The Fbi And Martin Luther King Jr – One of the darkest chapters in FBI history is how Director J. Edgar Hoover used every dirty trick in his arsenal to discredit and remove Martin Luther King Jr. from power.
Examines the government’s tainted history of attacks on MLK and other black activists. This is the first film to reveal the extent of the FBI’s surveillance and prosecution of Dr. King at the height of the civil rights movement. Andrew Young, James Comey and Clarence Jones lend their voices to this powerful film. A fictional letter sent to Dr. To King and his wife, written as if a disgruntled King supporter begged King to take his own life, is “the darkest piece of FBI history,” according to former FBI Director James Comey. Director Sam Pollard pits Hoover against Dr. King and explores the actions and motivations of both in telling this tragic story.
The Fbi And Martin Luther King Jr
Pollard is an accomplished feature and television video editor and documentary producer/director with nearly 30 years of experience. His first assignment as a documentary producer came in 1989 for Henry Hampton’s Blackside
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He received an Emmy Award for one of the episodes of this series. Between 1990 and 2000, Pollard edited several Spike Lee films:
, a feature-length documentary about the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, was nominated for an Academy Award. Pollard has been nominated for nine Emmy Awards and won three, most recently in 2010 for Outstanding Documentary Editing for the HBO documentary The Time Is Always Right to Do What’s Right Is True. But the timing is ugly enough, especially after the release six months ago of a new set of FBI files on Martin Luther King that paint a grim picture of widespread sexual harassment.
Today, the FBI honors the life and work of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Quote from Dr. Kinga is carved in stone in the Reflection Garden at the FBI Academy in Quantico as a reminder to all FBI students and employees: “The time is always right to do the right thing.” #MLKDay pic.twitter.com/UKMLAAZw5w — FBI (@FBI) January 20, 2020
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But even if we ignore these most outrageous allegations, the fact remains that the FBI did wiretap King and wrote him anonymous letters encouraging him to commit suicide.
Their motivation in this letter was not to stop or seek justice for his alleged sexual behavior. They simply wanted to discredit him and the entire Civil Rights Movement while fulfilling their usual patriotic duty to preserve the status quo at all costs.
Regardless of the FBI’s apparent hypocrisy—or any truth to these allegations—King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail is still worth reading. The notebook is just a single sheet, yellowed with age, typed and closely spaced. It is full of typos and spelling mistakes and full of attempts to correct them. Apparently some effort went into improving the tone of a disappointed fan dismayed at the discovery of “disgusting [sic] anomalies” in what he once thought was “a man of character”.
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The word “wicked” appears six times in the text, and it begins with the accusation: “You are a monstrous swindler, as well as a wicked, wicked one.” In the following paragraphs, the recipient’s intended lovers receive the worst. They are described as “dirty, dirty evil companions” and “evil teammates” who all engage in “dirty, dirty, evil and idiotic talk”. The effect is at once grotesque and hypnotic, a poignant tale of carnal rage and personal betrayal. “How incredibly evil,” the letter says, citing “sexual orgies,” “adultery” and “immoral behavior.” Towards the end, he returns to his original target and denounces him as an “evil, maddened beast”.
The unnamed author assumes a good knowledge of his correspondent’s sex life, names one possible lover and claims to have concrete evidence for others. Another passage alludes to the audio recording that accompanies the letter, apparently a recording of “immoral behavior” in action. “Listen to the fence with the sexual psychoses,” the letter demanded. It expires in 34 days “until your dirty, insane fraud is exposed to the nation.”
“You only have one thing left,” the author vaguely warns in the last paragraph. “You know what it is.”
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When the venerable dr. Martin Luther King Jr. received this letter nearly 50 years ago, quietly informing his friends that someone wanted him to kill himself, and he thought he knew who that someone was. Despite the crude prose, self-conscious amateurism, and other attempts at deception, King was convinced the letter came from the FBI. Its notorious director, J. Edgar Hoover, made no secret of his desire to discredit King. A little more than a decade later, the church’s Senate Committee on Intelligence Abuse confirmed King’s suspicion.
Since then, the so-called “death letter” occupies a unique place in the history of American intelligence – the saddest and most shameful case of Hoover’s FBI. rampage. For several decades, however, only heavily redacted copies of the letter were available to the public. While researching Hoover’s biography this summer, I was surprised to discover the full, uncensored version of the letter hidden in a redacted set of his official and classified files at the National Archives. The leaked passages contain candid statements about King’s sex life couched in the racially charged language of the Jim Crow era. Despite the brutality of the allegations, the letter offers today’s readers a powerful warning about the dangers of domestic surveillance in an age of less restrained media.
The FBI’s contact with King did not begin as an investigation into his sex life, but as a matter of “national security,” a step away from King himself. In 1961, the bureau learned that a former Communist Party insider named Stanley Levison had become King’s closest white adviser, acting as a ghostwriter and fundraiser. The following year, Attorney General Robert Kennedy authorized wiretapping of Levison’s home and office, and the White House advised King to disown his communist friend. But with their surveillance, the bureau quickly discovered that King was still on the phone with Levison. Around the same time, King began criticizing the bureau’s practices in the South, accusing Hoover of not supporting the Civil Rights Act and condoning racist practices by Southern police officers.
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‘You’re Done’: The Letter Sent to King by the F.B.I. (One person’s name has been withheld because The Times could not confirm or deny claims about him.) Credit… National Archives, College Park, Maryland
This combination of events brought Hoover and King into conflict. In the fall of 1963, immediately after the March on Washington, the F.B.I. extended its control from Levison and other partners to King himself, planting wiretaps in King’s home and offices and bugs in his hotel rooms. Hoover learned very little about any Communist machinations, but he began to learn about King’s extramarital sex life, which was already an open secret to the leadership of the civil rights movement.
Hoover and the feds seem genuinely shocked by King’s behavior. “This was a clergyman, the leader of a moral movement, who behaved like a ‘cat with obsessively degenerate sexual instincts,'” Hoover wrote in one entry. In response, the F.B.I. officials began circulating information about King’s activities in hotel rooms to friendly members of the press, hoping to discredit the civil rights leader. To their surprise, this story did not pan out. If anything, as F.BR. After learning more about his sexual adventures, King seemed to have just gained public status. In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, and just a few months later, King became the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
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At this point, Hoover decided to intensify his campaign. On November 18, 1964 – 50 years ago this week – Hoover denounced King at a press conference in Washington, calling him “the most famous liar in the country.” A few days later, one of Hoover’s deputies, William Sullivan, apparently set about writing the anonymous letter and sent an agent to Miami to send the package to Atlanta.
Even now, looking at the full copy of the letter, it’s hard to understand exactly what the bureau wanted from King. The largest unredacted section focuses on King’s sex life, describing in vivid language what the Bureau believed it knew. Another part of the leaked memo praises “senior leaders” such as the N.A.A.C.P. executive director Roy Wilkins, who urged King to step aside and let other people lead the civil rights movement. And some claim they only wanted to oust King, not encourage suicide.
Whatever it was, the F.B.I. hoping that King would do so, they apparently preferred it to happen before the Nobel ceremony, which is scheduled for mid-December. But King never saw the packages until his trip to Oslo. According to his biographer David Harrow, he was first discovered by the king’s wife Coretta, who was expecting
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