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

crowd. In fact, he probably wasn't even inside city hall. He had been up all night, negotiating with strike representatives, prodded along by Undersecretary of Labor James Reynolds, whom President Johnson had personally dispatched from Washington to serve as an envoy. The talks had dragged on until 6:00 a.m., but the city still had not reached a resolution. The sour garbage would keep piling up on the curbsides, filling the streets with rank odors, growing happy rats.

King's death in defense of garbage workers made a certain kind of metaphorical sense, especially to the clergymen in the audience, several of whom pointed out a deep biblical irony: Jesus Christ was crucified between two thieves, upon a mound of trash.

Now labor leaders, one after another, came to the stage and fulminated. The Memphis strike had clearly become a cause celebre not just for municipal workers but indeed for all labor organizations around the country: the AFL-CIO, the UAW, the UFWA, the USWA, the IUE--all had representatives on the stage. The whole scene was a white Southern businessman's worst nightmare: Reds encamped at city hall!

AFSCME's Jerry Wurf, who'd been up all night with Loeb in the negotiations, vowed: 'Until we have justice⁵⁶⁷ and decency and morality, we will not go back to work.' But it was the legendary Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers who got lathered up into a fever pitch. 'Mayor Loeb,' he said, 'will somehow be dragged⁵⁶⁸ into the 20th Century!'

All this feisty union talk resonated with many in the audience, but Memphis was not a labor town--neither by tradition nor by style--so much of it soon fell on deaf ears. Besides, the person the crowds had really come to see was Coretta Scott King. Finally, after several hours, she obliged them. Introduced by Belafonte, she rose and addressed the crowd in a calm and level voice, keeping her remarks personal. She spoke of her love for her husband, and of his love for their children. She spoke of the brevity of life. 'It's not the quantity⁵⁶⁹ of time that's important, but the quality,' she said. She sounded only one bitter note when she raised the question: 'How many men must die before we can have a free and true and peaceful society? How long will it take?'

Her composure was almost otherworldly. Out in the audience, people were weeping uncontrollably, but her voice never cracked. 'If Mrs. King had cried⁵⁷⁰ a single tear,' said one woman in the crowd, 'this whole city would have give way.'

Her time in Memphis had inspired her, Coretta King declared. The movement would go on; she had not lost faith. 'When Good Friday⁵⁷¹ comes, these are the moments in life when we feel there's no hope.' She looked over at her children and said with a faint smile: 'But then, Easter comes.'

THAT EVENING, WHILE Coretta King was returning to Atlanta, the FBI agents Neil Shanahan and William Saucier⁵⁷² pulled up to 2608 Highland Avenue in Birmingham. 'Economy Rooms,' the little sign said out front. The two agents rapped on the door of the large pale gray two-story stucco rooming house located in the foothills of Birmingham, not far from the famed colossus of Vulcan, whose deformed physique lorded over the steel city of the South. Peter Cherpes, the Greek-American who ran Economy Rooms, came to the door. Shanahan and Saucier explained that they were with the FBI and that they were looking for a man named Eric Galt who was supposed to be living there. The Birmingham field office had gotten both the name and the Highland address from an urgent report that the Memphis agents Darlington and Bauer had filed earlier in the day.

'Eric Galt,' Cherpes repeated. His mind sifted and turned. Yes, he remembered an Eric Galt. He had been a tenant at the Economy Rooms for about six weeks last year. The seventy-two-year-old Cherpes shuffled back to retrieve his three-by-five index registration cards, but they were in disarray, and he was unable to locate Galt's information.

Still, Cherpes was happy to tell the agents what he knew. Galt had stayed in room 14. He'd shown up sometime in the summer of last year--a quiet sort of guy, neatly dressed, usually wore a suit and tie. He said he was 'on vacation,' cooling it between jobs. He'd previously been down in Pascagoula, Mississippi, working for a company that manufactured big boats. 'You couldn't imagine a nicer guy to have around,' Cherpes said. 'Paid the rent on time. Usually turned in early, didn't go out much. He never had telephone calls or visitors.' Cherpes didn't remember Galt befriending any of the other roomers. He had a way of keeping off to himself, aloof. Another boarder at Cherpes's establishment, a twenty-six-year-old man named Charles Jack Davis, had this to say about Galt: 'I don't guess there's any such thing as a 'typical person,' but my memory of him is so dim.'

