LATER THAT SAME week, Martin Luther King was also in Los Angeles, staying in a hotel only a few miles from the St. Francis. On March 16, King gave a talk to the California Democratic Council at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, where he praised the cheering crowds for endorsing Senator Eugene McCarthy's presidential bid (even though King himself had not formally endorsed McCarthy). He then made disparaging comments about Lyndon Johnson that were widely quoted in the news. "The government is emotionally committed207 to the war," King said, but "emotionally hostile to the needs of the poor." King made the local television news, as well as the Los Angeles Times, but his statements were largely overshadowed by Robert Kennedy's formal declaration, made that same day from Washington, that he would run for the presidency.
The next day, Sunday, March 17--St. Patrick's Day--King delivered a sermon titled "The Meaning of Hope" at a church in Los Angeles. He said that hatred, whether practiced by whites or blacks, was becoming a national disease. "I've seen hatred,"208 he told the congregation, "on too many faces--on the faces of sheriffs in the South and on the faces of John Birch Society Members in California. Hate is too great a burden to bear. I can't hate."
Sometime that day, the Reverend James Lawson in Memphis reached King by telephone in his hotel. Lawson had an urgent invitation: he wanted his old friend to swing through Memphis and give a talk to the striking garbage workers. The sanitation strike was now over a month old and reaching a crisis stage, Lawson said. During a recent peaceful march down Main Street, the police had attacked the garbage workers with Mace and billy clubs. Mayor Loeb was digging in, and things were getting ugly. Could King lend a hand?
King asked Lawson when he'd like him to be there.
Lawson said the sooner the better, noting that a mass meeting was scheduled for the very next night, March 18. Lawson told King that if he came, he could expect to address a crowd of at least ten thousand people. What was happening in Memphis, Lawson said, was the perfect illustration of what he was trying to accomplish with the Poor People's Campaign--a spirited fusion of racial and socioeconomic issues. King needed to see it for himself.
As it happened, King was already scheduled to travel through Mississippi all the next week. A brief detour through Memphis wouldn't be too taxing on his itinerary, King agreed.
Even as he said this, Lawson could hear some of King's staff members grumbling in the background. Andrew Young, the executive vice president of the SCLC, was one of the grumblers. He worried that Memphis was a distraction, if not a trap. King needed to stay focused on the main goal, the march in Washington. Their month was already seriously overbooked, and King was exhausted from ceaseless traveling. Young knew that King had an incorrigible habit of ensnaring himself in local conflicts by accepting "just one little invitation to give just one little speech."
But King overruled Young and the rest of the staff. He told Lawson what he wanted to hear. They would rework the itinerary, and King would fly to Memphis the next day in time for the mass meeting. It would only be one night--what could be the harm in that?
AT THE SAME moment that King was giving his Sunday sermon only a few miles away, Eric Galt walked down to the front desk of the St. Francis Hotel and gave notice that he would be vacating his room. He filled out an official postal service card209 to have his mail forwarded to "General Delivery, Atlanta." This venue change was more than a little strange: Eric Galt had no personal connection to the state of Georgia. Apparently, he'd never been to Atlanta in his life.
It had been one week since his last appointment with Dr. Hadley. The stitch marks on his nose were almost gone, and Galt felt more comfortable out in public. That day, he took care of a number of last-minute errands in preparation for his cross-country trip. The next morning, Monday, March 18, he threw all his belongings in his car--the Channel Master transistor radio, the portable Zenith television, the photographic equipment, the sex toys, and the self-help books. He stopped by Marie Tomaso's place and picked up a box of clothes that she'd asked him to drop off for her family in New Orleans.
Then he pointed the Mustang east, toward Martin Luther King's hometown.
14 SOMETHING IN THE AIR
KING FLEW EAST late in the afternoon of March 18, landing in Memphis just in time to speak to the rally that had assembled at Mason Temple, a massive black Pentecostal church downtown. Lawson hadn't lied about the turnout--in fact, he'd significantly underestimated it. When King entered the cavernous hall and stepped up to the podium, he found more than fifteen thousand cheering fans packed inside.
