Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (49 page)

All this feisty union talk resonated with many in the audience, but Memphis was not a labor town--neither by tradition nor by style--so much of it soon fell on deaf ears. Besides, the person the crowds had really come to see was Coretta Scott King. Finally, after several hours, she obliged them. Introduced by Belafonte, she rose and addressed the crowd in a calm and level voice, keeping her remarks personal. She spoke of her love for her husband, and of his love for their children. She spoke of the brevity of life. "It's not the quantity
⁵⁶⁹
of time that's important, but the quality," she said. She sounded only one bitter note when she raised the question: "How many men must die before we can have a free and true and peaceful society? How long will it take?"

Her composure was almost otherworldly. Out in the audience, people were weeping uncontrollably, but her voice never cracked. "If Mrs. King had cried
⁵⁷⁰
a single tear," said one woman in the crowd, "this whole city would have give way."

Her time in Memphis had inspired her, Coretta King declared. The movement would go on; she had not lost faith. "When Good Friday
⁵⁷¹
comes, these are the moments in life when we feel there's no hope." She looked over at her children and said with a faint smile: "But then, Easter comes."

THAT EVENING, WHILE Coretta King was returning to Atlanta, the FBI agents Neil Shanahan and William Saucier
⁵⁷²
pulled up to 2608 Highland Avenue in Birmingham. "Economy Rooms," the little sign said out front. The two agents rapped on the door of the large pale gray two-story stucco rooming house located in the foothills of Birmingham, not far from the famed colossus of Vulcan, whose deformed physique lorded over the steel city of the South. Peter Cherpes, the Greek-American who ran Economy Rooms, came to the door. Shanahan and Saucier explained that they were with the FBI and that they were looking for a man named Eric Galt who was supposed to be living there. The Birmingham field office had gotten both the name and the Highland address from an urgent report that the Memphis agents Darlington and Bauer had filed earlier in the day.

"Eric Galt," Cherpes repeated. His mind sifted and turned. Yes, he remembered an Eric Galt. He had been a tenant at the Economy Rooms for about six weeks last year. The seventy-two-year-old Cherpes shuffled back to retrieve his three-by-five index registration cards, but they were in disarray, and he was unable to locate Galt's information.

Still, Cherpes was happy to tell the agents what he knew. Galt had stayed in room 14. He'd shown up sometime in the summer of last year--a quiet sort of guy, neatly dressed, usually wore a suit and tie. He said he was "on vacation," cooling it between jobs. He'd previously been down in Pascagoula, Mississippi, working for a company that manufactured big boats. "You couldn't imagine a nicer guy to have around," Cherpes said. "Paid the rent on time. Usually turned in early, didn't go out much. He never had telephone calls or visitors." Cherpes didn't remember Galt befriending any of the other roomers. He had a way of keeping off to himself, aloof. Another boarder at Cherpes's establishment, a twenty-six-year-old man named Charles Jack Davis, had this to say about Galt: "I don't guess there's any such thing as a 'typical person,' but my memory of him is so dim."

In the mornings, Cherpes recalled, Galt would show up right at the end of the breakfast hour, when all the other guests had left. At night, Galt spent a lot of time in the rooming house lounge, watching television.

Did he have a car? Agent Saucier asked.

Cherpes thought for a second. Yes, matter of fact, Galt
did
drive a car. He couldn't remember the make, but Cherpes recalled with some conviction that it was a white car of some kind. Galt checked out sometime in November, and he'd never returned. "I've gotten a couple pieces of mail for him since he left," Cherpes said. "I just sent them all back to the postman."

Did Galt say where he was going?

"Down to Mobile, or someplace like that. Said he'd gotten a job on a boat."

36
THE MAN FURTHEST DOWN

FOR THREE AND A HALF miles,
⁵⁷³
the mourners crept through the azalea-bright streets of Atlanta. Under cloudless skies, a crowd of more than 150,000 tromped from Ebenezer Baptist Church toward Morehouse College, past Auburn Avenue, past downtown, past the gold-domed capitol, where Governor Lester Maddox, an ardent segregationist, was holed up with phalanxes of helmeted state troopers. Occasionally, the governor, who a few days earlier had suggested that King arranged
⁵⁷⁴
his own murder, would part the blinds and stare disgustedly at the passing parade.

At the head of the procession, a cross of white chrysanthemums was carried along, and just behind it a team of Georgia farm mules pulled an old wooden wagon bearing the casket of polished African mahogany. King's lieutenants walked with the mule skinners--Abernathy and Lee, Bevel and Orange, Williams and Young--wearing blue denim to symbolize the hard rural folk at the heart of the coming Poor People's Campaign. It was April 9, 1968--Tuesday morning, one day after the silent march in Memphis and five days after the assassination.

Spectators watched from curbsides, from rooftops, from front porches, from the plate-glass windows of small businesses along the route. The best view, however, was probably on national television. All three networks were covering the funeral live, and more than 120 million people were said to be watching around the world. Half of America had taken leave from work; not just government offices and schools and unions and banks, but even the New York Stock Exchange had called the day off, the first time in history that Wall Street had so recognized a private citizen's death. Roulette wheels in Las Vegas would take a two-hour rest.

"Black Tuesday," people all over the country were calling this day of lamentations. April 9 was already a date etched into the national consciousness, a date fraught with racial overtones; it was, after all, the anniversary of Appomattox. A movement was now building to declare a permanent national holiday in King's name, and other ideas were floated to rename parks, office buildings, highways, and whole neighborhoods after the martyred leader. (California politicians, for example, proposed rechristening the riot-scarred Watts section of Los Angeles as "Kingtown.")

