Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (14 page)

FEBRUARY 1, 1968, was a rainy day, the skies leaden and dull. On Colonial Road in East Memphis, the spindly dogwood branches clawed at the cold air. A loud orange sanitation truck, crammed full with the day's refuse, grumbled down the street, past the ranch-style houses, past the fake chalets and pseudo Tudors, where the prim yards of dormant grass were marred only by truant magnolia leaves, brown and lusterless, clattering in the wind.

At the wheel of the big truck
¹⁷⁹
was a man named Willie Crain, the crew chief. Two workers rode in the back, taking shelter in the maw of its compacting mechanism to escape the pecking rain. They were Robert Walker, twenty-nine, and Echol Cole, thirty-five, two men who were new to sanitation work, toiling at the bottom of the department's pay scale, still learning the ropes. They made less than a hundred dollars a week, and because the city regarded them as "unclassified laborers," they had no benefits, no pension, no overtime, no grievance procedure, no insurance, no uniforms, and, especially noteworthy on this day, no raincoats.

The "tub-toters" of the Public Works Department were little better off than sharecroppers in the Delta, which is where they and their families originally hailed from. In some ways they still lived the lives of field hands; in effect, the plantation had moved to the city. They wore threadbare hand-me-downs left on the curbs by well-meaning families. They grew accustomed to home owners who called them "boy." They mastered a kind of shuffling gait, neither fast nor slow, neither proud nor servile, a gait that drew no attention to itself. All week long, they quietly haunted the neighborhoods of Memphis, faceless and uncomplaining, a caste of untouchables. They called themselves the walking buzzards.

The truck Walker and Cole rode in--a fumy, clanking behemoth known as a wiener barrel--was an antiquated model that the Department of Public Works had introduced ten years earlier. It had an enormous hydraulic ram activated by a button on the outside of the vehicle. Though the city was in the process of phasing it out of the fleet, six wiener barrels still worked the Memphis streets. These trucks were known to be dangerous, even lethal: in 1964, two garbage workers were killed
¹⁸⁰
when a defective compactor caused a truck to flip over. The faulty trucks were one of a host of reasons the Memphis sanitation workers had been trying to organize a union and--if necessary--go on strike.

Having completed their rounds, Crain, Walker, and Cole were happy to be heading toward the dump on Shelby Drive--and then, finally, home. They were cold and footsore, as they usually were by day's end, from lugging heavy tubs across suburban lawns for ten hours straight. The idea of
wheeled
bins had apparently not occurred to the Memphis Sanitation Department. Nor were home owners in those days expected to meet the collection crews halfway by hauling their own crap to the curb. So, like all walking buzzards across the city, Walker and Cole had to march up the long driveways to back doors and carports, clicking privacy gates and entering backyards--sometimes to the snarl of dogs. There they transferred the people's garbage to their tubs while also collecting tree cuttings, piles of leaves, dead animals, discarded clothes, busted furniture, or anything else the residents wanted taken away.

Now, as Crain, Cole, and Walker headed for the dump, their clothes were drenched in rain and encrusted with the juice that had dripped from the tubs all day. It was the usual slop of their profession--bacon drippings, clotted milk, chicken blood, souring gravies from the kitchens of East Memphis mingled with the tannic swill from old leaves. Plastic bags were not yet widely in use--no Ziploc or Hefty, no drawstrings or cinch ties to keep the sloshy messes contained. So the ooze accumulated on their clothes like a malodorous rime, and the city provided no showers or laundry for sanitation workers to clean themselves up at the end of the day. The men grew somewhat inured to it, but when they got home, they usually stripped down at the door: their wives couldn't stand the stench.

AT 4:20 THAT afternoon, a white woman was standing in her kitchen, looking out the window at Colonial Road. She heard something strange--a grinding sound, a shout, a scream. She rushed out the front door and looked in horror at the scene unfolding before her.

Willie Crain's big wiener-barrel truck had stopped outside. Some kind of struggle was taking place. The two workers, Walker and Cole, had been standing in the back of the truck, but they were in trouble now. The wires to the compacting motor had shorted out, and something had tripped the mechanism. A shovel wedged in the wrong place, perhaps, or lightning in the area--something had caused an electrical malfunction.

Now the hydraulic ram was turning, grinding, squeezing, groaning. Crain slammed on the brakes, hopped out of the truck, and raced back to the safety switch. He mashed it and mashed it, but the ram inside would not stop.

Logy in their heavy, wet clothing, Walker and Cole tried to escape as soon as they heard the compactor motor turn on, but the hydraulic ram must have caught some stray fold or sleeve--and now began to pull them in. One of them seemed to break free, but at the last moment the machine found him again.

The screams were terrible as the compactor squeezed and ground them up inside. Crain frantically mashed the button. He could hear a terrible snapping inside--the crunch of human bone and sinew. The motor moaned on and on.

The horrified home owner, who witnessed only the second worker's death, talked to reporters. "He was standing there
¹⁸¹
on the end of the truck, and the machine was moving," she said. "His body went in first and his legs were hanging out. Suddenly it looked like that big thing just swallowed him whole."