After the roar subsided, King greeted the sanitation workers and congratulated them for their struggle. "You are demonstrating,"210 he began, "that we are all tied in a single garment of destiny, and that if one black person is down, we are all down. You are reminding not only Memphis, but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages."
King was invigorated by this crowd. The energy in the great hall was intoxicating. No one booed, no one heckled. This audience unequivocally loved him, and everyone seemed united behind the strike--in lieu of collection plates, enormous garbage cans were passed around and filled with donations. "I want you to stick it out," King said, until "you can make Mayor Loeb say 'Yes,' even when he wants to say, 'No.'"
King spoke for an hour, almost entirely without notes. He explained that the Memphis strike fit into the larger fight that was now central to the movement--the fight for economic justice symbolized by his upcoming Poor People's Campaign. "With Selma and the voting rights bill," he said, "one era came to a close. Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't earn enough money to buy a cup of coffee?"
King moved toward a broad indictment of American society--how could a nation so rich and technologically innovative fail to recognize the misery of its poorest citizens? "We built gigantic buildings to kiss the sky," King said, and "gargantuan bridges to span the seas. Through our spaceships we carve highways through the stratosphere. Through our submarines we penetrate oceanic depths. But it seems I can hear the God of the universe saying, 'Even though you've done all of that, I was hungry and you fed me not. I was naked and ye clothed me not. So you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness.'"
King left the microphone for a moment to confer with Lawson, then returned to the podium to close his address with an announcement that did not please his staff: he was coming back to Memphis in a few days to conduct a massive march downtown on behalf of the garbage workers. "I will lead you through the center of Memphis," he said. "I want a tremendous work stoppage, and all of you, your families and children, will join me."
The crowds went wild, and King's face lit up. He loved the spirit here in Memphis. It seemed that everyone in the vast hall was smiling--everyone except Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young, who could only roll their eyes and think: Just one little speech.
IN TRUTH, KING had conflicted feelings about Memphis, a town he had visited many times before. It was a very different city from Atlanta, rougher around the edges, funkier, with a population that was poorer and closer to the cotton fields. The last time King had stayed any length of time here was in 1966. In June of that year, James Meredith, who'd become nationally famous four years earlier as the first African-American man to attend the University of Mississippi, was leading a solitary march--the March Against Fear, he called it--from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, to protest brutality against blacks when he was struck down by a white sniper wielding a shotgun; seriously but not fatally hurt, Meredith had become a victim of the very thing he was marching against. King joined a clutch of civil rights leaders in Memphis to pick up where Meredith had fallen--and to trudge through sultry heat all the way to Jackson, Mississippi. Though they reached their destination, the march ended with tear-gas dousings and a deepening rift between King and Stokely Carmichael's emergent black-power movement. King's memories of the episode were
not fond ones.
On that stay in Memphis, King had briefly lodged at his usual hangout, the black-owned Lorraine Motel, located a few blocks from the river on the south end of downtown. True to habit, King and his entourage returned to his old haunt on this night, after the speech at Mason Temple.
The Lorraine had long been popular211 among Stax musicians, gospel singers, and itinerant ministers. Count Basie had stayed here, as had Ray Charles, the Staple Singers, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Cab Calloway, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong, and Nat "King" Cole. The old part of the lodge212--the Lorraine Hotel--had once been a white whorehouse. In the mid-1940s the husband-and-wife team of Walter and Loree Bailey bought the place and worked hard to make it respectable, building a new wing that was a modern motor court.
King liked the homey feel of the place, the way you could wander into the kitchen at odd hours and order whatever you wanted. Over the years, King had stayed at the Lorraine at least a dozen times, and the Baileys had become like family. The room rate was thirteen dollars a night, but the Baileys refused to charge King.
