Hellhound on His Trail

  Galt's new neighborhood in midtown cut against the city's conventional grain, however; it was a shaggy precinct of head shops and pawnshops, street buskers and panhandlers, co-op houses and record stores, with the first strains of what would become known as Southern rock seeping from the late-night bars along Peachtree. Not that Galt was interested in any of this; he couldn't stand "longhairs," as he called hippies, or their music--and he especially detested their protest politics, one of the constant subjects of George Wallace's ridicule. Except for illicit drugs, which Galt both sold and used, the ways of the counterculture were foreign to him--and antithetical to everything Wallace preached.

  Still, Galt felt at home in this part of town, with its familiar undertow of petty criminality. It was a neighborhood, Galt wrote, where he "wouldn't have to answer222 too many questions." He might have looked like a square with his alligator loafers and his nicely laundered dark suit, but he was a canny hustler who knew how to live on these streets. Here, he could beg, borrow, or steal what he needed, watch his pennies, and lie low as long as circumstances required.

  He eased the Mustang into the gravel parking area and walked through the weedy lot to the rooming house, where vines of brown ivy clung lifelessly to the cheap asbestos siding. For a buck fifty a night, he rented a forlorn little room with a marshmallowy bed, a stained washbasin, and a tiny dresser marred with dents and scratches. The room, number 2, was on the first floor, its windows slatted with metal venetian blinds.

  Galt coughed up enough money for a week's rent--a grand total of $10.50. He hauled in his portable Zenith, his transistor radio, and his clothes--as always, tidy and clean--and set up housekeeping among the filth.

  The manager of the place, a wino from Mississippi named Jimmie Garner, was in the midst of a prolonged drunk. Because so many of his previous tenants had been scruffy squatters--"this place was just infested with hippies,"223 Garner later admitted--the landlord was duly impressed by the clean-cut Galt. He thought the well-dressed new roomer looked "like a preacher"224--adding that "there was nothing whatever about this man that was unusual." He was quiet and mannerly and didn't cause any trouble. Garner did notice that the guest was always alone, and not at all forthcoming about his circumstances.

  "What do you do for a living?" Garner asked him one day.

  "Jack of all trades--done some welding in the Carolinas," Galt replied with a curtness that conveyed an unwillingness to endure questioning. For the next four days, the guest came and went, sometimes on foot, sometimes in his Mustang. Mostly, though, he kept to his room, with the blinds drawn.

  What was Galt doing in camera for those four days and nights? If he was following his usual routine, he was reading the newspaper, watching TV, listening to his transistor radio, and subsisting on saltine crackers, tinned meats, and powdered soups. He also bought a can of Carnation milk, a bottle of French salad dressing, and a bag of frozen lima beans. He had his self-help books, including his beloved Psycho-Cybernetics. He was settling in for a long haul, it seemed, and the figures he jotted on an envelope indicated that he was growing short on cash.

  At some point he bought a detailed map of Atlanta and began studying it closely. He must have spent a considerable amount of time driving around town, checking specific locations that he circled on the map with a pencil. He was endeavoring to learn the lay of the land--or, as Galt later put it, "to bone up225 on Atlanta's street system."

  One of his circles marked226 the location of his rooming house. Two others were more ominous. Pencil in hand, he circled addresses on Sunset Avenue and Auburn Avenue: the residence and the church, respectively, of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

  15 "MARTIN LUTHER KING IS FINISHED"

  ON THE MORNING of Thursday, March 28, King boarded a flight at Newark, bound for Memphis. He'd spent several exhausting days in the New York area, drumming up support for his Poor People's Campaign, still determined to wage his "War on Sleep." He tried to catnap on the plane, but he couldn't.

