Chasing King's Killer: The Hunt for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Assassin Page 4

  King knew exactly who had sent him the letter and the audio recordings of FBI wiretaps that accompanied it. Hoover and Sullivan could not have seriously believed they could force King to take his own life. But they wanted to harass him and let him know that he was under constant FBI surveillance. Indeed, the agency had even penetrated King’s circle—one of his associates was actually a paid FBI spy and informant.

  King ignored the intimidation and traveled to Oslo, Norway, where he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 1964. At age thirty-five, he was the youngest person in history to receive it. This prestigious honor brought worldwide attention to him and the civil rights movement.

  By the mid-1960s, a climate of racial and political violence had become part and parcel of American public life. White segregationists continued to resist the progress of the civil rights movement with intimidation and violence. At the same time, the assassination of President Kennedy had caused many people to lose confidence in our government and institutions.

  A Nation of Islam minister and civil rights leader named Malcolm X was impatient with Martin Luther King’s strategy of nonviolence. He thought it was too passive a tactic and that it would take too long for blacks to obtain equal rights. He also disagreed with King’s goal of full integration into white society. Instead, Malcolm X advocated that blacks adopt more aggressive tactics to defend themselves, and that, in their quest for civil rights, they should not seek integration. He thought that mixing with white society was poisonous and dangerous for blacks.

  Like Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X was a charismatic leader and a brilliant speaker. But they were different leaders on different paths. Despite their fame, they met only once.

  On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom, in New York City, while beginning to give a speech to the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Three black men in the audience—followers of a rival leader in the Nation of Islam movement—stood up and shot him. Although Malcolm X had not been murdered by a white man, the assassination furthered the idea that people who had political disagreements were now more likely to settle their disputes with violence—even murder. The death of Malcolm X was an ill omen that foreshadowed an emerging truth: It was dangerous to be a black leader in America.

  Two weeks later, with the shadow of murder still in the air, Martin Luther King, Jr., led the civil rights movement back to Alabama to urge Congress to support the federal Voting Rights Act. Several million blacks in the South had been disenfranchised by statewide efforts to deprive them of the right to vote. A man named Jimmie Lee Jackson had recently been killed while supporting voter registration in Selma, Alabama. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, along with several other groups, organized a protest for March 7.

  Civil rights supporters planned to walk the fifty miles between Selma and Montgomery, the state capital. They were stopped at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where state troopers attacked the marchers with clubs and tear gas. The event became known as Bloody Sunday. The violence and tragedy did not end there: Two days later, whites beat to death a white minister, James Reeb, who had come to Alabama to support voting rights.

  On March 21, under protection from National Guard troops, the march from Selma to Montgomery began again. This time it crossed the Pettus Bridge. On March 25, near the state capitol building in Montgomery, King addressed a rally of more than fifty thousand people. He gave an inspiring and defiant speech and vowed that he and the civil rights movement would never give up, repeating the positive encouragement:

  “We are on the move now. The burning of our churches will not deter us. We are on the move now. The bombing of our homes will not dissuade us. We are on the move now. The beating and killing of our clergymen and our young people will not divert us. We are on the move now.”

  King continued, “Like an idea whose time has come, not even the marching of mighty armies can halt us.” King called for action: a march to the American dream, and a march on segregated housing, segregated schools, poverty, ballot boxes. However, he acknowledged that progress would not be fast or easy.

  “I know you are asking today, ‘how long will it take?’

  “How long? Not long, because ‘no lie can live forever.’

  “How long? Not long, because ‘you shall reap what you sow.’

  “How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

  His words gave courage to his listeners, but the day’s success, as with so many other moments of triumph, was marred by violence. That night a white civil rights volunteer from Michigan was murdered along Route 80, the scene of the march.

  There was a moment of light, however, when on August 6, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 became law. This legislation followed up the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and gave additional protections to the political rights of blacks and guaranteed the right to register to vote and cast a ballot. But by now, many black communities had become frustrated by the oppression of their rights. On August 11, 1965, these feelings triggered a five-day riot in Watts, a predominantly black section of Los Angeles, which left thirty-four dead. Such events did not presage an auspicious year in 1966.

  In January 1966, King tried to take the civil rights movement north to Chicago to campaign for improvements in housing and schools. Although the city was not in the South, Chicago was one of the most segregated cities in America. Blacks and whites did not live in the same neighborhoods. Many blacks lived in poor communities on the city’s South and West Sides, so they rarely socialized, and their children did not attend the same schools. Mayor Richard Daley, one of the most powerful political bosses in America, kept the peace by awarding loyal black subordinates with power and influence in their own neighborhoods, called wards.