King usually stayed in room 306, on the second floor of the motel in the middle of the long balcony. Abernathy referred to it as "the King-Abernathy suite."213 Furnished with twin beds, a television, cheap Danish furniture, and a black rotary telephone, 306 was a modest-sized paneled room appointed in a 1960s contemporary style that Andrew Young later described as "seeming so modern214 then and so frightful today."
King, Abernathy, Young, and the few others in the entourage stayed up far into the night, meeting with local ministers and planning the coming demonstration: it was decided that they would march down Beale Street, the fabled avenue of the blues. Lawson, along with AFSCME leaders, would organize the march, and King would drop into the ranks in the mid-morning to lead the procession. Given everything he'd seen at Mason Temple that night, King was tremendously optimistic. Not since Selma had he been a part of something that felt so auspicious.
The next morning King and his crew rose early and headed south into the poorest precincts of the Delta, to begin a brief whirlwind through Mississippi and parts of Alabama.
The day started in Clarksdale, in the heart of blues country--the town where, according to one version of the legend, the young Robert Johnson met the devil at midnight at "The Crossroads" and sold his soul to learn to play guitar. King was brought to tears by the poverty he saw in the plantation settlements of shotgun shacks, surrounded by wet, fallow cotton fields.
Later in the day, King and his entourage worked their way down to a rally at Jennings Temple Church in Greenwood, Mississippi, a town also steeped in the Robert Johnson story. Just outside of Greenwood, in 1938, the itinerant bluesman, still in his late twenties, died a horrible death, likely of strychnine poisoning, said to have been slipped into his whiskey by an angry juke-joint owner. A fellow musician said Johnson "crawled on his hands and knees and barked like a dog before he died."
It was, for King, haunted country, country just a few steps from slavery, and a natural place for his Poor People's Campaign to take root.
He would return to Memphis in three days.
ON THE BLUSTERY spring day of March 22, Eric Galt swung his Mustang into Selma, Alabama. He was exhausted from his transcontinental journey and eager to clean off the grunge of the road. The drive from Los Angeles had taken four days. He'd followed a southerly route across the prickly deserts of the Southwest, and then down into Texas. He stopped for one night in New Orleans, where, true to his promise, he dropped off the box of clothes for Marie Tomaso's family.
Entering the Selma city limits, he turned in to the parking lot of the Flamingo Motel,215 on Highway 80, not far from the heart of town--and checked in, signing the register book "Eric S. Galt."
Galt moved into his room and peered out the window at the traffic on the highway. The Flamingo was just a few blocks from the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where three years earlier Martin Luther King had helped lead several hundred marchers into the teeth of Governor Wallace's mounted state troopers.
A gritty agribusiness town on the Alabama River, Selma had been a major Confederate rail hub and manufacturing center for war materiel--including shells, saltpeter, even ironclad warships. Nathan Bedford Forrest led a doomed effort to save the town's munitions factories from the Union torch in the very last days of the war. But it was the civil rights movement that had made Selma famous around the world, a fact that Galt must have known. The spirited marchers had tramped by this very motel, down this very road--Highway 80--en route to the state capitol in Montgomery to lay their grievances at the feet of Galt's beloved Governor Wallace. The Selma-to-Montgomery march was in some ways the acme of the civil rights movement. The confrontation at the Pettus Bridge shocked the nation and resulted in President Johnson's signing of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Why had Galt come to Selma? What business did he have with this racially freighted burg in the Black Belt of Alabama, this arsenal of the dead Confederacy, with its crumbling antebellum mansions and live oaks gauzed in Spanish moss? He was no Civil War buff, and certainly no fan of the civil rights movement. One didn't easily wander into Selma on the way to someplace else; it was not on the main roads between New Orleans, Birmingham, and Atlanta, Galt's ultimate destination. Yet something about Selma interested him enough to make a detour--of nearly sixty miles--to stay the night here.
There is one clue. That morning Galt had awakened in New Orleans, where the Times-Picayune reported a curious fact: Martin Luther King was scheduled to make a public appearance in Selma that very day to drum up recruits for his Poor People's Campaign. Other newspapers and TV stations across the South reported King's plans as well.
