Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (21 page)

AFTER HIS MEETING with the Invaders, King finished dressing and headed down to a Rivermont conference room to face the media. He looked sharp, dressed in a green-blue silk suit and a razor-thin tie, but Abernathy worried about his friend; King was too exhausted and too depressed to perform before hostile journalists. They were going to destroy him.

Once he entered the brightly lit room, however, King seemed to undergo a transformation. He was poised, forceful, brimming with cautious optimism. The cameras caught no hint of the doubts that had washed over him the previous night. Astonished, Abernathy thought King showed a "lion quality."

Why did you run away from the march yesterday?

"I did
not
run away from the march,"
²⁵⁷
King insisted in a level tone. It was a matter of principle: "I have always said that I will not lead a violent demonstration."

The trouble, he pointed out, was caused not by legitimate participants but by a few undisciplined young people on the sidelines. His decision to lend a hand to the Memphis cause was predicated on "a miscalculation," he said. "When I spoke here two weeks ago, thousands of people [were] assembled inside and outside. Nobody booed, nobody shouted Black Power. I assumed the ideological struggles that we find in most cities, particularly in the North, were non-existent here."

King said he now understood his mistake. If he could do it over again, he would sit down and confer at length with the city's black youth. They were "just angry," he said, "feeling a sense of voicelessness in the larger society and at the same time a sense of voicelessness in the black community."

One of the journalists asked King whether the Beale Street violence presaged another long summer of riots across the nation.

"I cannot guarantee anybody that Memphis or any other city in this country will not have a riot this summer," King replied. "Our government has not done anything about removing the conditions that brought riots into being
last
summer."

So you can't give the country a guarantee?

"I don't know what you mean by 'guarantee.' I don't want to put myself in the position of being omniscient. I can only guarantee that
our
demonstrations"--ones fully vetted and organized by the SCLC--"will not be violent."

What had happened in Memphis the previous day was disappointing and even tragic, he said, but he had not lost faith. The philosophy of nonviolence was still the only hope for America and the world--it was, in fact, the only alternative to human annihilation. "Nonviolence can be as contagious as violence," he insisted, and that was something he aimed to prove next month during the Poor People's Campaign on the Mall. "We are fully determined," he vowed, "to go to Washington."

After the reporters dispersed, King turned to Abernathy and Lee, relieved that the ordeal had gone as well as it had. "It was perhaps his finest performance
²⁵⁸
with the press," Abernathy thought. Lee said that King "must be called
²⁵⁹
to do what he is doing--he could not have changed as he did in one night if God had not put His hands on him."

Yet King's thoughts were already somewhere else. "Can you do something for me, Ralph?" King asked.

"What's that?"

"Can you get me out of Memphis?"
²⁶⁰

WHEN THEIR PLANE arrived in Atlanta early that night, Abernathy retrieved his car at the airport and dropped King off at the Butler Street YMCA.
²⁶¹
King hoped a steam bath and a rubdown from his blind masseur would lift his spirits.

Afterward, King, Abernathy, and their wives had a somber dinner at the Abernathy house.
²⁶²
Juanita Abernathy cooked fish and a special casserole she prepared only once a year--a concoction made from pig's ears, pig's feet, and pig's tail. Following the heavy meal, they lounged around the house. Coretta and the Abernathys tried to cheer King up, to little effect. He was still licking his wounds.

He talked about going on a fast, as Gandhi had done, to purify the movement. He talked about the old times in Montgomery, dredging up names long forgotten and reliving youthful triumphs from the halcyon days of the struggle. He tried to snooze on a love seat in the Abernathy family room, gently grousing that the chair was too small.

IN BIRMINGHAM the next morning, Eric Galt returned to Aeromarine
²⁶³
Supply Company as the doors opened at 9:00. Don Wood waited on him. Something about this customer didn't seem right, and Wood wanted to oversee every aspect of the transaction. He quickly deduced, as John DeShazo had, that Galt knew little about rifles--and even less about deer hunting.

Galt told Wood he'd like to look at the Remington Gamemaster 760 .30-06-caliber rifle. Wood took it down from the rack, and Galt immediately liked the look and feel of it. It was a pump-action rifle, "the fastest hand-operated big game rifle made," according to the Remington literature.

As Galt handled the Gamemaster, Wood asked him, "What you need that one for? That .243 there will kill anything in Alabama."

"Well, see, I'm going to hunt in Wisconsin," Galt replied.

The implication was that the bucks were bigger up that way, so he needed a rifle that could fire bigger ammo. Certainly the .30-06 version of the Gamemaster 760 fit the bill. It had prodigious amounts of "knockdown power," enough to kill anything in Alabama and Wisconsin, too. The ammunition the Gamemaster fired had real heft--it weighed twice as much as the .243-caliber round Galt had purchased the day before.

