Some years ago, while researching something else entirely, I stumbled across the accusations that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr was a Communist. Strange that I’d never heard that, in retrospect. Then again, I didn’t hear much about J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI while growing up, either.
Viewed through an historical lens, though, and the political climate of those years — McCarthyism, loyalty reviews, etc — I was primary struck by how deeply the Cold War had affected the nation. Unfortunately, there are more than a few parallels between that paranoid era and the direction we seem to be moving today.
This is a timely reminder:
The almost fanatical zeal with which the FBI pursued King is disclosed in tens of thousands of FBI memos from the 1960s.
The FBI paper trail spells out in detail the government agency’s concerted efforts to derail King’s efforts on behalf of the civil rights movement.
And yet for all those wiretaps and memos, Hoover couldn’t turn King into a Communist. Ultimately, the best he could come up with was clandestinely recorded evidence of sexual affairs.
The agency’s hidden tape recorders turned up almost nothing about communism. But they did reveal embarrassing details about King’s sex life — details the FBI was able to use against him.
[snip]
The FBI’s interest in King intensified after the March on Washington in August 1963, when King delivered his “I have a dream speech,” which many historians consider the most important speech of the 20th century. After the speech, an FBI memo called King the “most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.”
It’s been public since at least 1970 that Hoover couldn’t tie MLK to communism, but there’s great value in revisiting the disturbing, inherent dangers of governmental power.
And here’s an odd footnote: The article sent me off, as ever, into the internet wilderness for further reading. This time, though, I came away with a much different view of the phrase “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader”.
I don’t know how valid the theory that Hoover was “passing” is, but given his fanaticism with the Civil Rights Era, the possibility certainly gives one pause.