The FBI's War on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

[Kid Berwyn]

King's FBI File

American Public Media Reports

Beginning in 1962, the FBI conducted an extensive program of surveillance and harassment against Martin Luther King Jr. Under the guidance of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover - and with the permission of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy -- the FBI tapped King's home and office phones and those of his associates. FBI agents also bugged King's hotel rooms, recording the civil rights leader's extramarital activities. The FBI used selected parts of its round-the-clock surveillance to try to discourage and discredit King. On orders from Hoover, information characterizing King as a communist dupe and a moral degenerate was circulated throughout the government, and to journalists, church leaders and others.

J. Edgar Hoover created the modern FBI and ran it for 48 years, until his death in 1972. He collected dirt on public officials and private citizens, building a vast set of files on the famous and the obscure. Hoover was a relentless foe of people he considered subversives, especially those he suspected of siding with communism. Journalist and author Nick Kotz writes, "It was Standard Procedure in FBI reports to identify people by their affiliations - however distant or vague - with suspected leftist groups." Hoover kept tabs on his political enemies and those who dared criticize the Bureau.

Many historians have described Hoover as a racist. He viewed the civil rights movement - and its leaders -- as a subversive threat to the American way of life. He particularly hated King. Hoover was willing to use the FBI's enormous power to try to destroy people, like King, whom he considered the nation's enemies. In 1976, a congressional investigation described the FBI's campaign against King as "one of the most abusive of all FBI programs."

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The King-Levison Wiretaps

In 1962, FBI informants told the Bureau that one of Martin Luther King, Jr's closest advisers - New York lawyer Stanley Levison - was a communist. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ordered an investigation. On June 22, 1963, King met with President John F. Kennedy at the White House to discuss civil rights. At one point, Kennedy led King from the Oval Office into the Rose Garden. The president warned King that two of his top associates - Levison and SCLC employee Jack O'Dell, were communists. Kennedy urged King to get rid of them (King later quipped that perhaps the president spoke to him in the garden because he thought the Oval Office might be bugged).

Kennedy also warned that King, himself, was under close surveillance. Kennedy said any scandal at SCLC could damage the administration's work toward a civil rights bill. Leaks to the press about O'Dell's communist background compelled King to oust him. But King refused to drop Stanley Levison. As Nick Kotz, author of Judgment Days - Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws that Changed America, says, Levison was "too valuable an advisor and friend to give up." Historian David Garrow says Levison was King's closest white friend.
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https://features.apmreports.org/arw/king/d1.html