Today, in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we welcome Hampton Sides, author of the fascinating book, Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin, as he discusses his unique perspective on MLK’s legacy.
A few people who’ve read Hellhound on His Trail have described it as “a thriller.” Though they intended this as a compliment, I’m not sure I took it as one—for, in effect, it might suggest that I’ve turned a national tragedy into an entertainment. If my book is a thriller, it’s also a requiem, the story of the last days of a great figure and the end of his movement. Rather than wrap King in a saintly nimbus, I wanted to make him human on the page, which means flawed, vulnerable, uncertain about the future, and buffeted by the stresses of his high position. But I remain in awe of the man and his soaring eloquence and his otherworldly courage. I’m ashamed that he was killed in my hometown.
I believe King anticipated James Earl Ray. The night before his death he spoke of the threats that were out there from “some of our sick white brothers.” Like Robert Johnson waiting for his hellhound to come, King had spent much of his career looking over his shoulder for some deranged redneck to take him. If there was ever a sick white brother, Ray was it.
James Earl Ray, like Jared Lee Loughner in Arizona, was just one in a long line of American nobodies who’ve left their permanent stain on our history. Though he spent his criminal career striving for anonymity, he desperately wanted the world to know he existed. He longed to do something bold and lasting. Sadly, like so many before him, he imagined the best way to leave his mark was to gun down an international figure who was young, eloquent, and charismatic.
King traveled ceaselessly, of course, and Ray stalked him across the country. The assassination could have happened anywhere. To me, the fact that it happened in Memphis—the headquarters of Delta cotton, blues, rock n’ roll, and soul—seems almost scripted by fate. Memphis is one of the most racially freighted of places in America. It has always been perched, precariously but interestingly, on the nation’s racial fault-line. Nearly everything good and nearly everything bad about my native city has ultimately boiled down to race—and to the way in which blacks and whites have either collaborated or collided with one another.
On the night of King’s murder, my parents drove me and my brother a hundred miles away to the relative safety of a Holiday Inn in Jackson, Tennessee, to ride out the race riot they assumed would convulse the city. But the riots didn’t happen, and we returned home in a few days. Though Memphis was under a virtual state of siege, it was one of the few American cities of any size where the situation remained fairly calm. Out of deference to King, his spirit of non-violence pervaded the streets—and the center held.
Four days after the assassination, Coretta Scott King came to Memphis, wearing her widow’s veil, and led the peaceful march her husband had hoped to lead. This time there was no window-busting, no shouting or picketing, not even a song. For several miles, thousands of marchers threaded through the streets to City Hall. In the midst of all that beautiful sadness, no one breathed a word. The only sound was leather on pavement.
NOOK owners: go to shop, and search “Hampton Sides” to download his books.