  Perhaps he was worried about the Beale Street march, set to begin as soon as he touched down in Memphis. Or perhaps the unpleasantness of the previous night played in his head: After a fund-raiser at the apartment of Harry and Julie Belafonte, he'd ended up staying at the Manhattan home of Arthur and Marian Logan (she was a civil rights activist and a member of the SCLC board). There he'd fallen into an argument about the merits of the Poor People's Campaign that lasted for hours and turned sour. The Logans tried to convey their sincere doubts about his Washington project, but King would hear none of it. Downing glass after glass of sherry, he argued with his hosts until three in the morning. Marian Logan worried that he'd become unreasonable; he drank so much that he seemed to be "losing hold" of his faculties,227 she said. She'd never seen him so wound up before. She noticed that he gripped his glass with one hand and made a clenched fist with the other.

  As his plane sped across the country, King was bleary-eyed, restive, and a bit hungover. He was traveling with an aide, Bernard Lee, a young bespectacled Howard University graduate who'd helped lead the sit-in movement in Alabama and was now a devoted SCLC staffer. Abernathy was already in Memphis and would meet King and Lee at the airport. The plan was for King to stay no more than a few hours in Memphis. He would fulfill his vow to march with the striking garbage workers--and then fly straightaway to Washington to continue raising funds and solidifying support for his Poor People's Army. The march would be a mere whistle-stop.

  He worried about Memphis, but he knew that his old friend James Lawson was an ace at organizing these sorts of events, adept at training marshals and disciplining the marchers. A first-rate communicator and strategist, Lawson would take care of things. On King's visit to Memphis ten days earlier, the mood had seemed so right, so united and strong. The esprit de corps of the sanitation workers reminded King of the movement's early days, in Montgomery, Birmingham, and the March on Washington.

  The plane touched down at around 10:30. King and Lee disembarked and met Abernathy at the gate. The flight was nearly an hour late, so Abernathy hurried them through the airport and out to the modern terminal to a waiting white Lincoln Continental that whisked them downtown. It was a humid spring day, and the sun was just beginning to burn through the morning haze. More than ten thousand people had been gathering in the hot side streets, waiting for King to arrive.

  Now the Continental nosed through the crowds outside Clayborn Temple, the African Methodist Episcopal church that was the starting point of the march, a few blocks off Beale Street. People pressed their noses against the car windows to get a look at King, and for a while he and Abernathy were pinned there in the backseat.

  Once he was able to dislodge himself from the limo, King looked around and immediately sensed that something was "off" about the crowd. The atmosphere, he told Abernathy, was "just wrong."228 People trampled on King's feet and swarmed all around him. The garbage workers were dutifully lined up, carrying their I AM A MAN posters, but King could sense that this was no longer the garbage workers' show. The event was all but hijacked by young rowdies who sang and shouted expletives and seemed generally to have come to raise hell. Many thousands were teenagers playing hooky. Cries of "Black power" filled the air. Though it was still morning, people were drinking. A number of kids wore shirts that said "Invaders," a local organization of militants. Some had scrawled their own signs--LOEB EAT SHIT, one of them read. One firebrand carried a noose in his hand.

  The crowds were growing hot and irritable. "All the police would have to do229 is look the wrong way and the place would have blown up," recalled a spokesman for the Invaders. "Some youngsters in high schools had been led to believe this could be the day, man, that we could really tear this city up."

  King and Abernathy found Lawson and pointedly asked him what was going on. Where were the marshals? Why were all these young folks so riled up? Lawson didn't know, exactly, but he said some of the crowd's restiveness could be attributed to a false rumor, spreading like a virus, that the police had killed a high-
school girl.

  King and Abernathy briefly considered canceling the march, but they worried this might precipitate the very thing they most feared--a riot. So much spite surged through the crowd that it seemed imprudent to try to stop it now. King's experience was that usually these things worked themselves out; simply putting one foot in front of the other had a way of dissipating negative energy.

  THE MARCH BEGAN. King, Abernathy, Lee, and Lawson locked arms in the front, and began walking, as police helicopters whirred overhead. They left Clayborn Temple and slogged along Hernando Street for a few blocks, jerking and halting, trying to find the right pace. Then they turned left onto Beale, the avenue of the blues, and marched west, in the direction of the Mississippi River.

  In the rear, no one bothered to form orderly lines. The kids were jostling and shoving, sending forward wave after wave of people stumbling and stepping on heels. "Make the crowds stop pushing!"230 King yelled. "We're going to be trampled!"

