I was twenty-four when Martin Luther King was shot in 1968. I can’t remember where I was when I heard about it. I do remember where I was when I heard that John Kennedy was shot and also where I was when I heard that a man had landed on the moon. Part of the reason I don’t remember the report of King’s death is this: I was still enough of a racist not to care that much. I was only beginning to transition away from the segregationist elements of my childhood culture in rural North Carolina. Those elements began to unravel as I became friends with African Americans and matured in my vision of what it means to be a human being. While reading Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the International Hunt for His Assassin (Doubleday), a part of my past became newly revealed to me in all its narrowness.

The book may be the most vivid account of the murder of Martin Luther King ever written. Hampton Sides, the book’s author, can write the ears off an elephant, and though every page is based in documented fact, he tells this wrenching story in the style of a novel. What a pleasure to find yourself reading while eating supper, while brushing your teeth. Listen to the piercing accuracy and the poetry of Sides’s description of a rooming house:

Mrs. Brewer’s establishment was a haven for invalids, derelicts, mysterious transients, riverboat workers, and small-time crooks—rheumy-eyed souls who favored wife-beater T-shirts and off-brand hooch. Mostly white middle-aged men, they blew in on wisps of despair from Central Station a few blocks to the south and from the nearby Trailways and Greyhound terminals.

James Earl Ray (alias Eric Galt, Ramon George Sneyd, John Willard, and others) walks into that establishment and turns down the first room he’s offered because it’s on the wrong side of the house. He gets a room on the other side—near the Lorraine Motel, where King’s room, 306, is two hundred feet away.

The first half of the book takes us into Ray’s and King’s daily lives. The account of the days just prior to King’s death first gives us several pages with Ray, then several pages of King and his staff as they scramble to get to Memphis. As the day of the murder nears, we spend two pages or so with one man, then the other. Finally we’re getting only a few paragraphs with each. We stand with King on the balcony of the Lorraine at dusk on April 4, 1968. And then “a ragged belch rang out over the parapets.” America was changed.

Ray’s stalking of King was dramatic in part because of the psychological, social, political, and religious forces driving these two men. If you think our nation is divided now, read here about George Wallace’s run for the White House and the panic that gripped Washington, D.C., and other cities during the hours and days after King’s murder. While all this was happening, I was an Air Force fighter pilot in training near Miami—readying for service in Southeast Asia, and far removed from the events this book paints for me in startling color.

The second half of Hellhound follows Ray as he flees from the FBI into Canada and then to Europe. This part is all the more fascinating because of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s hatred of King.

Our nation’s escape from civil war in the spring of ’68 seemed to rest on the hoped-for arrest of King’s killer. The twists and turns in the story of Ray’s capture, his subsequent escape, his family’s complicity in the murder, the turmoil among King’s close associates—all of this makes the second half of the book as compelling as the first.

Now, at sixty-five, remembering my childhood numbness to segregation, I watch elected officials in North Carolina establish racially segregated school districts in the name of “neighborhood schools”—an affront to King’s legacy, which Hellhound lets us revisit.

A footnote: If you think the rhetorical support for the views of a modern-day politically motivated assassin is not with us now as it was in ’68, then surf your AM radio when you have some time.