In the mornings, Cherpes recalled, Galt would show up right at the end of the breakfast hour, when all the other guests had left. At night, Galt spent a lot of time in the rooming house lounge, watching television.

Did he have a car? Agent Saucier asked.

Cherpes thought for a second. Yes, matter of fact, Galt did drive a car. He couldn't remember the make, but Cherpes recalled with some conviction that it was a white car of some kind. Galt checked out sometime in November, and he'd never returned. 'I've gotten a couple pieces of mail for him since he left,' Cherpes said. 'I just sent them all back to the postman.'

Did Galt say where he was going?

'Down to Mobile, or someplace like that. Said he'd gotten a job on a boat.'

36 THE MAN FURTHEST DOWN

FOR THREE AND A HALF miles,⁵⁷³ the mourners crept through the azalea-bright streets of Atlanta. Under cloudless skies, a crowd of more than 150,000 tromped from Ebenezer Baptist Church toward Morehouse College, past Auburn Avenue, past downtown, past the gold-domed capitol, where Governor Lester Maddox, an ardent segregationist, was holed up with phalanxes of helmeted state troopers. Occasionally, the governor, who a few days earlier had suggested that King arranged⁵⁷⁴ his own murder, would part the blinds and stare disgustedly at the passing parade.

At the head of the procession, a cross of white chrysanthemums was carried along, and just behind it a team of Georgia farm mules pulled an old wooden wagon bearing the casket of polished African mahogany. King's lieutenants walked with the mule skinners--Abernathy and Lee, Bevel and Orange, Williams and Young--wearing blue denim to symbolize the hard rural folk at the heart of the coming Poor People's Campaign. It was April 9, 1968 --Tuesday morning, one day after the silent march in Memphis and five days after the assassination.

Spectators watched from curbsides, from rooftops, from front porches, from the plate-glass windows of small businesses along the route. The best view, however, was probably on national television. All three networks were covering the funeral live, and more than 120 million people were said to be watching around the world. Half of America had taken leave from work; not just government offices and schools and unions and banks, but even the New York Stock Exchange had called the day off, the first time in history that Wall Street had so recognized a private citizen's death. Roulette wheels in Las Vegas would take a two-hour rest.

'Black Tuesday,' people all over the country were calling this day of lamentations. April 9 was already a date etched into the national consciousness, a date fraught with racial overtones; it was, after all, the anniversary of Appomattox. A movement was now building to declare a permanent national holiday in King's name, and other ideas were floated to rename parks, office buildings, highways, and whole neighborhoods after the martyred leader. (California politicians, for example, proposed rechristening the riot-scarred Watts section of Los Angeles as 'Kingtown.')

In many senses, the ceremony in Atlanta was the equivalent of a head-of-state funeral. Scores of chartered planes, and hundreds of chartered buses, had come to Georgia--disgorging every kind of commoner and every kind of royal. Several hundred garbage workers from Memphis were on hand, but also Rockefellers and Kennedys. Among the dignitaries in the swarming crowds were six presidential contenders, forty-seven U.S. congressmen, twenty-three U.S. senators, a Supreme Court justice, and official delegations from scores of foreign countries. Hollywood turned out in full force as well--Marlon Brando was there, and Paul Newman, and Charlton Heston, and any number of directors and producers. One could also spot a fair cross section from the upper registers of black sports and entertainment--Aretha Franklin, Jackie Robinson, Mahalia Jackson, Sammy Davis Jr., Jim Brown, Stevie Wonder, Floyd Patterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Diana Ross, Ray Charles, Belafonte, Poitier. Towering a foot or more above everyone else, wearing dark black shades that did nothing to camouflage his well-known visage, was Wilt