Hellhound on His Trail

by Hampton Sides

  Before the crowds were admitted, Abernathy and others from the SCLC inner circle lingered a few minutes with their leader. "We all wanted to be there,"501 Andrew Young wrote. "Even though we all knew that we, the living, must move on with our lives, with our movement, we wanted to be near Martin for as long as we possibly could."

  Then the doors opened, and the long, solemn line of visitors shuffled through. They were an eclectic mix of humanity--"from company presidents to field hands," one newspaper reporter put it. Photographers from around the world snapped pictures. When a woman kissed King's right cheek, Clarence Lewis grew concerned. "It will spoil the makeup job,"502 he said. Many of the mourners were garbage workers and their families, who, as they peered into the still face of the martyr, were touched both by sadness and guilt, a feeling that he had died for them. They leaned over, they spoke to King, they touched his face, and they wept.

  "I wish it was Henry Loeb503 lying there," one woman said.

  "Why'd this happen to you,504 Dr. King?" said another, leaning into the coffin. "What are we going to do now?"

  For several hours, people marched through the funeral home. They moaned and wailed and prayed and sang. Abernathy said, "The Lord is my light and my salvation." Billy Kyles said, "I am the resurrection and the life." The cameras kept flashing.

  Finally the lid was lowered, and the coffin was placed in the back of the long limousine. When Abernathy shut the hearse doors, he placed his hand on the glass and said, "Long live the King."

  A two-mile procession of cars followed the hearse as it crept through the city streets and then motored out to the Memphis Metropolitan Airport, escorted by National Guardsmen and police. The convoy turned toward the tarmac, where an Electra four-engine prop jet had just landed, a plane that had been provided to the King family by Senator Robert Kennedy. The aircraft's hatch door was open. Standing at the lip, hatless, wearing a black dress and black gloves and staring out over the approaching motorcade with a queenly rectitude, was Coretta Scott King.

  32 ONE MAN ON THE RUN

  RAMSEY CLARK AND Cartha DeLoach spent most of the morning making the rounds in Memphis. They dropped by the local FBI office to bolster the morale of Jensen's already beleaguered cadre of field agents. They paid a visit to the U.S. attorney's office, to reassure prosecutors that the FBI would work hand in glove with them to build a successful case against King's assailant, if and when he was caught. Then they met with some of the top National Guard officers. Clark told the commanders they were doing a fine job but urged them not to use excessive force. He was particularly troubled by the use of tanks. "I thought it was a provocation,"505 Clark said, "and it was also a kind of sorry sign as to what kind of country we are. I mean, what's around here that calls for tanks?"

  Clark's entourage quickly moved on to city hall for a meeting with Mayor Henry Loeb. Outside the building, some of the garbage strikers were marching with their I AM A MAN signs. Clark was clearly moved by the succinct clarity of the slogan. "What a message that was,"506 he later said. "It was one of the most imaginative demonstrations and one of the most powerful symbols that came out of the civil rights movement." The Justice Department official Roger Wilkins was similarly touched by the sight of the garbage workers, solemnly parading on the morning after King's assassination: "To see these men507 walking in a very orderly fashion, asserting, 'I should be treated as a human being'--you couldn't not be moved by that. I stood there with tears rolling from my eyes."

  Clark and Wilkins strode inside the white marble halls for their visit with Mayor Loeb, which went nowhere. Wilkins described Loeb as "gracious in a Southern kind of way,508 but staunch as a brick wall." Clark tried to persuade Loeb to do whatever it took to resolve the strike--it was not only in the city's best interests but in the nation's as well. Loeb dug in his heels even as he lavished his Washington visitors with hospitality. "We did not move him one inch," recalled Wilkins, "and he did not have one inch of sympathy for these men who were out there pacing around the building."

  Finally, Clark and DeLoach met with Fire and Police Director Frank Holloman, in his smoke-filled office. Holloman had some bad news. The enticing "John Willard" lead his detectives were bird-dogging that morning had already dried up. This particular John Willard, it turned out, had an airtight alibi: he was still in jail.

