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

CHAPTER 1

CITY OF WHITE GOLD

²⁰ all the secret krewes: The 1967 Cotton Carnival details here are drawn from Magness, Party with a Purpose, p. 242. The description of the 1967 Royal Barge and other carnival atmospherics is drawn from newspaper coverage in the Memphis Commercial Appeal and Memphis Press-Scimitar, April and May 1967.

²¹ Memphis was built on the spot: For details on the early history of Memphis, see Capers, Biography of a River Town; Roper, Founding of Memphis; Magness, Past Times; and Harkins, Metropolis of the American Nile.

²² Front Street, cotton's main drag: Details here on the business of cotton are drawn from Bearden, Cotton, and Yafa, Big Cotton. I also relied on collections displayed at the Cotton Museum in Memphis.

²³ a yellow fever epidemic: For a vivid account of the 1878 yellow fever epidemic, see Crosby, American Plague.

²⁴ "was built on a bluff": Wills, "Martin Luther King Is Still on the Case."

²⁵ Marcus Brutus Winchester: Weeks, Memphis, pp. 25-34.

²⁶ Ida B. Wells: For anyone curious about the courageous life of this civil rights matriarch, I recommend her excellent memoir, Crusade for Justice.

²⁷ renouncing the Klan: Jack Hurst's fine biography, Nathan Bedford Forrest, deftly traces Forrest's evolution, in his later years, toward racial moderation. See esp. pp. 359-67.

²⁸ masked green jesters: See Magness, Party with a Purpose, pp. 205-10.