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

20 NOT FEARING ANY MAN

AROUND 7:15 P.M., as the rainstorm kept pelting the city and thunder-heads menaced the sky, Eric Galt coasted into the parking lot³⁰² of Vic DuPratt's New Rebel Motel at 3466 Lamar Avenue on the southeastern outskirts of Memphis. The main drag in from Birmingham, Lamar was a bustling byway on the rednecky edge of the city, cluttered with tire dealerships, body shops, honky-tonks, drive-in BBQ joints, and a string of motor courts much like the New Rebel. It was the long, gritty Appian Way into Memphis, a road awash in acrid lights and crowded with mud-barnacled pickup trucks.

He had pulled in to Memphis sometime earlier that day--a city he had apparently never spent any time in before. Not all of Galt's movements are known, but he certainly spent much of the day tooling around the southern edges of the city, along the Mississippi-Tennessee state line. He got a haircut.³⁰³ He picked up a six-pack of Schlitz³⁰⁴ beer at a bait shop in Southaven, Mississippi. Shortly before noon, he bought a Gillette shaving kit at a Rexall drugstore in Whitehaven, not far from Graceland. (Though Priscilla was home with her new baby daughter, Elvis was off in Hollywood the whole month.)

The New Rebel's bright red sign sported a Confederate plantation owner who, with his high leather riding boots, white gloves, and battle sword dangling at his side, closely resembled Colonel Reb, the impressively mustachioed mascot of the Ole Miss football team. Despite the Dixie atmospherics, and the George Wallace-esque ring to its name, the New Rebel was not exactly Galt's kind of place. The motel was clean, modern, and well run--as Galt himself later put it, "the kind of place where more or less legitimate people's around."³⁰⁵ It had a new swimming pool and a decent restaurant that offered room service. Its spick-and-span rooms cost $6.24 a night--a good bit more than he usually liked to pay. Not only that, the motel management requested too much personal information from its guests. The layout of the premises was overly conducive to desk-clerk nosiness: the New Rebel had an enclosed courtyard that required patrons to drive through a narrow entrance, so the attendant at the front desk, sitting behind a large plate-glass window, could keep a close eye on all comings and goings.

Still, Galt realized this was no time to be wandering around at night in an unfamiliar town hunting for lodging while a storm raged. The wind was howling with such force around the New Rebel that one guest later said he "thought the roof of the motel might blow off." So Galt put his money down,³⁰⁶ signing the registration card "Eric S. Galt, 2608 Highland Avenue, Birmingham, Alabama." He filled out the standard form, dutifully noting that he was driving a Mustang bearing Alabama plate number 1-38993.

The desk clerk, Henrietta Hagermaster, put him in room 34. After paying the nightly rate in cash, Galt pulled his car through the narrow entranceway and parked directly in front of his door. He inserted the key into the lock, turned it, and stepped inside.

AT THE LORRAINE, King and Abernathy looked out the window and grimaced at the gravid skies and listened to the eerie sound of the air-raid sirens. They knew what this kind of weather meant: the turnout for the rally at Mason Temple was going to be low--maybe anemically low. How many people could be expected to brave a tornado warning to come out tonight? This was not good for King, they both realized; the media would note the low attendance, and possibly use it to suggest that his local support was waning. Besides, King desperately needed to rest. His cold was worsening, his throat was scratchy, and he thought he might have a slight fever. This was not his night.

"Ralph," he said, "I want you to go speak for me tonight."³⁰⁷

Abernathy balked. "Why don't you let Jesse go? He loves to speak."

King dismissed the idea. "Nobody else but you can speak for me."

"OK, OK," Abernathy said. "But can I bring Jesse?"

"Yes, but you do the speaking."

At about 8:30, Abernathy arrived at Mason Temple and was startled to behold nearly three thousand people, most of them garbage workers and their families, gathered in the large hall. It was clear they had come to see King, not him. They were clapping and singing in anticipation--struggling to be heard over the din of the pummeling rain and thunder.

Abernathy found a phone in the church vestibule and called the Lorraine. "Martin," he said, "you better get over here right now. There's two thousand people braved the storm for you. This is your crowd."

IT WAS GOING to be a perfunctory appearance, a courtesy call. King was just going to slip on a suit and go over and acknowledge the crowd, say a few words, and get back to the Lorraine to nurse his cold. When he walked into Mason Temple at around 9:00 p.m., however, the spirit of the crowd caught him. He was wearing a long black raincoat over his suit, and as he walked down the aisle, people reached out and touched his sleeves, his lapels, his coattails.

Abernathy gave a meandering introduction that went on for nearly half an hour, his words echoing through the vast hall as the tornado sirens keened outside. With a slightly embarrassed smile, King sat on the platform, puzzled by what sounded more and more like a eulogy. Periodically, the shutters high in the gallery would bang in the lashing wind, and King would flinch. There would be a spate of thunder and lightning, and then--bang--the shutters would slam once more, and King would jump again.

Finally Abernathy was done. King rose and approached the podium without notes. After the usual salutations, he settled into an ominous tone. "Something is happening in Memphis,"³⁰⁸ he said. "Something is happening in our world. The nation is sick, and trouble is in the land." Still, he said, he would rather be alive today than in any epoch of history--because the stirrings in Memphis were part of a larger movement across the globe. "The masses of people are rising up," he said. "And their cry is always the same: We want to be free!"