  Clark and DeLoach tried to brighten the mood by sharing some of the positive information they'd gleaned from FBI headquarters that morning: that the murder weapon had already been traced to Birmingham, where agents had obtained a good physical description of the buyer; that analysts in the fingerprint unit had lifted several high-quality latent prints they were now comparing with the prints of known fugitives; that right here in Memphis, Jensen's men had interviewed the York Arms clerk who had sold the binoculars to the man in 5B. Jensen, meanwhile, had hired an artist to interview witnesses at Bessie Brewer's and Canipe's to prepare a preliminary sketch of "John Willard." All in all, they were making brisk progress, DeLoach thought. It was only a matter of time before they'd catch the killer.

  But Director Holloman remained surly. The stress King's assassination was putting on his already overstrained department showed on his pale and furrowed face. He'd been up all night and was now so wired on nicotine and coffee that he could scarcely complete a thought. He kept running his fingers through his strands of gray hair. "He was just about out on his feet,"509 said an aide. "He was whipped and numb."

  Holloman deeply resented the rumors circulating around the city, and the nation, that his department was somehow involved in King's murder--rumors intensified by the public knowledge that Holloman had once worked directly for Hoover at the FBI headquarters in Washington. Clark and DeLoach assured him the federal government had no such suspicions, but the accusation clearly stung--and would continue to trouble him the rest of his life. "I had not a scintilla510 or an iota of a desire to see any harm come to Dr. King," Holloman testified in Washington years later. "One of the greatest disappointments in my life has been that Dr. King was assassinated and that he was assassinated in Memphis."

  Holloman apprised Clark and DeLoach of other developments around the city--that night's curfew plans, preparations for Abernathy's "silent march" down Beale, the various leads his own department was pursuing. He mentioned that Memphis's two daily Scripps Howard newspapers had offered a combined reward of fifty thousand dollars for information leading to the killer's arrest, and that the Memphis City Council had responded by putting up another fifty thousand dollars. Holloman was mildly optimistic that a hundred grand would produce a raft of new leads, but he also knew that posted rewards of this sort have a way of bringing out the nutcases and cranks.

  CLARK BROKE UP his mid-morning meeting with Holloman to call a press conference. More than a hundred journalists and film crews from around the world--including Sweden, Australia, Yugoslavia, and Japan--gathered in a nondescript federal suite downtown to hear the attorney general's delicately worded remarks. "All of our evidence511 at this time," Clark said, "indicates that it was a single person who committed this criminal act."

  He was not free to divulge any details lest he jeopardize the ongoing investigations. But he wanted to assure the nation that investigators had already compiled a considerable amount of evidence, and that every effort was being made to catch the killer. The dragnet, he said, extended well beyond Memphis. "It has already spread several hundred miles from the boundaries of Tennessee now." Investigators were working on several names, some of which might be aliases, and they were hunting for a white Mustang. "We have a name we're working on. Whether it is the right name we'll have to see. We're very hopeful. We've got some good breaks." He said he hoped to have an early conclusion to the investigation, followed by an indictment, trial, and conviction.

  "We are getting close--we've got one man on the run," Clark confidently announced. But as the nation's highest law-enforcement official, he was worried about violence erupting around the country. He advised the nation's mayors, governors, and police
chiefs that "either overreaction or under-action can lead to rioting. You have to exercise a very careful control."

  Throughout his remarks, Clark was repeatedly interrupted by militants from the Invaders and other groups. Some were suspicious of Clark's quick pronouncement that no conspiracy was involved in the shooting. How could he possibly know this already? Their criticisms quickly devolved into shouting and incendiary diatribes for the benefit of the cameras. When Clark left the room, he was livid. "A lot of phonies," he vented to DeLoach. "They'll just make things worse."