  Soon they passed W. C. Handy Park, named for the prosperous bandleader and composer who first wrote down the blues and shaped the form into an internationally recognized genre. As it happened, this very day was the tenth anniversary of W. C. Handy's death, and someone had laid a wreath beside the bronze statue of the beaming bluesman standing with his trumpet at the ready.

  But this Beale was a faded version of the street that the Father of the Blues had known; had he been alive to see it now, he would have despaired at its mirthless state. In Handy's heyday, it was the Main Street of Negro America, a place of deep soul and world-class foolishness, of zoot suits and chitlin joints, of hoodoos and fortune-tellers, with jug bands playing on every corner. The street smelled of tamales and pulled pork and pot liquor and lard. Day and night, Beale throbbed with so much authentic and sometimes violent vitality that, as Handy put it in one of his famous songs, "business never closes 'til somebody gets killed."

  For more than a century, blacks from across the Mississippi Delta came to Beale to experience their first taste of city life. Workers came from the levee-building camps, from the lumber and turpentine camps, from the cotton fields and the steamboat lines. The only confirmed studio photograph of Robert Johnson was taken on Beale--a ghostly image of the long-fingered bluesman posing in a fedora and pin-striped suit with his well-worn guitar. Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and B. B. King came here to play some of their first city gigs. The South's first black millionaire, Robert Church, made his real estate fortune on Beale. Black doctors, black photographers, black dentists, black insurance companies, black mortuaries, black newspapers, hotels and restaurants "for coloreds only," African-American parades as a counterpart to the all-white Cotton Carnival--Beale was a place where the concept of "separate but equal" had one of its more spirited and convincing runs.

  "If you were black231 for one Saturday night on Beale, you'd never want to be white again," the Stax Records legend Rufus Thomas once quipped.

  By the spring of 1968, however, most of the great clubs and theaters--the Daisy, the Palace, the Monarch, P. Wee's Saloon, Club Handy--were boarded up or gone altogether. Though there were still reputable businesses closer to Main, much of Beale had become a drab drag of busted concrete and liquor stores and pawnshops, populated by winos and petty thieves. As King tramped west on Beale, past Handy's statue, separate was most assuredly not equal. The blues was on its sickbed, it was said--a moribund music, an era dead and gone. Now a column of proud but anxious men carried signs in the direction of city hall, headed for an uncertain future.

  THE TROUBLE STARTED when King, Lawson, and the others in the vanguard approached the intersection of Beale Street and Main. King heard a crashing sound somewhere behind him and jumped reflexively. They turned right onto Main Street and King heard it again. It sounded to him like shattering plate glass--and it was.

  Some of the younger marchers had taken their placards, ripped off the wooden pickets, and started smashing store windows along Beale. This ignited a chain reaction. Now people hurled bottles, bricks, stones, any projectile at hand. Someone yelled, "Burn it down, baby!" Screaming bystanders bolted in all directions. The sidewalks glittered with glass shards.

  Then came the looters, dashing into stores, grabbing whatever they could on the run, and dashing back into the chaos. Abe Schwab's dry-goods store was robbed and vandalized, as were Uncle Sam's Pawn Shop, Lansky Brothers men's clothing store, York Arms sporting goods, and dozens of other businesses along Main and Beale. Soon incongruous objects from the storefront windows lay about the sidewalks--a broken violin, a washboard, a naked mannequin.

  King couldn't see all of this, and he didn't know exactly what was going on behind him, but he smelled trouble. The march had become a mob. He turned to Lawson. "Jim--there's violence breaking out."

  Lawson looked worried. Up ahead, a line of policemen in riot gear blocked Main Street. By their implacable stance, they indicated that the march would go no farther. Some of them fastened on gas masks.

  Grabbing a bullhorn, Lawson wheeled toward the crowd and made his displeasure known: "Turn around!232 All marchers, young and old, go to the temple! You have hurt the cause--we don't want violence!"

