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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