The FBI and Dr. King

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The FBI and Dr. King

Unread post by 'X' » February 9th, 2006, 2:39 pm

The FBI and Dr. King
By George Curry



Few people in history have been as dedicated to civil rights as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In an interview with Playboy magazine, he noted that he worked 20 hours a day, traveled 325,000 miles a year, giving 450 speeches. That grueling schedule alone was enough to take a toll on Dr. King and his family life. But more mentally and physically taxing was a vicious, unrelenting stealth campaign by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to harass Dr. King.

Mr. Hoover suspected that Stanley Levison, a King adviser, had Communist ties, and used that as a pretext to smearing Dr. King.

Writing in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Bearing the Cross,” David Garrow noted: “FBI officials focused upon Levison’s ongoing involvement with Dr. King’s and SCLC’s affairs, and in early October renewed their entreaties to Robert Kennedy about the serious security threat represented by Levison’s role and King’s refusal to sever the relationship. Their warnings received a sympathetic hearing by the attorney general and Robert Kennedy felt compelled to take the step that the FBI had been recommending since midsummer: the wiretapping of King’s home and office in Atlanta.”

Mr. Garrow wrote, “Ever since the wiretaps on King’s own home and office were added in November, the supervisors of the King-Levison investigation had been turning their attention more and more to King’s private life and away from their previous fixation on his supposed Communist ties.

“At a mid-December conference, Bureau officials discussed in detail how they could gather further evidence of what they felt were King’s serious personal and moral shortcomings, and had resolved that if they could, they would use such material to expose King ‘as an immoral opportunist’ and ‘clerical fraud.’”

In “At Cannan’s Edge,” the last of his trilogy on the Civil Rights Movement, Taylor Branch recounts how the FBI used former Massachusetts Sen. Leverett Saltonstall to prevent Dr. King from receiving an honorary degree from Springfield College, derailed an effort by Dr. King to obtain a loan for SCLC from labor leader Jimmy Hoffa and, even more troubling, decided not to inform Dr. King of imminent threats on his life.

“Hoover revised internal communications about the latest threats to kill King if he marched on Tuesday in Selma—one via the Secret Service about two alleged gunmen out of Detroit, another about a killing squad from the Coushatta, Louisiana, Ku Klux Klan—and vetoed plans to give a routine warning to King,” wrote Mr. Branch, who won the Pulitzer Prize for “Parting the Waters,” his first civil rights book.

The author continued, “‘No,’ Hoover scrawled on one memo, and on another ordered agents ‘not to tell King anything.’ He reminded top officials of a previous order to exclude King from the standard advisory to the targets of threats, and explicitly confined FBI notice to Sheriff Clark and other local authorities of dubious protective value.”

Mr. Hoover detested Dr. King and resented his suggestion that the FBI did not aggressively investigate the murderers of civil rights activists. He would later describe Dr. King as “the most notorious” liar in America.

Mr. Branch writes, “Richard Harwood disclosed in the Washington Post that FBI officials had offered to reporters tape-recorded evidence of ‘moral turpitude’ on King’s part. No other news outlet would touch the cryptic revelation, which Harwood buried among equally sensitive suggestions that Hoover had become a pampered tyrant with homosexual leanings.”

Perhaps, the most disgusting act in a series of disgusting acts, the FBI tried to get Dr. King to commit suicide.

An anonymous threatening letter and copy of tape recordings were mailed to Dr. King at his SCLC office in Atlanta.

“There is but one way out for you,” the letter said. “You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”


David Garrow writes, “King and his aides had little doubt about the origin of the package: J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. The material on the tape—dirty jokes and bawdy remarks King had made a year earlier at Washington’s Willard Hotel, plus the sounds of people engaging in sex—had obviously been acquired by bugging King’s hotel rooms.”

Mr. Garrow recalls a conversation between Dr. King, his wife Coretta and activist Dorothy Cotton.

“Quiet at first, Martin suddenly spoke up, his wife remembered. ‘’I’ve told you all that I don’t expect to survive this revolution; this society is too sick.’ And, of course, Dorothy said, ‘Oh, Martin, don’t say that.’ And he said,

‘Well, I’m just being realistic.’ Coretta recalled that she ‘had heard him say it several times before … He had an awareness of what could happen to him, and he … was not able to forget about it because he lived with this constantly.”

Dr. King also lived with the constant harassment of his own government.

MiChuhSuh

Unread post by MiChuhSuh » February 10th, 2006, 1:05 pm

Okay, I know this is really controverisla, but there was an article somewhere saying Dr. King was recorded by the FBI the day before the asssassination, and well... it's really hard saying this about him but they reported that he was abusing prostitutes in his room or some craziness like that. I know that's a crazy ass story, so did anyone else hear/know anything about that and if it's true or not?

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Unread post by Q » February 10th, 2006, 4:49 pm

is that a reason to assassinate him?

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Unread post by black » February 16th, 2006, 1:05 am

End Violence NOW wrote:Okay, I know this is really controverisla, but there was an article somewhere saying Dr. King was recorded by the FBI the day before the asssassination, and well... it's really hard saying this about him but they reported that he was abusing prostitutes in his room or some craziness like that. I know that's a crazy ass story, so did anyone else hear/know anything about that and if it's true or not?
^^^^the devil at work..... if it was so hard to say why you say it then???

