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

Hosea Williams, Chauncey Eskridge, Bernard Lee, and Dorothy Cotton, as well as Young and Abernathy. A South African filmmaker named Joseph Louw, working on a PBS documentary about the Poor People's Campaign, was also staying in the motel, as was a black New York Times reporter named Earl Caldwell. A few rooms had been reserved for the Invaders, with whom King's staff was intensely negotiating. Then, too, King was expecting the arrival of his younger brother, A. D. King, who was a minister in Louisville, Kentucky. AD had been on a road trip with his girlfriend, Lucretia Ward, in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. They were driving her baby blue Cadillac convertible, and were bringing along a young black state senator from Louisville named Georgia Davis, one of Martin Luther King's mistresses. They were supposed to arrive late that night.

Now a cameraman from Channel 5, the NBC affiliate in Memphis, took a shot of the SCLC entourage standing on the balcony, in front of 306, the brass numerals gleaming in the sun. King was set up in his familiar digs--if not in his favorite city, at least in his favorite room at his favorite hotel, with his staff and closest confidants around him. Whatever might happen in Memphis that week, his world was in place at the Lorraine.

SHORTLY AFTER LUNCH, King and much of the staff took off in a convoy for the Reverend James Lawson's Centenary United Methodist Church to discuss strategies for the coming march. There King learned that the City of Memphis had succeeded late that morning in obtaining a federal injunction effectively preventing him from staging any demonstration for the next ten days. Among the many arguments raised by the city attorney, Frank Gianotti, was the legitimate worry that King could be in mortal danger should he lead another march down Beale Street. 'We are fearful,'²⁹³ Gianotti said in U.S. District Court, 'that in the turmoil of the moment someone may harm King's life, and with all the force of language we can use we want to emphasize that we don't want that to happen.'

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 silent²⁹⁴ 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 stopped²⁹⁵ 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 thoughts²⁹⁸ 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 lot³⁰² 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.