Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (4 page)

THE SKIES OVER Arkansas ripened to a final brilliant red before closing into darkness. It seemed as though the sun had literally buried itself in cotton fields. An orchestra played strains of Vivaldi, and the heavens crackled with fireworks.

Then, from under the bridge, the dazzling vessel slipped into view, with the crowds gasping in wonder. At first it was just a burst of bright light, a diaphanous vision floating out on the currents. As it drew nearer to the harbor, the ravishing details began to emerge. The barge was the size of a football field, with a giant art deco cotton boll rising over the sparkling set. Egyptian motifs were woven into the decorations--pyramids, sphinxes, hieroglyphics: the Old South meets the land of the pharaohs.

Seated on their thrones high up in the towering boll were King Joseph and Queen Blanche, 1967's monarchs, wearing their crowns, holding their scepters. As always, they'd been chosen in secret, by some obscure protocol known only to the Mystic Society of the Memphi. As always, he was an older man, a business potentate, while she was a nubile paragon of Southern pulchritude, college aged and presumably a virgin. They were blindingly white people, in blindingly white clothes, sitting high in their resplendent perch. In unison, they cupped their gloved hands and gave the crowds tiny swiveling waves, as if to say,
Here we are! ... There you are! ... We're all here!

More than a hundred people made up the royal court, all posed together on the barge like the largest wedding party ever assembled. There were the duchesses, the counts, the pages, the princesses and their tuxedoed escorts. There were the young girls, who curtsied with labored formality and attended the train of Her Majesty's gown. There were the weevils, the masked green jesters
²⁸
whose identities were unknown. On one side of the Royal Barge stood the Ladies of the Realm--belles from plantation towns all over the Mississippi Delta. On the other side were the Ladies-in-Waiting--belles from the city, from good families, and of marriageable age.

The court moved about the barge in a carefully choreographed promenade. Everyone was smiling, bowing, waving, beaming. "Don't get wise with me," the king warned, "or I'll have you all beheaded." When the music reached a fever pitch, King Joseph and Queen Blanche rose and took a bow. All along the bluff, the seventy-five thousand loyal subjects erupted in thunderous cheers: Hail, King Cotton and His Queen!

Then, in a swirl of lights, the court began to parade off the stage, and off the barge, and onto the old cobblestones, the royals closely guarded by uniformed young men dressed as Confederate colonels. Like Peabody ducks, the revelers strutted down a long red carpet to a waiting convoy of Cadillac convertibles and were whisked away to the first parties of the season.

2
GOING FOR BROKE

SIX MONTHS LATER, in November 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. found himself in Frogmore, in the swampy Low Country of South Carolina not far from Hilton Head, where his civil rights organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was having its annual conclave. King had decided to use the retreat as a platform to announce a bold new direction for the SCLC. With nearly a hundred staffers, board members, and volunteers in attendance, he would unveil an ambitious turn in the organization's focus. It would be controversial, radical, revolutionary in scope.

King had decided that late next spring--the spring of 1968--he would return to the Washington Mall, the site of his triumphant "I have a dream" speech. Only this time, he envisioned something much more confrontational than an afternoon of soaring oratory. Instead, he would bring an army of poor people from all around the country--not just African-Americans, but indigents from various Indian tribes, whites from Appalachia, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Eskimos, Pacific islanders from the U.S. territories. They would camp out on the Mall for weeks, living in a vast shantytown at the foot of the monuments. They would paralyze the city. They would tie up traffic. They would hold daily sit-ins in the halls of government. They would occupy the nation's capital and refuse to leave until their demands were met. It would be an act of civil disobedience on a scale never witnessed before. The only precedent that King could come up with was the Bonus Marchers, the World War I veterans who descended on Washington in the summer of 1932 to claim their promised benefits.

King had been moving in this direction for years, but his thinking had really crystallized over the summer, after the horrific riots in Detroit and Newark led him to believe that America--its structures and its practices, its very
idea
--was in serious trouble. "For years," he said, "I labored with reforming
²⁹
the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values."

America, he believed, was now a sick society in need of "radical moral surgery." It had become arrogant, selfish, more interested in things than in people. Washington was moving forward with its disastrous war in Southeast Asia while pursuing Cold War policies that seemed to be taking the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. "My own government,"
³⁰
he said, has become "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

The specter of mass riots was a symptom of a larger disease within the body politic, he said. Consumed by Vietnam, the space race, and other expensive military-industrial projects, the government was unwilling to confront the appalling conditions in the ghettos of America. This lack of compassion was shortsighted, he felt, for if something wasn't done immediately, there would be more riots next summer--much more destructive riots. King genuinely feared the country might slip into a race war that would lead, ultimately, to a right-wing takeover and a kind of fascist police state.

Some of the root problems had to do with capitalism itself, he argued. For years, King had been accused of being a secret Communist, which was flatly untrue, but for several years he
had
been moving toward advocating a form of democratic socialism similar to that practiced in Scandinavia (a notion inspired in part by his 1964 visit to Sweden and Norway to collect his Nobel Peace Prize). "The good and just society,"
³¹
he said, "is neither the thesis of capitalism nor the antithesis of communism, but a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truths of individualism
and
collectivism."

King's vision for a poor people's descent on Washington had grown out of months of soul-searching, and a summer he spent living in a tenement in one of Chicago's worst slums. He'd been thinking closely and intensely about poverty--its origins, solutions, and effects. He viewed the new campaign as an alternative to riots, a last chance for nonviolence. His Poor People's Army would demand that the government initiate a kind of Marshall Plan to attack poverty in America--programs for mass job creation, health care, better schools, and a guaranteed minimum income for every person in the land.

He realized this was much more radical than anything he had ever attempted before; it would be a tough sell at any time, but especially in wartime. He understood that the project he was undertaking lacked the logistical and moral clarity of the old days of the civil rights movement, when the evils seemed so manifest, and when the nation seemed more easily swayed by his ferocious eloquence. Instead of asking for something that was already guaranteed in the Constitution, he was now asking the country to dig deep into its coffers to solve one of humanity's most ancient and intractable problems. "It didn't cost the nation
³²
one penny to integrate lunch counters," King said. "It didn't cost the nation one penny to guarantee the right to vote. But now, we are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars--and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power."

Nonetheless, King insisted that the SCLC forge ahead with the campaign, this epic
camp-in
. "I'm on fire
³³
about this thing," he told his staff in Frogmore. "We've got to go for broke this time."

MOST OF KING'S aides were
not
"on fire" with the idea, however. They thought the Poor People's Campaign sounded quixotic from the start--and worse, that it reflected their leader's troubled state of mind.

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,
³⁴
get away from the movement and collect his thoughts. "I'm tired of all this traveling
³⁵
I 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
³⁶
every now and then and feel my work's in vain. But then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again."