Sides, Hampton. Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin.
Sides was a six-year-old native of Memphis, Tennessee when Dr. King was assassinated there on April 4, 1968. The author’s father worked in the law firm that backed the civil rights leader’s marches of behalf of striking Memphis garbage collectors. Much of this book parallels the steps to that fateful day by both Dr. King and the man referred to mostly by the alias Eric Galt (real name James Earl Ray). After the killing, Galt/Ray fled to Canada and then to England in an attempt to find sanctuary in the “white supremacist” nation of Rhodesia. Eventually captured, Ray would escape briefly from a Tennessee prison in 1977 only to nabbed again and get his sentence rounded out to 100 years. His claims to being part of a secret society actually responsible for the King slaying were never taken seriously. This tragedy was recently depicted in an episode of the PBS series "The American Experience."
Also by Hampton Sides at Merrick Library:
Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West
Ghost Soldiers: The Forgotten Epic Story of World War Two’s Most Dramatic Mission
Reviewed by librarian Bob.
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