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

15 "MARTIN LUTHER KING IS FINISHED"

ON THE MORNING of Thursday, March 28, King boarded a flight at Newark, bound for Memphis. He'd spent several exhausting days in the New York area, drumming up support for his Poor People's Campaign, still determined to wage his "War on Sleep." He tried to catnap on the plane, but he couldn't.

Perhaps he was worried about the Beale Street march, set to begin as soon as he touched down in Memphis. Or perhaps the unpleasantness of the previous night played in his head: After a fund-raiser at the apartment of Harry and Julie Belafonte, he'd ended up staying at the Manhattan home of Arthur and Marian Logan (she was a civil rights activist and a member of the SCLC board). There he'd fallen into an argument about the merits of the Poor People's Campaign that lasted for hours and turned sour. The Logans tried to convey their sincere doubts about his Washington project, but King would hear none of it. Downing glass after glass of sherry, he argued with his hosts until three in the morning. Marian Logan worried that he'd become unreasonable; he drank so much that he seemed to be "losing hold" of his faculties,²²⁷ she said. She'd never seen him so wound up before. She noticed that he gripped his glass with one hand and made a clenched fist with the other.

As his plane sped across the country, King was bleary-eyed, restive, and a bit hungover. He was traveling with an aide, Bernard Lee, a young bespectacled Howard University graduate who'd helped lead the sit-in movement in Alabama and was now a devoted SCLC staffer. Abernathy was already in Memphis and would meet King and Lee at the airport. The plan was for King to stay no more than a few hours in Memphis. He would fulfill his vow to march with the striking garbage workers--and then fly straightaway to Washington to continue raising funds and solidifying support for his Poor People's Army. The march would be a mere whistle-stop.

He worried about Memphis, but he knew that his old friend James Lawson was an ace at organizing these sorts of events, adept at training marshals and disciplining the marchers. A first-rate communicator and strategist, Lawson would take care of things. On King's visit to Memphis ten days earlier, the mood had seemed so right, so united and strong. The esprit de corps of the sanitation workers reminded King of the movement's early days, in Montgomery, Birmingham, and the March on Washington.

The plane touched down at around 10:30. King and Lee disembarked and met Abernathy at the gate. The flight was nearly an hour late, so Abernathy hurried them through the airport and out to the modern terminal to a waiting white Lincoln Continental that whisked them downtown. It was a humid spring day, and the sun was just beginning to burn through the morning haze. More than ten thousand people had been gathering in the hot side streets, waiting for King to arrive.

Now the Continental nosed through the crowds outside Clayborn Temple, the African Methodist Episcopal church that was the starting point of the march, a few blocks off Beale Street. People pressed their noses against the car windows to get a look at King, and for a while he and Abernathy were pinned there in the backseat.

Once he was able to dislodge himself from the limo, King looked around and immediately sensed that something was "off" about the crowd. The atmosphere, he told Abernathy, was "just wrong."²²⁸ People trampled on King's feet and swarmed all around him. The garbage workers were dutifully lined up, carrying their I AM A MAN posters, but King could sense that this was no longer the garbage workers' show. The event was all but hijacked by young rowdies who sang and shouted expletives and seemed generally to have come to raise hell. Many thousands were teenagers playing hooky. Cries of "Black power" filled the air. Though it was still morning, people were drinking. A number of kids wore shirts that said "Invaders," a local organization of militants. Some had scrawled their own signs--LOEB EAT SHIT, one of them read. One firebrand carried a noose in his hand.

The crowds were growing hot and irritable. "All the police would have to do²²⁹ is look the wrong way and the place would have blown up," recalled a spokesman for the Invaders. "Some youngsters in high schools had been led to believe this could be the day, man, that we could really tear this city up."

King and Abernathy found Lawson and pointedly asked him what was going on. Where were the marshals? Why were all these young folks so riled up? Lawson didn't know, exactly, but he said some of the crowd's restiveness could be attributed to a false rumor, spreading like a virus, that the police had killed a high-school girl.

King and Abernathy briefly considered canceling the march, but they worried this might precipitate the very thing they most feared--a riot. So much spite surged through the crowd that it seemed imprudent to try to stop it now. King's experience was that usually these things worked themselves out; simply putting one foot in front of the other had a way of dissipating negative energy.

THE MARCH BEGAN. King, Abernathy, Lee, and Lawson locked arms in the front, and began walking, as police helicopters whirred overhead. They left Clayborn Temple and slogged along Hernando Street for a few blocks, jerking and halting, trying to find the right pace. Then they turned left onto Beale, the avenue of the blues, and marched west, in the direction of the Mississippi River.

In the rear, no one bothered to form orderly lines. The kids were jostling and shoving, sending forward wave after wave of people stumbling and stepping on heels. "Make the crowds stop pushing!"²³⁰ King yelled. "We're going to be trampled!"

Soon they passed W. C. Handy Park, named for the prosperous bandleader and composer who first wrote down the blues and shaped the form into an internationally recognized genre. As it happened, this very day was the tenth anniversary of W. C. Handy's death, and someone had laid a wreath beside the bronze statue of the beaming bluesman standing with his trumpet at the ready.

But this Beale was a faded version of the street that the Father of the Blues had known; had he been alive to see it now, he would have despaired at its mirthless state. In Handy's heyday, it was the Main Street of Negro America, a place of deep soul and world-class foolishness, of zoot suits and chitlin joints, of hoodoos and fortune-tellers, with jug bands playing on every corner. The street smelled of tamales and pulled pork and pot liquor and lard. Day and night, Beale throbbed with so much authentic and sometimes violent vitality that, as Handy put it in one of his famous songs, "business never closes 'til somebody gets killed."

For more than a century, blacks from across the Mississippi Delta came to Beale to experience their first taste of city life. Workers came from the levee-building camps, from the lumber and turpentine camps, from the cotton fields and the steamboat lines. The only confirmed studio photograph of Robert Johnson was taken on Beale--a ghostly image of the long-fingered bluesman posing in a fedora and pin-striped suit with his well-worn guitar. Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and B. B. King came here to play some of their first city gigs. The South's first black millionaire, Robert Church, made his real estate fortune on Beale. Black doctors, black photographers, black dentists, black insurance companies, black mortuaries, black newspapers, hotels and restaurants "for coloreds only," African-American parades as a counterpart to the all-white Cotton Carnival--Beale was a place where the concept of "separate but equal" had one of its more spirited and convincing runs.

"If you were black²³¹ for one Saturday night on Beale, you'd never want to be white again," the Stax Records legend Rufus Thomas once quipped.

By the spring of 1968, however, most of the great clubs and theaters--the Daisy, the Palace, the Monarch, P. Wee's Saloon, Club Handy--were boarded up or gone altogether. Though there were still reputable businesses closer to Main, much of Beale had become a drab drag of busted concrete and liquor stores and pawnshops, populated by winos and petty thieves. As King tramped west on Beale, past Handy's statue, separate was most assuredly not equal. The blues was on its sickbed, it was said--a moribund music, an era dead and gone. Now a column of proud but anxious men carried signs in the direction of city hall, headed for an uncertain future.

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 trouble²³⁴ 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 abandoned²³⁵ 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 war²³⁶ 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 idea²³⁷ 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."