In many senses, the ceremony in Atlanta was the equivalent of a head-of-state funeral. Scores of chartered planes, and hundreds of chartered buses, had come to Georgia--disgorging every kind of commoner and every kind of royal. Several hundred garbage workers from Memphis were on hand, but also Rockefellers and Kennedys. Among the dignitaries in the swarming crowds were six presidential contenders, forty-seven U.S. congressmen, twenty-three U.S. senators, a Supreme Court justice, and official delegations from scores of foreign countries. Hollywood turned out in full force as well--Marlon Brando was there, and Paul Newman, and Charlton Heston, and any number of directors and producers. One could also spot a fair cross section from the upper registers of black sports and entertainment--Aretha Franklin, Jackie Robinson, Mahalia Jackson, Sammy Davis Jr., Jim Brown, Stevie Wonder, Floyd Patterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Diana Ross, Ray Charles, Belafonte, Poitier. Towering a foot or more above everyone else, wearing dark black shades that did nothing to camouflage his well-known visage, was Wilt "the Stilt" Chamberlain.

It was a day of odd juxtapositions, to be sure--at one point Richard Nixon was reportedly seen mingling with the actress Eartha Kitt, then playing the role of Catwoman on the popular television series
Batman--
but for anyone who had any connection to black America, or who wanted black America's vote, the funeral of Martin Luther King could not be missed. Stokely Carmichael, long a critic of King, drew stares from conservative church folk as he slipped into the church, wearing a dignified black Nehru jacket.

Jackie Kennedy was probably the most sensational guest in attendance. She had dropped by the King house earlier that morning to pay her respects to Coretta in person. The two national widows took leave of the crowded kitchen and repaired to a bedroom for a few minutes of semi-private conversation--"leaning toward each other,"
⁵⁷⁵
wrote a
Newsweek
reporter, "like parentheses around the tragic half decade." What they said to each other is lost to history, but as one witness who passed by in the hall put it, likely in terrific understatement: "There was a powerful mood
⁵⁷⁶
in the room."

The most notably absent dignitary, on the other hand, was Lyndon Johnson. Over the preceding few days, the president had hemmed and hawed, he'd sent a dozen mixed signals, he'd listened to Secret Service agents who whispered of threats in the air and implored him to consider that the country couldn't take another assassination. But the truth was, Johnson didn't
want
to go to Martin Luther King's funeral. Although the two figures had made history together, the president could not quite bring himself to honor the man who'd so brazenly undermined him on Vietnam. In his stead, Johnson sent Vice President Hubert Humphrey and stayed in Washington.

That morning at Ebenezer Baptist, the family had held a "small" service of a thousand people. (That was all the modest church could hold, but tens of thousands gathered outside and listened over loudspeakers.) The eulogy was odd and beautiful not so much for what was said as for who was doing the eulogizing--Martin Luther King Jr. himself. The family played a tape recording from one of King's last sermons at Ebenezer, in which he talked poignantly about his own death and how he wanted to be remembered. "If any of you are around when I meet my day, I don't want a long funeral," King said at one point to the audience's soft chuckle--and if that was truly his wish, he most assuredly was not getting it. The service went on and on, and this was only the first part of an all-day extravaganza of mourning. Bored and restless, little Bernice buried herself in Coretta's lap through most of the Ebenezer service, but when she heard her father talking, she perked up. Confused, she looked over at the open coffin to make sure he was still lying there, unmoving, and then slumped back in her mother's arms until the service let out.

Bernice and the other King children--Martin III, Dexter, and Yolanda--had been smothered with goodwill these past few days. True to his word, Bill Cosby had flown to Atlanta and personally entertained them at the house. The King children had received untold thousands of letters and telegrams from all around the world. "Dear Yolanda," one twelve-year-old girl wrote, "I believed in your father
⁵⁷⁷
down to the bottom of my soul." Said a grade-schooler named Robert Barocas from Great Neck, New York: "Dear Dexter--if they catch the guy
⁵⁷⁸
who shot your father, give him a sock in the mouth for me."

Now the four King children slipped out of Ebenezer with their mother, just ahead of the mourners. On Auburn Avenue, most of the flags flew at half-staff, but some flew
upside down
, sending a message not of sorrow but of bitterness and defiance. Along the funeral route, angry mutterings could be heard: Johnson had done it. Hoover had done it. Wallace had done it. The Klan, the White Citizens Council, the Memphis Police Department. The Mafia, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the generals who ran the war King had condemned. In a society already marinated in conspiracy, it was only natural that every form of collusion would be bruited about. Now, with each step the mourners took toward Morehouse, King's death seemed to gather further layers of mystique.

Throughout his civil rights career, King had drawn symbolic meaning and practical power from an Old Testament analogy: he was a black Moses, parting the waters, leading his people on their great exodus out of Egypt. It was an image he consciously and repeatedly invoked, even in his last speech in Memphis
--I may not get there with you but we as a people will get to the Promised Land
. With his assassination, however, the analogy suddenly shifted to the New Testament: King had become a black Jesus, crucified (during the Easter season, no less) for telling society radical truths. If this new analogy was to carry any biblical resonance, then the entire apparatus of the state and culture must be complicit in the Messiah's death--King Herod, Pontius Pilate, the Levites and the Pharisees, the long arm of the Roman Empire.