When the rev. Martin luther kingJr. was assassinated in Memphis on April 4,1968, a lot of people, including numerous civil-rights leaders and at least one congressman, assumed that a conspiracy lay behind his death. Much of this suspicion can be blamed on the sour, paranoid, unstable atmosphere of the late '60s, a climate that Hampton Sides re-creates brilliantly in Hellhound on His Trail, his account of King's murder and the search for his killer. The deaths of King and the Kennedys, the inner-city riots, the Vietnam War-these events combined to create a mood where anything could happen, as long as it was tragic, and where the pronouncements of publicfigures were met with no small degree of disbelief. Racist extremists were the obvious suspects in King's death, but even the FBI did not escape suspicion.
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