THE STORY OF the fatal accident scarcely made news in the Memphis paper the next morning. There was just a small item in the
Commercial Appeal
--a drab announcement with all the emotion of a bankruptcy notice. The paper failed to mention that the truck in question had a history of killing people, or that the families of Walker and Cole had no money to bury their two men, or that the city had no contractual obligation to compensate the widows beyond a rudimentary one-month severance. Earline Walker,
¹⁸²
the pregnant widow of Robert Walker, decided to have her husband buried in what amounted to a pauper's grave in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, down in the Delta, where their families had been field hands.

Instead, the headlines that morning were reserved for Memphis's most famous citizen--Elvis Presley--whose wife, Priscilla, had given birth
¹⁸³
to a six-pound fifteen-ounce baby girl at Baptist Hospital less than an hour after Walker and Cole met their deaths. The Presleys' daughter had dark hair and blue eyes, and they'd named her Lisa Marie. For the rush to the hospital that morning, Elvis had orchestrated an elaborate caravan at Graceland, complete with a decoy vehicle to throw off reporters. Dressed in a pale blue suit and blue turtleneck, Elvis greeted well-wishers at the hospital while Priscilla rested--then blazed off again in a convoy of Lincolns and Cadillacs.

"I am so lucky,
¹⁸⁴
and my little girl is so lucky," Elvis said. "But what about all the babies born who don't have anything?"

JUST OVER A week later, on February 12, thirteen hundred employees from the city's sanitation, sewer, and drainage departments went on strike. Though the deaths of Walker and Cole provided the catalyst, the strike organizers had a long list of grievances that went well beyond the immediate question of safety. They wanted better pay, better hours, the right to organize, a procedure for resolving disputes. They wanted to be recognized as working professionals--and not as boys. Theirs was a labor dispute with unmistakable racial overtones, since almost all the sanitation and sewer workers were black.

February was an inauspicious time to begin a garbage strike; conventional wisdom had it that a work stoppage should occur in the summer, when the refuse would rot faster and produce an unholy stench. But the strike preyed on an old dread lodged deeply within the civic memory: Ever since the yellow-fever epidemic of 1878--which was then thought to have been spawned by putrescent garbage heaped in open cesspools--the city had been extremely attentive to public cleanliness.

From the start, the city refused to acknowledge the garbagemen's cause, or even their union's existence. Soon a few scabs were brought in, but they couldn't keep pace, and the garbage began to pile up all around the city. Municipal employees could not go on strike, Memphis's mayor, Henry Loeb, insisted. "This you can't do,"
¹⁸⁵
he told them. "You are breaking the law. I suggest you go back to work."

Henry Loeb III was a garrulous,
¹⁸⁶
square-jawed man, six feet four, who had commanded a PT boat in the Mediterranean during World War II. He came from a family of millionaires who owned laundries, barbecue restaurants, and various real estate concerns. His wife, Mary, the daughter of a prominent cotton family, was Queen of the Cotton Carnival in 1950. It couldn't be said that Loeb was a racist--certainly not in the raw, Bull Connor sense--and he was by no means a typical cracker politician. For one thing, he'd been schooled in the East, at Phillips Andover and Brown; for another, he was Jewish, a biographical quirk that made him unfit for the Memphis Country Club (even though he'd recently converted to Christianity and joined his wife's Episcopal church).

Like many white business leaders in the South, Mayor Loeb approached the entwined subjects of labor and race with a paternalism reminiscent of the plantation. Although always outwardly courteous to blacks, he called them "nigras"
¹⁸⁷
despite his best efforts, and he seemed to believe that his fair city, having avoided the messy troubles of Little Rock, Birmingham, and Montgomery, didn't have a race problem. During an earlier term as mayor, Loeb had presided over the integration of the city's public establishments, schools, and restaurants without incident. Reinforced by that mostly positive experience, Loeb's position was that black folks in Memphis were
content
--and would remain so, as long as Northern agitators didn't come down and stir things up.

This was a prevalent attitude among white Memphians, in fact, an attitude perhaps best summed up by a popular cartoon that ran in the
Commercial Appeal
every morning. The creation of a Memphis editorial cartoonist named J. P. Alley,
Hambone's Meditations
featured the homespun wisdom of a lovably dim-witted black man, a kind of idiot savant. The grammatically challenged Hambone would say things like: "Don' make no diff'unce whut kin' o' face you's got, hit look mo' bettuh
smilin'
!!"

The garbage workers didn't seem so different from Hambone; many of them were older men who talked and carried themselves not unlike the cartoon character. They were "the world's least likely revolutionaries,"
¹⁸⁸
the journalist Garry Wills said at the time. Unschooled in the ways of protest, they were lowly Delta "blue-gums," as some whites still called them--men who scratched where they didn't itch and laughed at things that weren't funny. Yet these men were playing fiercely against type. They refused to listen to the mayor, and they would not go back to work. Instead, they were out there each day, marching down Main Street, past glowering police and unsympathetic merchants, on the way to city hall to lay their grievances before the massuh.