The FBI and MLK: What We Need To Know Isn’t in The Files, It’s How the Files Came to Be

J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was famously obsessed with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., convinced King was a communist pawn (largely due to his association with left-wing civil rights activist Stanley Levison). The irony, of course, is that if Moscow actually was predicating its hopes of dividing America by supporting Dr. King, then any backdoor support for King’s cause from communists ultimately amounted to one of the greatest own goals in history.

Dr. King’s approach that married Christian love to hardnosed political tactics might well have prevented a race war. That approach certainly helped to transform the heart of America.

Then, as now, law enforcement overreach was premised on “national security.” But the motivation behind the FBI’s surveillance of King soon revealed itself to be a character assassination campaign centered on his sex life – salacious, personal, harassing, and utterly invasive.

Hoover made sure that King’s personal foibles were sent to Lyndon Johnson’s White House, Members of Congress, the AP, UPI, and Coretta Scott King herself. Hoover even held a press conference denouncing King as “the most notorious liar in the country.” And yet few deemed the information newsworthy. Americans instinctively realized that one’s private life is exactly that, undeserving of the indignity of unauthorized surveillance and the terror of state-sanctioned moral harassment.

Now those files, sequestered for nearly half a century, are under review to be released as part of Trump’s Executive Order 14176 on the 1960s trinity of assassinations, those of the Kennedys and King.

So here’s the truth about releasing the contents of King’s classified files: Nobody wins. What is of real value is not what the FBI learned, but exactly how and why the FBI invaded King’s privacy.

Consider what we already know: Hoover’s appalling and thoroughly discredited COINTELPRO program included policing morality. To quote the Church Committee’s 1976 report, the program aimed not only to protect national security, but to maintain the “existing social and political order.” Nowhere in the U.S. Code will you find Congress tasking the FBI with upholding its idea of what society should look like.

“No holds were barred,” lamented COINTELPRO chief William Sullivan in his posthumous memoir. He recalled that Hoover’s team saw King as a demagogue and “the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation” after his history-making speech on the National Mall.

• U.S. District Judge Richard Leon should keep these facts in mind when he soon begins reviewing arguments for and against unsealing King’s FBI files. Since a judicial order in 1977 they have been held at the National Archives and Records Administration, with instructions to remain under wraps until January 2027 unless shortened or extended by a federal court.

 

• “It is unquestionable that my father was a private citizen, not an elected official, who enjoyed the right to privacy that should be afforded to all private citizens of this country,” King’s youngest daughter, Bernice, told Judge Leon’s court in a filing. “To not only be unjustifiably surveilled, but to have the purported surveillance files made public would be a travesty of justice.”

We don’t need to know what Dr. King did in his private life. We need to know what the FBI did, under what legal guidance it acted (assuming there was any), why it happened, and what could have prevented it.
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The FBI must never again engage in this kind of politically motivated violation of an American’s privacy. For an era in which surveilling Americans is now so easy, the FBI’s misbehavior is the only worthwhile remaining part of the King story that must be told.

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