots social welfare organization that did serious work in the community. If the Invaders hadn't caused the violence, then they had declined to exert their influence to stop it. As elsewhere in the country, a generational divide existed in Memphis between the older ministers and the younger militants. Differences in style, lingo, aims, and education meant that they had trouble working together--the clerical collar came up against the dashiki. On some level, the day's violence was a reflection of those generational frictions.

King hadn't known about the Invaders. He listened carefully and began to process what Kyles and Lawson had to say. "Until then, King really didn't have any idea
²³⁷
of what had happened," recalled Kyles. "He wasn't angry, he was just very disturbed, and upset."

That evening King began a telephone blitz, trolling for opinions from his closest friends and advisers. He called Coretta, who tried without much success to console him. He called Stanley Levison, his attorney friend in New York, who told him that more than anything he needed to get some sleep. He called the SCLC board member Marian Logan, in whose house he had stayed the previous night. Her advice was succinct: "Get your ass out of Memphis."
²³⁸

King was sunk in profound doubt about his role and his identity. On the phone, he told one adviser that people would now declare that "'Martin Luther King is dead.
²³⁹
He's finished. His nonviolence is nothing, no one is listening to it.' Let's face it, we do have a great public relations setback where my image and my leadership are concerned."

Ralph Abernathy tried to lift King's spirits but failed. They went out on the balcony and looked over the Mississippi River. Abernathy had never seen his friend this dejected before. "I couldn't get him to sleep that night," Abernathy recalled. "He was worried, worried. Deeply disturbed. He didn't know what to do, and he didn't know what the press was going to say."

The more Abernathy tried to console him, the deeper King descended into his funk. "Ralph," he said, "we live in a sick nation.
²⁴⁰
Maybe we just have to give up and let violence take its course. Maybe people will listen to the voice of violence. They certainly won't listen to us."

16
THE GAMEMASTER

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Friday, March 29, Eric Galt walked into the Long-Lewis hardware store in Bessemer, Alabama, a blue-collar suburb of Birmingham, about 160 miles west of Atlanta. He made his way over to a salesman
²⁴¹
named Mike Kopp, who stood beneath an enormous moose head mounted on the wall--a trophy that advertised the hardware store's sideline business in big-game hunting equipment.

Galt inquired about the store's selection of high-powered rifles.

"We've got a few 30.30s," Kopp said.

Galt cut him off. "I need something more powerful than that," he said.

He then peppered Kopp with questions about various kinds of ammunition. How many inches would a certain kind of bullet drop in fifty yards? Or one hundred yards? What was the knockdown power? What about the recoil?

The questions were too detailed for Kopp to answer with authority. Galt started to leave, but then eyed the large bearded ungulate scowling from the wall and mused, "I once tried to bring down a moose, but I missed."

Kopp studied the pale, fidgety man and concluded to his own satisfaction that Galt had never hunted moose--or any species of big game.