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J. Edgar
Happy Martin Luther King Day. To honor Martin Luther King it seems appropriate to remember what the government of his time (and clearly ours) did to thwart his activism.
Letters of Note published an interesting piece of correspondence this time last year. It is a letter from the FBI, written in 1964, trying to convince Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide.
In November of 1964, fearful of his connection to the Communist Party through Stanley Levison, the FBI anonymously sent Martin Luther King the following threatening letter, along with a cassette that contained allegedly incriminating audio recordings of King with women in various hotel rooms — the fruits of a 9 month surveillance project headed by William C. Sullivan.
Unsurprisingly, King saw the strongly worded letter as an invitation for him to take his own life, as did an official investigation in 1976 which concluded that the letter “clearly implied that suicide would be a suitable course of action for Dr. King.”
J. Edgar Hoover had decided to destroy the civil rights movement as it was considered a threat to the status quo. As a result the FBI conducted surveillance on King looking for dirt to destroy his credibility. The FBI had a divide and conquer campaign within the civil rights movement and tried to sow division by false flag operations and anonymous communications to bring terror and paranoia to the activists.
From the letter:
King, like all frauds your end is approaching. You could have been our greatest leader. You, even at an early age have turned out to be not a leader but a dissolute, abnormal moral imbecile…
Your “honorary” degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you. King, I repeat you are done.
No person can overcome facts, not even a fraud like yourself… I repeat — no person can argue successfully against facts… Satan could not do more. What incredible evilness… King you are done.
The letter was accompanied by FBI recordings of King having extramarital sexual encounters. The FBI’s logic seems to have been that King would rather commit suicide than face the shame of being exposed as an adulterer.
As the letter concludes:
King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.
The FBI’s campaign of state terrorism would continue throughout the 60s and 70s under the Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) and would include similar threatening correspondence, surveillance, and ultimately assassinations of political dissidents.
It might be worth considering on Martin Luther King Day the power and nature of the forces that opposed King’s vision for social and economic justice – and still do.
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Either that letter was written personally by JEdgar Hoover, or his agency was so pervaded with his bitter hate of King that any agent could type up a letter in his voice, reflecting his vision and values of America.
Whichever, it’s pretty chilling in today’s environment.
I’m betting it was Hoover, mainly because Hoover was himself a fraud in his chosen career, as any British intelligence agent operating in the US during World War Two could have stated were he or she free to talk at the time. (Dusko Popov, for example.) When the Brits found a spy from the other side operating in Allied territory, they would either try to turn the spy or feed him/her craptastic information. (Ian Fleming described the use of the latter option in his short story “The Property of a Lady”.) Hoover’s preference was instead to alert the media, then swoop down and make a big show of arresting the spy with cameras flashing, which had the effect of warning the other enemy spies and giving them time to go to ground. This is why the Brits wound up bypassing Hoover whenever they could and going through Bill Donovan’s OSS and FDR himself whenever they needed something important done in the US.
Thus, this letter to Dr. King was the result of what the shrinks call “projection”.
I would not be surprised if Hoover at least made some edits.
Just watched the J Edgar movie on cable TV. What a sanitized version of this despicable slimeball (and I don’t mean DiCaprio).
Hoover hated anybody who could even spell communism. He was at best a paranoid lunatic. At worst fascist piece of rhino shit.
What is this? Scum’s Night Out on FDL? First thing I see is Scalia and, now, The Hovinator himself. Another guy that needed to see the other end of his dick in somebody’s hand. A sociopathic p.o.s. if there ever was one. No wonder he’s got federal buildings named after him.
Well, MLK, Jr. has his own federal holiday and Hoover is seen as a disgusting turd.
Not only his own holiday, but one that, over the decades, well coincide with the inauguration of the POTUS again and again. No POTUS will ever be inaugurated on J. Edgar Hoover Day. As legacies go, I would much rather be MlK, Jr.
However, Hoover was enabled by quite a few Presidents, supposedly because he had dirt on them. If so, they put themselves above the good of the country, as so many of our elected officials tend to do.
Martin Luther King was an admirable man. J. Edgar Hoover, if he had just stuck to police work, would have risen to his level of incompetence and remained there. Oh, wait…he DID remain there. He emulated the worst of the secret police types, a la Himmler and Beria, and tried to blackmail his way into permanent power.
Then he ran up against someone every bit as ruthless as he…LBJ. Old LBJ was able to get some interesting pictures of JEH. Johnson, and then Nixon, were able to control him to an extent because he was gay and that was socially and politically unacceptable at the time.
It is ironic that perhaps the most powerful gay person in American history was J. Edgar Hoover. Just goes to show that being gay doesn’t necessarily make one a saint.
Any more than being black or hispanic or white or male or female or rich or poor or middle class, or anything else for that matter, makes one a saint.
That’s why identity politics is so foolish and counterproductive.
And if this isn’t appalling enough, look up some period photos of JE Hoover with his “constant companion, Clyde”—a good-looking young man who went everywhere with the Big Cheese and neither ever faced a single question about their relationship. No doubt Hoover was dressed to the nines in his dominatrix outfit (or more likely, in his slave collar and giant diaper) when he dick-tated the note to King. And that there is your 1930s-1950s Amerika—a land of freedom and staggering hypocrisy.
And yet the FBI headquarters are still named after Hoover, something that I have always found offensive. His legacy is one of opposing civil rights, opposing anti-war protests and protecting the Mafia.
Unless you are part of a group targeted for discrimination. Then it makes sense to join together for your mutual interests.
Thanks for reporting on this. (I brought it up in Comments to stories by Jane Hamsher and others about Mr. Swartz, noting the parallel.)
Very well said, Ohio Barbarian, very well said.
It is better to enter the large tent which targets discrimination of all sorts. Else you run the risk of going overboard. That’s been Israel’s problem writ large and is a lesson to us all.
Remember when Perot (NAFTA sucking sound) dropped out of the Presidential race because he said his family was threatened. Wonder why Dennis is on Fox? Who wanted the two Kennedys shot?
Well, we have at least one letter, although I think most of this stuff is done by public pay phone (if you can find one that works).