Sides has managed to frame a grim cutout of the 1960s within a few weeks of springtime 1968 by following the paths of King and Ray in a deadly pas de deux. Hoover, director of the FBI, had nursed a vendetta against King for a decade, called the civil-rights leader “Burrhead” and other names and fretted privately to President Lyndon Johnson that it was “clear is an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our nation.”
Wallace, the former governor of Alabama, was running a segregationist-minded, third-party campaign for president and found a supporter and volunteer in Ray (Wallace referred to civil-rights legislation as “an assassin’s knife stuck in the back of liberty,” a view he disowned years later). Stoner, chair of the National States’ Rights Party and publisher of hate literature, who contended that Ray “should be given the Congressional Medal of Honor.” (Stoner eventually became one in Ray’s long line of attorneys and was the first of them to suggest that “agents of the federal government,” not Ray, killed King.) and the International Hunt for His Assassin.” And yet there are hellhounds aplenty in Sides’ book, notable among them George Wallace, J. James Earl Ray, the dodgy career criminal and escaped convict who murdered King and helped turn 1968 into the sad, tumultuous year that it was, is the man with the gun in Hampton Sides’ “Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. He was in high spirits, for his associates from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had that very day won a court battle allowing King to lead a march in the city. responded, in his famous 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” that while he was committed to nonviolence, “I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.” Five years later, he was in Memphis, Tenn., for similar reasons - to demonstrate in support of 1,300 city sanitation workers who were on strike - when he was gunned down on a motel balcony, waiting to go to dinner. Told that his activities were “unwise and untimely,” the Rev.
and the International Hunt for His Assassin
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