  That summer in 1966, King lived temporarily in Chicago in his attempt to organize a civil rights movement there. It was hard and dangerous work. When he led a march through a segregated neighborhood, he was stoned by angry “white power” mobs. King said he had never seen such vicious hatred, not even in the Deep South. Many did not support him, including local black leaders who viewed King as an outside agitator ignorant of their ways, and some of those leaders even sided with Mayor Daley against him.

  It was a major setback, and King’s failure in Chicago shocked and depressed him. It made him wonder if his work made any difference, especially as rival civil rights leaders rejected his strategy of nonviolence and sought greater influence over the direction of the movement.

  Dr. King’s doubts stemmed from the fact that the civil rights movement was changing by the mid-1960s. The movement had never been monolithic, and King had never been its only voice. Other leaders like Malcolm X had emerged, and many had become frustrated with King’s strategy of nonviolence and the religious practice of turning the other cheek. Some of them even began speaking of Dr. King with disrespect, mocking him as “De Lawd” (The Lord).

  By this time, King was almost forty years old. The young and upcoming generation of activists—some in their late teens or early twenties—thought his approach was too conservative. They thought and even dressed differently from King: he in a dark suit and tie, they in less formal clothing. Impatient, their voices called for a more radical response to white racism and violence. They argued that the civil rights movement had become too passive, and too accommodating to white opinion. They saw nonviolence as a kind of appeasement or surrender, and advocated that white violence be met with self-defense. They wanted to fight back.

  Several major developments occurred in the summer and fall of 1966. In June, Stokely Carmichael, the new chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), shouted the slogan “Black Power” in public for the first time. A few months later, in October, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was formed by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California. Carmichael, Newton, and Seale rejected King’s philosophy of peaceful resistance and nonviolence. They said it made blacks the victims of violent raci
sts. Too many innocent lives had been lost to murder, while thousands of other blacks had been beaten or abused, sometimes the victims of police brutality. It was time, they argued, for blacks to fight back and defend themselves.

  For King, this was an especially difficult time, as—during the same period—J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI kept him under surveillance, violated his privacy, and tried to destroy his personal life.

  Martin Luther King, Jr., remained a great leader and public speaker, but he began privately to experience self-doubt. The responsibility of leading a historic movement for more than a decade was a crushing burden.

  Was it all too much, he asked himself, for one man to bear?

  In 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr., split the civil rights movement. The division was caused not by something at home in America, but by a war halfway around the world in Vietnam. King himself set the tone for the year with the publication of his latest book, aptly titled in the form of a question: Where Do We Go from Here?: Chaos or Community.

  The United States government intervened in the conflict to stop communism from spreading throughout Vietnam and into the rest of Southeast Asia. America supported the government of South Vietnam against the communist threat, while the other side was fighting to unify both North and South Vietnam under a communist government.

  American involvement in the conflict quickly escalated. By 1963, President Kennedy had sent almost twenty thousand troops to Vietnam, and by 1967, President Johnson had sent several hundred thousand. However, victory over communist forces still seemed out of reach. The war dragged on endlessly, and more Americans were dying in Vietnam every day. By the end of March 1967, more than ten thousand American soldiers had been killed in Vietnam. Importantly, many of them were black and had been drafted and sent to fight against their will.

  The war in Vietnam deeply troubled King. On April 4, 1967, he gave one of the most important speeches of his life, setting out his opposition to it. Speaking at the famous Riverside Church in New York City, King said it was time for the civil rights movement to expand its traditional goals and tactics—using the courts to overturn racist laws; staging sit-ins, public protests, and big marches to fight racial segregation; and passing new laws to guarantee civil and equal rights. King wanted to do more than help African Americans. He called for a new campaign to fight for social justice for people of all races, for economic equality, and for world peace. And he demanded that the United States end the war in Vietnam.

  It was risky for King to link his opposition to the Vietnam War to the civil rights movement. In fact, his antiwar stance divided the movement. Many black leaders and rank-and-file supporters criticized him. Shouldn’t he, they asked, continue to devote his time and energy to the cause of civil rights at home rather than to a foreign conflict? The journey from slavery to freedom was not over, and there were still important battles to be fought and won. Why did he want to distract the movement now at this crucial moment and divert his efforts to a new cause? Many black leaders worried that King was taking the spotlight off their core mission: civil rights for African Americans.

  King’s antiwar speech was a direct attack on a major foreign policy of the United States. Young American soldiers were fighting and dying in the jungles of Southeast Asia. To many of his critics, his antiwar stance looked unpatriotic. Such a stance risked alienating several groups: the white Americans who had supported the goals of the civil rights movement; his political supporters and allies in Congress, those senators and representatives who supported legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and his core group, black Americans.