The conclusion was unavoidable: in making his detour and speeding his way up to little Selma on this particular day, Eric Galt appeared to be stalking Martin Luther King. But stalking him for what purpose? Armed only with his Japanese-made Liberty Chief revolver, he surely was not thinking of killing King--at least not yet. That was far too risky. With a handgun, he would have to shoot close in, and unless King was entirely alone, Galt would run a high risk of being captured.
Yet the potent symbolism of killing King in Selma must have registered with him. To many who thought as Galt did, it would seem a delicious irony that George Wallace's nemesis should be cut down in the very spot where the most famous insult to the governor's authority, and to the honor of his state, had taken place.
Far more likely, though, Galt had come to Selma just to get a sense of King's entourage. He wanted to take note of the style in which the minister traveled, his habits of movement, the presence or absence of bodyguards or police details. What were King's most obvious vulnerabilities? What car did he ride in, and in what sort of convoy? How long did he linger with the crowds? King's appearance in Selma would be, for Galt, a kind of dry run.
On a deeper level, it is also possible that Galt wanted to see King for himself and hear his message firsthand, to stoke his rancor for the man and his movement. But Galt's anticipated encounter with his target was not to be. King never reached Selma that evening, and his talk was canceled. Mustering recruits for the Poor People's Campaign, he was delayed in the tiny town of Camden, thirty-eight miles away, and ended up spending the night there. (It's possible, of course, that Galt somehow learned of this late-breaking revision in the SCLC itinerary in time to catch King's appearance in Camden, but there's no evidence for it.)
When a frustrated Galt woke up the next morning in Selma, he began to weigh his options. The papers were now reporting that the Nobel laureate would be heading home. If King would not come to Galt, then Galt would go to King. So Galt checked out of the Flamingo Motel the next morning and headed northeast, on dry roads, in the direction of Atlanta.
ON MARCH 22, the day of the proposed march down Beale Street, Memphis awoke to an extraordinary spectacle. Overnight, seventeen inches of snow had fallen, and the city was a wonderland, with a heavy wet slurry smothering the jonquils, freezing the azalea bloss
oms, and bending the branches of magnolia trees. Serious snow was a rarity in Memphis, especially in the month of March, but this one was for the record books: it was the second-largest snowstorm in the city's history. Memphis shut down. Schools and factories and government offices closed, with power outages reported throughout the region. Nature, as one wag put it, had gone on strike.216
Lawson told King the news: an act of God had intervened, and the march would have to be postponed. "We've got a perfect work stoppage,217 though!" he quipped. Lawson and King set a new date for the march--Thursday, March 28.
The papers called it, simply, "The Day of the Big Snow." A prominent black minister in Memphis said, "Well, the Lord has done it again218--it's a white world." While many people in Memphis welcomed the great storm and the respite it provided from civil tensions, others saw it as a bad omen. "It had never snowed219 that late in March," said one strike supporter. "And some of us felt that something was just in the air, and that something dreadful was going to happen."
TWO DAYS LATER, Eric Galt rolled into Atlanta, and though he knew nothing about the city, he soon found his kind of neighborhood--which is to say, slatternly, sour smelling, and cheap. No matter where he was in the world, his radar for sleaze remained remarkably acute. It was March 24, a Sunday. He located a rooming house220 at 113 Fourteenth Street Northeast, just off Peachtree Street near Piedmont Park in midtown. It was a somewhat disheveled part of Atlanta that had lately been turning into a hippie district--or at least what passed for one in this starched-collar, business-oriented, Baptist-conservative boomtown, which a few years earlier had adopted the boosterish slogan "The City Too Busy to Hate." Home of Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines, among other large national companies, Atlanta had become the proud epitome of the New South; it was a city of unapologetic commercialism and an often ersatz sophistication, but also, in many quarters, a city of surprising racial tolerance--so much so that one prominent Southern essayist, John Shelton Reed, would remark: "Every time I look at Atlanta,221 I see what a quarter million Confederate soldiers died to prevent."