  Clark soon received word that Coretta King's plane had arrived, so he and DeLoach made for the airport. When they got there, the bronze casket was being loaded onto the rear of the Electra prop jet, by means of a hydraulic conveyor belt ramp. Clark and Roger Wilkins climbed on board to greet Mrs. King, A. D. King, Abernathy, and the others gathered sorrowfully on the plane. DeLoach lingered on the tarmac. "In view of Mr. Hoover's512 longtime feud with her husband," he said, "I thought she might resent my coming"--probably a prudent assessment on his part.

  On board, Clark offered his deepest sympathy, both on his own behalf and on that of the government. Wilkins thought Coretta was "courageous and calm513 and gracious" as she received them. "People were crying--it was all very hard. But Coretta was simply regal." Farther back in the cabin, A. D. King was having a rough time. To Wilkins, he looked like "a bloated and faded version514 of Martin--it was said AD drank too much."

  Outside, in the bright humidity of the forenoon, DeLoach awkwardly sidled up to Andy Young, who was standing on the hot pavement. Over the whine of jet engines, DeLoach tried to express his condolences. "We'll do everything we can,"515 he told Young. "I'm sure we'll get him."

  Young nodded blankly. Exhausted and grieving, he was, at that moment, emphatically uninterested in exchanging pleasantries with any FBI official--especially DeLoach, who Young knew was complicit in many of the dirty tricks the FBI had pulled on King over the years. DeLoach thought Young was "somewhere else," which was true enough. Finding and punishing the assassin were surprisingly low in the SCLC's scheme of priorities. Young felt that carrying on King's work was a far more important task than fixating on the crime itself, or on legal retribution. Throughout the movement, King had seldom vilified individuals--even Bull Connor or George Wallace; instead he'd tried to focus on engaging the larger social forces at work in any given situation. This same strain of transcendent "love-your-enemies" thinking guided Young, Abernathy, and the others as they began to contemplate their leader's death. As Young put it, "We aren't so much concerned516 with who killed Martin, as with what killed him."

  It was the kind of sentiment that mystified a G-man like DeLoach.

  In a few minutes, Ramsey Clark stepped off the plane and rejoined DeLoach on the tarmac. Coretta never left the plane; she had no interest in putting a toe on Memphis soil. Amazingly, no city official--neither Mayor Loeb, nor Director Holloman, nor a single city councilman, black or white--had come to greet her at the airport. She had flown here for one errand only: to claim her husband's body and get home.

  Now the Electra's hatch doors heaved shut, and the plane taxied and climbed into the bright hazy skies, banking southeast toward Atlanta. Along the runway, several hundred mourners, some with fists held high, bade their farewell to Martin Luther King. Some tried to sing a stanza of "We Shall Overcome," but the spirit wasn't there, and the song soon withered into silence.

  AT THE CAPITOL HOMES project in Atlanta, the white Mustang sat parked all day, its windshield beaded with rain--the car that held hard clues and hidden imprimaturs that might lead to the identity, if not the whereabouts, of Martin Luther King's killer. Mary Bridges and her daughter Wanda weren't the only ones who had seen the mystery car pull in to the parking lot that morning. A few buildings away, Mrs. Lucy Cayton had been standing on her front stoop with a broom in her hands, when she saw the driver emerge from the Mustang. "He was nice looking," she thought. "That's why I stood with my broom and watched."

  Several doors down, Mrs. Ernest Payne had also gotten a glimpse of the man who parked the Mustang that morning, had watched him step out and "fool with the car door" before heading off toward Memorial Drive. He wore a dark suit and carried what she thought was a "little black book" under his arm.

  Mrs. John Riley lived in a unit just across the parking lot from the Mustang. She too had spotted the car but didn't pay much attention to it. But her thirteen-year-old son, Johnny, a car buff, feasted his eyes on it as soon as he got home from school. He noticed the Alabama tag, the rust red mud inside the car, and the two stickers in the window that said, "Turista." The teenager observed that the Mustang, unlike every other car in the Capitol Homes lot, was backed into its parking space; he could only surmise that the guy who left it didn't want passersby to readily spot the out-of-state tag.

