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

44 PLAGUES

ALONG THE MALL in Washington, the caravans of the Poor People's Army had all arrived, and on May 13, Resurrection City was declared open for business.⁶⁸⁵ Much as Martin Luther King had hoped for, more than two thousand people of all colors and backgrounds were now encamped in a sprawling tabernacle city set among the cherry trees of West Potomac Park. Abernathy was sworn in as "mayor," and Jesse Jackson, having more or less patched up his relationship with King's successor, was named the shantytown's "city manager."

The SCLC began this epic demonstration with high energy and fervent hope and even good humor. Abernathy envisioned a "City on a Hill," a great experiment in protest politics that would last at least a month. It would be a kind of American Soweto perched on the back doorstep of Capitol Hill, a deliberate eyesore meant to force the government to pay attention to the problem of systemic poverty. Protesters vowed to disrupt if not paralyze the business of government, and they planned to go to jail en masse. Abernathy threatened to sic "plague after plague⁶⁸⁶ upon the pharaohs of Congress until we get our demands"--which included an economic bill of rights guaranteeing a minimum yearly income, a campaign to end hunger in America, and a multi-point plan to rebuild the nation's worst inner-city ghettos. The price tag on all of Abernathy's antipoverty measures came to nearly thirty billion dollars.

During its first week, Resurrection City made front-page news and enjoyed a sort of honeymoon period in the media. Reporters feasted on the spectacle of this latter-day Hooverville erected in the shadow of the Mall's cold marble monuments. Congressional delegations walked the grounds--among the visitors was a U.S. representative from Texas named George Herbert Walker Bush. There were marches, parades, press conferences, and sit-ins; there was live music, dancing, even an Indian powwow. Peter, Paul, and Mary came, as did Pete Seeger and a host of black entertainers. Abernathy proudly baptized the first child born in the camp. Resurrection City had the feel and pulse of a freewheeling countercultural festival, a full year before Woodstock.

But by the second week, things had started to unravel. It became apparent that the Poor People's Campaign was short on ideas--and even shorter on organizational strategy. The SCLC knew how to run a march, but it had no experience running a functioning city. Ralph Abernathy was no Martin Luther King--he had neither the shrewdness nor the charisma nor the rhetorical discipline to bring off such an ambitious campaign. Even Abernathy recognized it. "Resurrection City was flawed⁶⁸⁷ from the beginning," he later conceded. "I realized more every day the loss I had suffered and the burden I had inherited."

Veterans and friends of the movement began to impugn Abernathy's leadership. Stanley Levison, King's old confidant, saw signs of "megalomania⁶⁸⁸--Abernathy is thrill-happy and running around everywhere." As far as Levison was concerned, the campaign was fast becoming "a fiasco." Bayard Rustin, meeting with reporters, shared a similar disdain for Abernathy's abilities. Resurrection City was "just another fish-fry,"⁶⁸⁹ he said. Instead of engaging government officials and building allies, Rustin argued, the SCLC leader was alienating nearly everyone who could aid the cause, leaving Congress feeling "trapped by Abernathy's nameless demands for an instant millennium."

As Andy Young saw it, Abernathy simply didn't have what it took to hold the already-disintegrating movement together, and he couldn't keep his headstrong young staff under control. Bickering between James Bevel, Hosea Williams, and Jesse Jackson nearly descended to the level of fistfights. "Ralph was frustrated⁶⁹⁰ with his inability to be Martin Luther King," Young later wrote. "The team of wild horses was now really running wild."

Most of the SCLC higher-ups didn't even stay in Resurrection City--they decamped to a Howard Johnson across from the Watergate. In the absence of strong and present leadership, Resurrection City fell apart. Teenage gang members, who served as "marshals" along the encampment's tattered thoroughfares, harassed and even beat up reporters. Thugs worked the long rows of tents, shaking down residents for protection money. The camp was treated to a steady drumbeat of weird and troubling anecdotes: An obese man wielding an ax stormed about the camp, hacking down several A-frame structures. Two psychiatric patients, recently released from St. Elizabeths mental hospital, set a phone booth on fire. A band of rowdies threw bottles at cars along Independence Avenue and fell into a protracted tear-gas war with the police at the east end of the Reflecting Pool. Camp officials began to receive threats on Abernathy's life. Then a rumor went out that vandals from Chicago were planning to scale the Lincoln Memorial and spray-paint it black.

Just when it seemed as though the news reports emanating from Resurrection City couldn't get any worse, they did. On May 23, the rains came, and the deluge didn't stop for two weeks. As Abernathy put it, "The gray skies poured water,⁶⁹¹ huge sheets that swept across the Mall like the monsoons of India," leaving people "ankle deep in cold, brown slush." It rained so much that people suspected the government had seeded the clouds. Resurrection City became, literally, a quagmire. Hosea Williams, who replaced Jesse Jackson as "city manager" after the internecine feuding became intolerable, called the campsite "that mudhole." Pathways had to be covered in sheets of plywood. Tents collapsed. Hygiene deteriorated. Worried health department officials warned that outbreaks of dysentery and typhoid were imminent. The National Park Service would soon be presenting the SCLC with a bill of seventy-two thousand dollars for damages to the grounds of the Mall. Meanwhile, some twenty-two broken-down mules abandoned after the long trek to Washington were given over to the care of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals or placed in perpetuity on a Virginia farm.

No one could have been more pleased by all this bad news than J. Edgar Hoover. Ever since the first caravans had pulled in to Washington a few weeks earlier, he'd been keeping close tabs on Project POCAM. Hoover had dozens of agents, paid informers, and undercover spies milling about the camp. One of his many sources of intelligence came from the Pentagon, which had assigned a unit of signal corpsmen to observe and photograph the encampment, night and day, from the top of the Washington Monument. Once it became obvious to Hoover that the SCLC's internal problems prevented it from becoming the organized subversive force he had feared, he pressed his agents and informers to take a slightly different tack. In a memo, he told them to "document such things as immorality,⁶⁹² indecency, dishonesty, and hypocrisy" among the campaign's leadership.

But by this time, the Poor People's Army was running out of steam, out of creativity, out of cash. People were referring to the campaign as the Little Bighorn of the civil rights movement. Now Abernathy was desperately trying to pull out of Washington with his dignity intact.

At some moment during that long, wet, turbulent month, an era had reached its denouement. The battle-fatigued nation had just about had its fill of protest politics, of marching and rioting, of scattershot airings of grievance. As Gerald McKnight put it in his classic study, The Last Crusade, most of Washington had come to regard Resurrection City as "some grotesque soap opera⁶⁹³ whose run could not end soon enough."

The civil rights movement was feeling the final impact of King's assassination, the final measure of his loss. By carrying out their slain leader's wishes in Washington, the SCLC staff had shown the world just how indispensable he was. Though the event still had several weeks to play itself out, Resurrection City had become, in McKnight's words, "almost a perfect failure."⁶⁹⁴

Yet there was also something fiercely apt about Resurrection City and its inability to move the nation. Ramsey Clark, perhaps alone among high-ranking Johnson administration officials, responded to the pathos embedded in King's final flawed experiment on the Mall. "Lincoln smiled kindly,⁶⁹⁵ but the American people saw too much of the truth," Clark wrote a few years later. "For poverty is miserable. It is ugly, disorganized, rowdy, sick, uneducated, violent, afflicted with crime. Poverty demeans human dignity. The demanding tone, the inarticulateness, the implied violence deeply offended us. We didn't want to see it on our sacred monumental grounds. We wanted it out of sight and out of mind."