Galt asked some technical questions about the velocities and trajectories of various rounds. Wood recommended the Remington-Peters .30-06 soft-pointed Springfield High Velocity Core-Lokt cartridge--150 grain--which he noted would travel 2,670 feet per second. Mushrooming on impact, the bullet would bring down the biggest buck on earth at three hundred yards. At one hundred yards, it was said to be capable of stopping a charging rhinoceros. And it was astonishingly accurate, Wood said: for a target standing a hundred yards away, the bullet would drop only one-hundredth of an inch.

The rifle's pump-action feature especially appealed to Galt. It would allow him to keep his finger poised on the trigger and his eye fixed on the sight while smoothly pumping the rifle's slide mechanism to reload. As the Remington brochure put it, "The pump-action aids
²⁶⁴
the shooter in staying on-target during second- and third-shot situations ... helping you to put that buck in the freezer."

Galt said he'd take it, even though the Gamemaster .30-06 cost a little more than the .243. For a scope, Galt decided on a Redfield 2x7. Wood asked Galt to give him a few hours to mount the scope, and Galt took off. Wood mounted it himself, setting it to 7x, the maximum magnification--so a deer viewed through the Redfield's crosshairs would appear seven times closer than it was. The Redfield company boasted that its 2x7 offered a "wide enough field of view
²⁶⁵
for tracking moving animals [but] good compromise power for varminting." Another nice feature was the magnesium fluoride film coating on the scope's lens, which enabled a shooter to see his target in low-light situations--even at late dusk.

The only problem with the scope was that, once mounted, its high profile prevented the Gamemaster from fitting into its original box. At three o'clock, when Galt returned, Wood suggested that he might want to buy a nice leather gun case, but Galt didn't want to spend any more money. So Wood improvised a solution: he rummaged around in the back of the store and found an old box for a Browning rifle, which was slightly bigger than the Gamemaster box. Wood stuffed the scope-mounted rifle into the carton--it just fit--and secured the slightly cumbersome assemblage with Scotch tape.

Pleased enough with the jury-rigged packaging, Galt selected a twenty-round box of the Remington-Peters .30-06 cartridges and told Wood he was ready to settle up. He took out his wallet and completed the exchange, paying the difference from the previous day's purchase in cash.

Again, Galt gave his name as "Harvey Lowmeyer" with a Birmingham address. Wood did not ask his customers to show identification--nor was he required by any law to do so. Galt smiled awkwardly, picked up the package, and turned toward the door.

17
TO LIVE OR DIE IN MEMPHIS

THAT SAME MORNING, in Atlanta, King held an emergency meeting of his SCLC executive staff to discuss what to do about Memphis. The all-day conclave was held in a paneled conference room on the third floor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue. Key advisers had flown in from all over the country: Chauncey Eskridge, one of King's legal counselors, came in from Chicago; Stanley Levison, from New York; Walter Fauntroy, from Washington; a labor delegation from Memphis. All King's regular staff was there, too: Andrew Young, James Bevel, Dorothy Cotton, Hosea Williams, James Orange, Jesse Jackson, and, of course, Abernathy.

All through the morning, King sat at a cramped Sunday-school desk, a creaky affair with a tiny wooden writing surface attached by a slender arm. He listened quietly to his staffers as they deconstructed the disaster in Memphis. They bickered and hurled accusations and named names. They agreed on little--except that Memphis was a catastrophe, and that under no circumstances should King go back to that troubled river town. The situation in Memphis, said one adviser, "was a set up,"
²⁶⁶
possibly orchestrated by the FBI to ruin King once and for all. It was a detour, a dangerous left turn. And it was a drain on resources that the SCLC did not have.

King listened to the dissension with growing agitation and distress. More painful to him was that many members of his staff clearly were not on board with the Poor People's Campaign. The Washington project, they said, was too ambitious, too logistically complicated, too diffuse in its goals. King held his tongue as staff members put forward their own ideas about what they should be doing. Jim Bevel wanted to concentrate on the Vietnam War. Jesse Jackson thought grassroots economic initiatives like the one he headed up in Chicago--called Operation Breadbasket--were the most promising use of the SCLC's time and energy. Hosea Williams said the real secret to gaining power was voter registration drives to elect leaders sympathetic to their cause.

After a while the discussion became a blur to King. His young staffers were headstrong. They were growing restless and wanted to take the movement in their own directions. Some of them thought they were smarter than King--and that he'd lost his touch.

Slowly, King rose from his Sunday-school desk and vented his feelings. "We are in serious trouble,"
²⁶⁷
he said. "The whole movement is doomed." Couldn't they see? It wasn't about Memphis anymore, or even Washington. It wasn't about the fine points of protest strategy. It was about the very foundation of nonviolence itself. Their flame was in danger of flickering out. Everything they'd worked for since Montgomery was on the line. Forget Washington. They couldn't even think about going there until they had proved to the nation that they could bring off a nonviolent march and redeem their mistakes and reestablish the primacy of their central creed.