  Mrs. Riley sat in her kitchen, visiting with a few neighbors over coffee. They got to talking about the assassination and the riots. One neighbor said she'd heard the authorities were looking for a white Mustang.

  Mrs. Riley tittered and pointed out the window. "Why," she said, "it's sitting right out there517 in the parking lot." Everyone laughed a nervous laugh--a laugh that said, Wouldn't that be something?--and then the ladies resumed their klatch without another thought.

  33 1812 REDUX

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, in Washington, President Johnson was taking a late lunch in the White House with the Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas and several advisers. The King assassination had taken a toll on everyone at the White House, and President Johnson looked haggard as he sat down at the table in the White House residence. He'd already had a long and exhausting Friday. After attending a King memorial service at the National Cathedral, he'd spent most of the day in the Cabinet Room meeting with a conclave of the nation's most prominent black leaders--among them Justice Thurgood Marshall, the great civil rights stalwart Bayard Rustin, the D.C. minister Walter Fauntroy, and the heads of the established civil rights organizations. Johnson had invited Martin Luther King Sr. to the meeting as well, but the minister was too racked with grief to contemplate such a trip. He did send a telegram, which Johnson read aloud to the assembled group. "Please know," King said, "that I join you518 in your plea to American citizens to desist from violence so that the cause for which my son died will not be in vain."

  Moved nearly to tears, Johnson looked up from the telegram and spoke off the cuff. "If I were a kid in Harlem,"519 he said, "I know what I'd be thinking. I'd be thinking that whites had declared open season on my people--that they're going to pick us off one by one unless I get a gun and pick them off first."

  After a few hours, the solemn and awkward meeting broke up with promises of goodwill but no hard-and-fast resolutions. With some of the black leaders around him, Johnson made a brief statement on national television. "Violence," he said, "must be denied its victory."

  Now ravenous, Johnson tried to steal a few minutes to grab a bite. He bowed his head with the others at the table and said a perfunctory but heartfelt grace: "Help us, Lord,520 to know what to do."

  Justice Abe Fortas, who, oddly enough, was born and raised in Memphis, talked to the president for a while about the search for King's killer, but the main topic of conversation was the fragile state of security in the nation's capital. Through much of the day, troubling reports from the White House message center had been piling up, rumors that a full-scale riot was being planned for the streets of downtown Washington. The word flowing into the White House was that the previous night's disturbances were mere child's play; tonight, the whole city was going to blow.

  Though the morning had started off peacefully enough, by midday the feel on the streets had begun to change. Following a viral logic, the city descended into fear and then hysteria. The rhetoric turned ugly. Stokely Carmichael had been outdoing himself, feeding the press outlandish calls to violence--at one point urging Washington blacks to "take as many white people521 with them as possible." All whites, he insisted, were complici
t in King's death: "The honky, from honky Lyndon Johnson to honky Bobby Kennedy, will not co-opt King. Bobby Kennedy pulled that trigger just as well as anybody else."

  Through the early afternoon, the feverish rumors grew. Black store owners began to cover their plate-glass windows with plywood and scrawled entrances with the words SOUL BROTHER in hopeful attempts to differentiate their businesses from white-owned stores--the mercantile equivalent of Israelites smearing their door frames with lamb's blood.

  Finally, as though belatedly reading the path of a glowering storm, people panicked. The large department stores downtown discreetly began to close up, removing merchandise from windows. Hundreds and then thousands simply got up and left their places of work, yanked their kids from school, and began to walk, then run down the streets, hurrying to bus stops and train stations and the Potomac River bridges. Idling in clogged traffic, frightened motorists abandoned their cars on the streets and took off on foot. It looked like a Hollywood disaster film--as Washingtonians, black and white, evacuated the District en masse.