MiChuhSuh

Unread post by MiChuhSuh » February 16th, 2006, 9:57 am

Q wrote:is that a reason to assassinate him?
OF COURSE NOT!!!

He was the greateset advocate for black civil rights, not only through "getting results" but the fact he set and example in the modern world for peaceful, yet firm action, and basing his ideas on Christianity and universal peace.

How many people in America can you say left a legacy like he did????????

MiChuhSuh

Unread post by MiChuhSuh » February 16th, 2006, 9:58 am

johnnyblac wrote:
End Violence NOW wrote:Okay, I know this is really controverisla, but there was an article somewhere saying Dr. King was recorded by the FBI the day before the asssassination, and well... it's really hard saying this about him but they reported that he was abusing prostitutes in his room or some craziness like that. I know that's a crazy ass story, so did anyone else hear/know anything about that and if it's true or not?
^^^^the devil at work..... if it was so hard to say why you say it then???
Because
1. I wanted to see if I was the only one who heard it or not
2. This shocked the crap out of me beacuse he is one of my heros, so I wanted to heard people saying if this is just another crap rumor or confirmed.

MiChuhSuh

Unread post by MiChuhSuh » February 16th, 2006, 10:03 am

o crap.........
okay I looked it up, and this is what Ralph David Abernathy said in his 1989 autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down:
Much has been written in recent years about my friend's weakness for women. Had others not dealt with the matter in such detail, I might have avoided any commentary. Unfortunately, some of these commentators have told only the bare facts without suggesting the reasons why Martin might have indulged in such behavior. They have also left a false impression about the range of his activities.

Martin and I were away more often than we were at home; and while this was no excuse for extramarital relations, it was a reason. Some men are better able to bear such deprivations than others, though all of us in SCLC headquarters had our weak moments. We all understood and believed in the biblical prohibition against sex outside of marriage. It was just that he had a particularly difficult time with that temptation.

In addition to his personal vulnerability, he was also a man who attracted women, even when he didn't intend to, and attracted them in droves. Part of his appeal was his predominant role in the black community and part of it was personal. During the last ten years of his life, Martin Luther King was the most important black man in America. That fact alone endowed him with an aura of power and greatness that women found very appealing. He was a hero — the greatest hero of his age — and women are always attracted to a hero.

But he also had a personal charm that ingratiated him with members of the opposite sex. He was always gracious and courteous to women, whether they were attractive to him or not. He had perfect manners. He was well educated. He was warm and friendly. He could make them laugh. He was good company, something that cannot always be said of heroes. These qualities made him even more attractive in close proximity than he was at a distance.

Then, too, Martin's own love of women was apparent in ways that could not be easily pinpointed — but which women clearly sensed, even from afar. I remember on more than one occasion sitting on a stage and having Martin turn to me to say, "Do you see that woman giving me the eye, the one in the red dress?" I wouldn't be able to pick her out at such a distance, but already she had somehow conveyed to him her attraction and he in turn had responded to it. Later I would see them talking together, as if they had known one another forever. I was always a little bewildered at how strongly and unerringly this mutual attraction operated.

A recent biography has suggested without quite saying so that Martin had affairs with white women as well as black. Such a suggestion is without foundation. I can say with the greatest confidence that he was never attracted to white women and had nothing to do with them, despite the opportunities that may have presented themselves.

Of course, J. Edgar Hoover became preoccupied with Martin's private life early in the civil rights movement, and this preoccupation was a significant factor in Hoover's pathological hatred of him and the movement he headed. Early in the game the FBI began to bug our various hotel rooms, hoping to discover our strategy but also to gather evidence that could be used against Martin personally.

I remember in particular a stay at the Willard Hotel in Washington, where they not only put in audio receivers, but video equipment as well. Then, after collecting enough of this "evidence" to be useful, they began to distribute it to reporters, law officers, and other people in a position to hurt us. Finally, when no one would do Hoover's dirty work for him, someone in the FBI put together a tape of highly intimate moments and sent them to Martin. Unfortunately — and perhaps this was deliberate — [his wife] Coretta received the tape and played it first. But such accusations never seemed to touch her. She rose above all the petty attempts to damage their marriage by refusing to even entertain such thoughts.
....... crap...................

well at least they disproved parts of the rumors, this is a good website to find out about rumors, and they at least proved wrong some of them

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/outrage/mlking.asp

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Unread post by Dr. Gonzo » February 16th, 2006, 11:29 am

JFK was a bigger degenarate then King ever was.

King might of not been a "Saint" but I believe his heart was in the right place.

MiChuhSuh

Unread post by MiChuhSuh » February 16th, 2006, 12:07 pm

^Yup, and reading that article, thought it comfirmed the affairs, it did help bring understanding to the situation

And you're right, in fact they said the only presidents to ever (so far) not be proven to have affairs is Bush Senior and Bush Junior, everyone else has so far been proven to have several affairs

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