Hellhound on his Trail

Hampton Sides

A taut, episodic narrative, it opens with Ray’s escape from prison nine months earlier. Taking the alias Eric Galt, he begins stalking the troubled King as the preacher struggles to control the violent elements within his own fractious coalition.

Sides contrasts these stories with the origins of the civil rights movement, the increasing urbanisation of African-Americans in the south and the relocation of socio-economic hierarchies from the plantations to cities like Memphis, site of the assassination. Built on cotton and perched on racial fault lines since its foundation, Memphis comes alive here in rich, sensory detail.

Sides deftly sketches a nation smouldering with inequality and prejudice. King too, in the final months of his life, is superbly drawn. Despite the victories of the civil rights and voting acts in the mid-1960s, by 1967 his stature is fading. His vision of nonviolent protest is losing purchase in the ghettos and former allies, including President Lyndon Johnson, refuse to speak to him. Further, he is subject to the nearly pathological hatred of FBI director J Edgar Hoover, who has spent a decade attempting to smear him.

Though committed to Gandhian principles of non-violence, King was no saint and Sides does not shy away from his heavy drinking or promiscuity, with one of his many mistresses present in the Lorraine Motel on the night he is shot. King is a man of flaws, yes, but that only makes him all the more identifiable. Particularly affecting is the image of King staring in resignation at footage of the JFK assassination, realising “this is what will happen to me”.

Nonetheless, he remains convinced of the “radical moral surgery” America requires if it is to meet its obligations to the poor. Stressed to breaking point by frustration, overwork and letters from Hoover’s G-men encouraging him to commit suicide, King embarks on his Poor People’s Campaign of 1968, a spirited fusion of racial and socio-economic issues.

When Ray, a preening racist with a radar for sleaze, catches up with King, the results are deadly. Sides reconstructs the murder in unsettling detail, from the investigation on the ground to the reactions of political leaders, among them Jesse Jackson’s self-aggrandising fictions and Robert Kennedy’s off-the-cuff response, later hailed as one of the great instances of American oratory.

With a thriller writer’s sense of tension, Sides traces the manhunt with the meticulous, often macabre minutiae of fibres, ballistics and autopsy reports burning through his prose. Riveting too is Ray’s flight, attempting to reach Ian Smith’s Rhodesia where he expects a hero’s welcome. Ray’s villainous loathing is yet outshone by King’s plainspoken heroism: ‘Hatred is too great a burden,’ he says. ‘I can’t hate.’ When these two lives collide it is catastrophic, for King and for America. Hellhound is a highly readable, recommended history.