Non-Fiction Interlude: MLK Assassination & Sides' Hellhound on His Trail

From today's BBC article "Long-lost video of Martin Luther King killer James Earl Ray unearthed:"

Long-lost video showing Martin Luther King's killer in police custody has been posted online, 45 years to the day after the civil rights leader's murder. 

Officials in Tennessee unearthed the tapes of James Earl Ray in 2011 but had no way to view the old technology. Ray is seen in 1968 on a plane after extradition from Britain and as he is searched and given a medical exam and a bulletproof vest at a Memphis jail. 

King, a Baptist minister, was shot in Memphis on 4 April 1968, at age 39. Ray, a racist drifter and theretofore bungling career criminal, was captured in London by Scotland Yard detectives on 8 June.

For a good non-fiction book about MLK and his assassination, try Hellhound on His Trail by Hampton Sides:

On April 23, 1967, Prisoner #416J, an inmate at the notorious Missouri State Penitentiary, escaped in a breadbox. Fashioning himself Eric Galt, this nondescript thief and con man—whose real name was James Earl Ray—drifted through the South, into Mexico, and then Los Angeles, where he was galvanized by George Wallace’s racist presidential campaign. 

On February 1, 1968, two Memphis garbage men were crushed to death in their hydraulic truck, provoking the exclusively African American workforce to go on strike. Hoping to resuscitate his faltering crusade, King joined the sanitation workers’ cause, but their march down Beale Street, the historic avenue of the blues, turned violent. Humiliated, King fatefully vowed to return to Memphis in April. 

With relentless storytelling drive, Sides follows Galt and King as they crisscross the country, one stalking the other, until the crushing moment at the Lorraine Motel when the drifter catches up with his prey. Against the backdrop of the resulting nationwide riots and the pathos of King’s funeral, Sides gives us a riveting cross-cut narrative of the assassin’s flight and the sixty-five-day search that led investigators to Canada, Portugal, and England—a massive manhunt ironically led by Hoover’s FBI.