The crowd was a mix of sanitation workers, church folk, and admiring preachers; representatives from the Invaders were also present. At least one FBI agent was there, too, dutifully taking notes in the back. As King fell into the familiar rhythms, people periodically erupted with calls of "Amen!" "Tell it!" "Preach it!" The television news cameras whirred. The shutters banged. The thunder grumbled on.

King made it clear that his lawyers were going to fight the injunction in court the next day and that the march would go on no matter what. "Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness," he said. "We're not going to let any injunction turn us around."

He seemed tired and harrowed, his nerves frayed, but slowly he began to ease into a groove. He reached for metaphors from the book of Exodus, metaphors that resonated with this churchgoing crowd, so close to the river and to slavery themselves. "You know," he said, "whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting amongst themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh's court. When the slaves get together, that's the beginning of getting out of slavery."

Outside, the thunder and lightning seemed to be dissipating, the worst of the storm passing to the east. The banging noise stopped, and there was only the hissing hush of steady rain on the corrugated roof.

King spoke of the bomb threat on his plane that morning, and the delays it had caused. "And then I got into Memphis," he said. "And some began to talk about the threats that were about--about what would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers." With a slow trolling gaze, he surveyed the audience, as if to say to any would-be assassin, Are you out there?

For ten minutes, he veered off on a theme of thanatopsis, exploring different angles of his own mortality. He recalled the time a decade earlier when a deranged black woman plunged a letter opener into his chest at a book signing in a Harlem department store, and how the blade nearly punctured his aorta. The doctor told him that if he had sneezed, he would have ruptured his artery and drowned in his own blood.

King went on to reminisce about the glorious events that had happened since 1958--Birmingham, Selma, the March on Washington, and the other benchmarks of the civil rights movement--all the things he would have missed had he died from his stabbing wound. "And I'm so glad," he said, "that I didn't sneeze."

Sweat poured off his face now, and his eyes seemed to moisten, as he moved toward a crescendo. "We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop."

Tell it!

"And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place."

Amen!

"But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And he's allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land."

Hallelujah preach it uh-huh.

"I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

Drowned in rapturous applause, King turned and collapsed in Abernathy's arms. Other ministers swarmed the stage, awed by the pathos of King's words. A local pastor noticed that King had tears in his eyes--"it seemed like he was just saying,³⁰⁹ 'Goodbye, I hate to leave.'"

In the audience, the mood was triumphant. People were crying, shouting, chanting. One striking sanitation worker recalled, "It seemed like he reached down³¹⁰ and pulled everything out of his heart." Said another: "I was full of joy³¹¹ and determination. Wherever King was, I wanted to be there. It seemed to me from where I was sitting, his eyes glowed."

AT THE NEW REBEL Motel, Eric Galt apparently never emerged from his room. He placed no phone calls through the motel switchboard and made no requests of any kind. He was a thoroughly unremarkable guest: he rode out the tornado warnings, sipped a few cans of Schlitz, and watched TV in his room.

Aside from reporting on the tornado's destruction, the local ten o'clock telecasts were filled with news that night about the sanitation strike and King's efforts to reverse the injunction so he could march again down Beale Street. The reports noted that King and his aides might have to linger in town for quite some time as lawyers hashed out the legal nuances of the proposed march. One newscast showed footage of King and his entourage standing on the balcony of his downtown lodgings; the clip showed the door to King's room at the Lorraine. The room number, 306, was clearly legible.

Whatever else Galt did that night is unknown. But the staff at the New Rebel noticed that he kept the lamps inside his room switched on; through the evening, a milky luminescence seeped around the edges of his window blinds. Perhaps fueled by amphetamines, Galt appeared to be burning through the small hours of the night. From midnight on, Ivan Webb,³¹² the night clerk, made his hourly rounds of the motel property and at each inspection found to his surprise that Galt's room remained brightly lit.

AFTER THE SPEECH, King ventured into the Memphis night. The storm had passed, and now a light, fine rain saturated the air. He was lighthearted, reinvigorated, in a playful spirit. His fever seemed to have broken. "He was like a kid again,"³¹³ Billy Kyles recalled. "He'd preached the fear out, he'd just laid that burden down."

King, Abernathy, and Bernard Lee went out to a late dinner at a friend's house and didn't return to the Lorraine until after 1:00 a.m. Emerging from his taxi, King saw a familiar blue Cadillac convertible parked in the parking lot. He knew that his brother, AD, had arrived from Florida with AD's girlfriend, Lucretia Ward, who owned this excellent road car. And he knew that the Kentucky state senator Georgia Davis must be here, too, waiting for him.

"Senator!"³¹⁴ he called out in the Lorraine parking lot. "Where's the senahhtahh?" He spoke in his deepest baritone--rounded, unmistakable, irresistible. Georgia always called it "the Voice."

King, Abernathy, and several others went into AD's room, where Georgia embraced King. Everyone in the room knew about her--there was nothing to hide. They all stayed up for a while, joshing and visiting, talking about the night's speech, the storms, and tomorrow's big day in court. Around three in the morning, Georgia excused herself and walked in the misting rain toward her room, 201. As she approached her door, she heard King's footsteps, just behind her, on the concrete walkway. Outside, they didn't speak or acknowledge each other--they didn't know who from the press or the police or the FBI might be spying on them.

Georgia turned the key to the lock and walked into her room, leaving the door slightly ajar. King slipped in and shut the latch. She studied his face, as a lover, as an equal, her desires unclouded by awe. "I didn't idolize him³¹⁵ like a lot of other people did," she later said. "To me he was just a man."

King turned and sat on the bed next to Georgia. Opening his arms, he said, "Senator, our time together³¹⁶ is so short."