He continued to fail to make an impression – or made a bad one – as he traveled across the US and Mexico.Įventually, he found his way to Tennessee as King arrived to stand up for striking garbage workers. The prison seemed to barely know he was there and hardly noticed that he’d left.

He was a small-time criminal who was already on the run after escaping from a notorious Missouri prison in a bread truck. None of this stopped a man who went by the name of Eric Stavro Galt and is known to history as James Earl Ray. The leaders of his movement were divided and King’s critics were swooping in to glory in his decline. King was not at the height of his powers in the spring of 1968. The book is a window on the passions and contradictions of an era – the hatred stirred by the civil rights movements, the battle lines within a single presidential administration, and a martyr who died just as his own flame seemed to be flickering amid dissension and disappointment.Ĭontrary to what we may remember, the Rev. The other was a weird and pathetic racist.īut as the remarkable new history Hellhound on His Trail shows, we can learn plenty by spending a few weeks in 1968 with Martin Luther King Jr., the man who shot him to death, and the investigators who tried to find a surprisingly savvy assassin. One was a hero, whose life has been chronicled again and again. More than four decades later, you might assume that there’s little more to say about either of these men.

One had a rifle, and one did not, and that made all the difference. For a moment, there were just two men in Memphis.

Hellhound on his trail book