  Worst of all, King’s vocal opposition to the war infuriated the president of the United States. This was not just any president—this was the larger-than-life Lyndon Baines Johnson, the white Southerner from Texas who had risked his political future when he sided with King and the cause of equal civil rights for African Americans. Johnson had been King’s ally, and the president treated his antiwar stance as a personal betrayal. Martin Luther King, Jr., had not only alienated the most powerful man in the world, but he had also turned his friend and partner against him.

  The response nationwide was anger, as many black leaders criticized King harshly, more than they had ever dared to before. All the major newspapers and magazines condemned him. But King refused to back down. On April 15, 1967, he gave a speech in New York City in front of the United Nations: “To return to the road of peace, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war,” he said. “We must all speak out in a multitude of voices against this most cruel and senseless war. The thunder of our voices will be the only sound stronger than the blast of bombs and the clamor of war hysteria.”

  King’s words mattered and began to change the tone of the debate. He spoke later that month at the University of Minnesota, where he said the Vietnam War had “divided our country [and] invited hatred, bigotry, and violence.” He argued that it was not his opposition to the war that had distracted the movement from civil rights, but that it was the war that had “diverted attention from civil rights.” The reaction was surprisingly positive, and some students even carried signs saying that King should run for president of the United States in 1968.

  On April 23, 1967, King gave a press conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to Harvard University. “It is time now,” he said, “to meet the escalation of the war in Vietnam with an escalation of opposition. There can be no freedom without peace and no peace without justice.”

  Martin Luther King was on dangerous ground. His antiwar stance threatened to ruin his reputation and credibility as a leader, and to undermine the progress of the whole civil rights movement.

  In April 1967, two things happened that would change the destiny of the nation, and of Dr. King. He set the first one in motion himself with his opposition to the Vietnam War, but he had no control over—and was not even aware of—the second. On the same day Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his press conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to oppose the Vietnam War, something happened a thousand miles away. Something no one could have imagined would have any significance whatsoever to the life or work of Dr. King.

  That day, a convicted felon escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City. He had tried but failed to escape several times before. This time he succeeded.

  The inmate came to breakfast on the Sunday morning of April 23, 1967. He worked in the prison kitchen, so he had all the supplies he needed for his journey.

  “I brought with me in a sack of twenty candy bars, a comb, a razor and blades, a piece of mirror, soap, and a transistor radio … I ate a good breakfast of about six eggs since I knew this might be my last meal for a while.”

  Then the inmate changed clothes. He had to. In the outside world, his prison uniform would have marked him instantly as an escaped convict and might lead to his quick arrest.

  “I went to the bread room where I had hidden a white shirt and a pair of standard green prison pants that I had dyed black with stencil ink.” That outfit would allow him to pass as a civilian. He dressed in the white shirt and black pants, and then he put on his jail clothes over them. He transferred the contents of his sack into his pockets and stuffed the empty bag under his shirts. He hid in his shoes three hundred dollars that he had made from black-market trading.

  Then he entered the kitchen bakery, which supplied bread not only to the inmates behind the walls but also to prisoners who worked nearby on several farms. Workers had just piled loaves of fresh, warm bread into boxes measuring about four feet by three feet by three feet. The boxes were ready to load onto trucks that drove the bread to the farms. His accomplices, two or three other convicts who had agreed to assist his escape, helped him step into a breadbox. It was just big enough to conceal a crouching man hiding on top of the squashed loaves of bread. Then, his accomplices lifted the box and stacked it in a truck on top of the other containers. When the truck drove through a tunnel leading out of the prison, guards f
ailed to search the breadboxes—and the convict rode to freedom, right through the open gates! When the vehicle stopped on a street near the Missouri River Bridge, the stowaway lifted the lid, and he jumped out of the truck. He was lucky: The driver did not even see him as he scrambled away.

  “I ran to the railroad tracks and along the river until I was sure nobody could see me. Then I took off my prison clothes.” He discarded the black pants but kept the shirt to wear at night when it was cold. He hid under a railroad bridge during daylight and listened to the radio, but he heard no news about his escape. He walked all night, stopping only to eat some of his candy bars.

  On the second day, he hid again during daylight and listened to the radio. His escape had still not been reported on the news. When darkness fell, he walked all night again. He was happy to be out-of-doors. “I looked at the stars a lot. I hadn’t seen them for quite a while.” It was true: He had been locked up for seven years.

  On the third day, he again hid during daylight hours. Then finally he heard a brief report on the radio about his escape! It was a short announcement. But he had to keep moving. He walked all night until he found a trailer, where he broke in and stole some wine and food.

  Just before sunrise on the sixth day, he saw the lights of a town in the distance. “I decided the heat must be off by now. So when night came, I walked into the town, bought two cans of beer and some sandwiches, and went back to the railroad.”