Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (24 page)

Despite the city's profession of concern for his safety, King was dejected by this new obstacle. Over the course of his career he had violated many local injunctions, but never a
federal
one, and he was uncertain how to respond. "Martin fell silent
²⁹⁴
again," Abernathy recalled. "Nothing was going right in this town."

Soon reporters found King and pressed him for a response to this latest development. King put on a game face. "Well," he said, "we are not going to be stopped
²⁹⁵
by Mace
or
injunctions. We stand on the First Amendment. In the past, on the basis of conscience, we have had to break injunctions and if necessary we may do it in Memphis. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

King returned to the Lorraine at 2:30 that afternoon, only to be met by federal marshals, who served him with a formal copy of the injunction. King accepted the documents good-naturedly--he even laughed before the cameras, as though to suggest that no mere piece of paper could stop the movement now.

The ACLU, meanwhile, had found King a good Memphis attorney to help him fight the injunction, and within an hour he showed up at the Lorraine to introduce himself. His name was Lucius Burch,
²⁹⁶
an irascible white liberal in a conservative town who had always come down on the progressive side of the race question. Burch lived in an antebellum mansion in the country east of Memphis, flew his own plane to work, and had by some miracle survived several aviation crashes. He was frequently away on hunting trips, diving adventures, and horse-packing sojourns in the mountains, and he had a house in Ireland to which he often retreated. Burch, Porter & Johnson was considered the preeminent law firm in Memphis. Burch had a reputation for being brilliant, literary, cocky, and touched with a certain incorrigible style of persuasion, in and out of the courtroom.

Flanked by two junior attorneys from his firm, Burch sat across the bed from King in room 306 and interrogated him. "Dr. King,
²⁹⁷
I'm going to get right to the point. I need to know how important this march is to you and your movement. I need to know, fundamentally, what it
means
to you." Burch had never met King, and wanted to make sure that he and his group "were what they purported to be."

King was taken aback by Burch's directness, but he liked him from the start. "It's simple," King answered. "My whole future depends on it. The tenets of non-violent protest are on the line."

Andy Young stepped in to add that the proposed march was exactly what it was represented to be: the constitutional right of people to express by assembly and petition what they felt was a just grievance. The strike was now in its fifty-second day, and unless they could successfully stage this "Redemption March," as it was being called, there was little hope of a peaceful resolution.

After drawing King out a little more, Burch recalled, "I had no second thoughts
²⁹⁸
or looking back. The white community didn't realize that Martin Luther King was the answer to the firebombing and he was the answer to the looting and he was the answer to Black Power. He was the best friend they ever had."

Lucius Burch would fight the injunction tooth and nail, and he would push for a modified march--disciplined, heavily self-policed by marshals, devoid of placards that could serve as weapons, and assembled in tight formations, four abreast, from start to finish. Burch took off for his office on Court Square, where he would spend all night working on arguments to present in court the following morning.

TRUE TO THEIR assignment, the plainclothes officers Edward Redditt and Willie Richmond had been watching King all day. From the airport, to the Lorraine, to Lawson's church, then back to the Lorraine again, they had stayed on King's tail, taking note of all comings and goings, copying license plate numbers, trying to identify all persons with whom he came in contact.

Now they were inside Fire Station No. 2, a new firehouse of white brick and glass just across Mulberry Street from the Lorraine. Here they had set up a semipermanent spy nest so they could keep an eye on doings around the motel. They cut viewing slits into a few sheets of newspaper, which they taped to a window panel in the locker room's rear door. Then, holding up binoculars,
²⁹⁹
they took turns watching all afternoon and into the early evening. They saw the federal marshals, they saw Lucius Burch arrive, they saw the Invaders coming and going. They saw members of King's staff walking along the balcony, going on ice runs, holding what appeared to be brown bags of liquor.

It was growing dark outside, unnaturally dark for six o'clock, making it harder for Redditt and Richmond to see anything. The forecasted storm was sailing in from the west, and now the wind was whining through the power lines and driving rain sideways. They could hear the wail of the Civil Air Defense sirens. A tornado had been spotted in Arkansas, another one in Tennessee, twenty miles north of the city.

At 6:30 police headquarters radioed Redditt and Richmond and told them to head to Mason Temple, where King was supposed to speak at a rally that night. They needed to get there early and secure good seats.

When they arrived at the cavernous Mason Temple around 7:00 p.m., the rain was pounding on the roof and the wind howled. The foul weather was taking a toll on attendance--fewer than a thousand people were listening to Lawson, the first in a roster of speakers that was supposed to crescendo with King, around nine o'clock.

Not long after Redditt and Richmond arrived, a black minister walked over and whispered to them that they had better leave--whatever cover the officers thought they had was blown. "This is the wrong place for you,"
³⁰⁰
the minister said. "The tension of the young people is already high." Word was out that Redditt had been using binoculars to spy on King from the fire station behind the Lorraine--apparently some black firemen working at Fire Station No. 2 had ratted on them. Now some of the young militants were growing agitated. "People started looking at us,"
³⁰¹
Richmond later recalled, "and they knew we were policemen. We thought it was best to leave so there wouldn't be any trouble."

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 lot
³⁰²
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 Schlitz
³⁰⁴
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."