J. Edgar Hoover V. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
From the historic March on Washington, 28 August 1963, on the steps of former President Lincoln’s Memorial in Washington, D.C., up until his assassination in 1968, the Federal Bureau of Investigation engaged in an intense campaign to discredit Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his work for social change in America.
The first fear that the Director of the Bureau, J. Edgar Hoover, had was that Dr. King was going to align himself with the Communist Party, which Hoover was obsessed with eradicating.
In the 21 November 2022 edition of The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot reviewed a new biography by historian Beverly Gage titled, "G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.”
One of the topics she highlights and is covered in the review is the very ugly relationship between the Rev. Dr. M.L.K. Jr. and J.E. Hoover.
What follows are a few quotes from that review of Hoover's publicly aired hate filled antipathy for Dr. King.
Under the auspices, the F.B.I. had wiretapped Martin Luther King, Jr's., hotel rooms and recorded his sexual assignations. In 1964, soon after King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, a package containing the tapes arrived at his home. His wife, Coretta Scott King, opened it. Inside was a letter, concocted by the F.B.I. and purporting to be from a disappointed Black supporter of King's, that called him 'a filthy, abnormal animal' while seemingly urging him to kill himself.
But Hoover's heart was just never in the harassment of white supremacists the way it was in the hounding of Black lefties. For the most part, he resisted calls for F.B.I. agents to protect civil-rights demonstrators, and he refused to inform King of credible death threats. Lyndon Johnson had to beg him to make an exception and send a detail to Jackson, Mississippi, to watch over King for a few days in the summer of 1964.
In 1964, after he gave a press conference in which he denounced King as America's 'most notorious liar," fifty per cent of Americans sided with Hoover and just sixteen percent sided with King. (The rest were undecided).
In 1964, when Hoover testified about the Bureau, as he did each year, before the House Appropriations Committee, he took the opportunity to go off the record and talk about King's sexual escapades and his ties to former members of the Communist Party. Johnson's aides worried that, once these scurrilous remarks entered the Capitol Hill gossip stream, the civil-rights bill they were working to pass would be imperiled. Hoover could have said more and said it more openly -- no doubt he would have liked to -- but doing so would have sabotaged Johnson while bringing the Bureau's secret spying operation to light. He held off.
The threat of communism became a way in which Hoover could undermine Dr. King and the Black movement’s quest for freedom and social justice in America. And he understood that the way in which Hoover and the federal government could take down their organization and the Movement as a whole was by painting them as Communists.
It was the late 1960s when J. Edgar Hoover, based on the information he was using from his intelligence apparatus, realized that trouble was on the horizon and that the status quo — hallowed by hate, sanctioned by Jim Crow — was beginning to crack.
And behind the scenes, Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation was keeping close watch on the turning events.
Consequently, in 1967, the FBI quietly unleashed a covert surveillance operation targeting what they believed were “subversive” civil rights groups and Black leaders, including Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver from the Black Panther Party; Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X from the Nation of Islam; John Lewis and Stokeley Carmichael from the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee; and especially Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who led the largest organization nationwide with his Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
In March of 1968, J. Edgar Hoover circulated an internal memo to his Bureau stressing the need for a COINTELPRO program and specifically ordered his agents to prevent “…the RISE of a MESSIAH”, specifically naming Dr. King, which was followed by his tragic assassination a month later, 4 April 1968 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
Happy Birthday, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Truth/Justice,
AWCIII Precinct 6