"Perhaps the stress of the tragedy was getting the better of him, or perhaps he sensed an opportunity, but at this point [Jesse] Jackson began to spin a small fiction that would grow in the days ahead, one in which he imagined himself playing the approximate role that Abernathy had in fact played on the balcony. 'And I immediately started running upstairs to where he was,' Jackson said. 'And I caught his head. And I tried to feel his head. I asked him, 'Dr. King, do you hear me? Dr. King, do you hear me?' And he didn't say anything. And I tried to — to hold his head. But by then . . .
"The SCLC staffer Hosea Williams glanced from his room window and saw Jackson speaking to the press. Curious, he wandered out to the courtyard and listened. Jackson's account gave Williams pause, because in all the confusion he couldn't remember Jackson ever getting near the fallen King, let alone cradling his head in his arms. Some people at the Lorraine couldn't remember seeing Jackson at all after the shot was fired, while others said he'd hidden somewhere behind the swimming pool's privacy wall until the ambulance arrived.
"Williams was thus already suspicious when he thought he heard Jackson tell the television reporter, 'Yes, I was the last man in the world King spoke to.'
"It's possible that the older and more seasoned Williams felt a stab of jealousy over the brazen way in which the young Jackson assumed the limelight. But the baldness of this apparent lie so infuriated Williams that he climbed over a railing and pushed his way toward him, yelling, 'You dirty, stinking, lying . . . !' People standing around the Lorraine had to physically restrain him from assaulting Jackson. 'I was gonna stomp him in the ground!' Williams fumed."
- Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin by Hampton Sides
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