  Then Lawson said to Lee and Abernathy, "Take Dr. King out of the way."233

  King balked. "Jim, they'll say I ran away."

  "I really think he should go," Lawson yelled to Abernathy, this time in an adamant tone. Lawson was worried that King's life might be in danger--and if not his life, certainly his reputation.

  King soon realized how ruinous it would be for him to appear to be leading a riot. "You're right," he finally said. "We got to get out of here."

  Abernathy and Lee linked arms with King and pushed through the crowds to McCall, a side street. There they flagged down a white Pontiac driven by a black woman, who, upon recognizing King, waved them inside the car. A police lieutenant on a motorcycle rolled up and offered to escort them from the chaos. They wanted to go to the Lorraine Motel, but the officer said that would only take them into the teeth of the riot once again.

  "Just get us away from trouble," Lee yelled.

  "Follow me," barked the policeman, and he led them to the Holiday Inn Rivermont, a new high-rise luxury hotel on the city's south bluff overlooking the Mississippi. The policeman promptly checked King and his entourage in to a suite, room 801. King switched on the television and morosely watched the live coverage from Beale Street. He couldn't believe what flickered across the screen.

  Looters darting from buildings ... canisters of tear gas ... riot police in wedge formation ... nightsticks ... blood streaming down faces ... squirts of Mace. At Lawson's urging, the garbage workers had fallen back to Clayborn Temple and taken refuge there to plan their next move while bathing one another's burning eyes with wet sponges. They remained disciplined and true to their cause--one police official freely admitted that his cops "never had trouble234 with the tub-toters." But some of the young hellions, wanting more of what they'd tasted on Beale, ventured out into the streets in search of trouble. When some of them threw rocks at the police and then ran back into the sanctuary, officers fired tear-gas canisters at the church, staining the walls and sending people gasping.

  The rioting on Beale soon spread to other precincts. It took police another hour to gain control of the city. When the mayhem finally smoldered out, scores had sought treatment at local hospitals, and hundreds had been arrested. Two hundred buildings were vandalized, with total property damages that would later be estimated at $400,000. A policeman killed--some said cold-bloodedly murdered--a suspected looter named Larry Payne, shooting the teenager at point-blank range with a shotgun. Numerous cases of police brutality were reported. Many responding officers clearly had overreacted in a show of overwhelming force, but others had performed bravely and practiced restraint in a situation they'd never encountered before, a situation that could have escalated into a Southern reply to Watts.

  Mayor Henry Loeb, arguing that "the march was abandoned235 by its leaders," announced on television th
at three thousand soldiers of the National Guard would soon take control of downtown Memphis to restore order and enforce a seven o'clock curfew. "We have a war236 in the city of Memphis," added the fire and police director, Frank Holloman, in a fit of hyperbole. "This is a civil war." So tense was the atmosphere around Memphis that a spokesman for the Panama Limited, the Illinois Central passenger line running between Chicago and New Orleans, announced that the train would forgo its customary stop in Memphis. On this night, the Panama Limited's engineer would speed right through the troubled city.

  King spent the afternoon watching his nightmare unfold on the screen. He crawled under the bedcovers with his clothes on, smoked cigarettes, and kept his eyes locked on the television. He'd never been so depressed, never so unable to move or speak or react in any way. For hours, he lay in an almost catatonic daze.

  Everything he had worked for was in jeopardy, he realized. His marches had always attracted violence, had always served as magnets for turmoil and hate. That was their purpose, in fact--to expose through choreographed drama a social evil for all to see, preferably with cameras rolling. One could only hope for the appearance of a Bull Connor and his police dogs, or redneck Klansmen on the sidelines, burning the usual "nigger" in effigy. Violent opposition only bolstered the demonstration's message.

  But in all of King's marches, the participants had never before caused violence. This was a new and troubling turn. He realized that what had happened in Memphis that day played right into the hands of the critics of the Poor People's Campaign. How could he stage a peaceable mass protest in Washington when he couldn't bring off a modest-sized march through a modest-sized city in his native South? Memphis had become a litmus test--and he'd failed.