There have been a lot of horror stories about how the FBI operated under J. Edgar Hoover. But Beverly Gage, an American history professor at Yale, recently shed some light on one of the worst. Back in 1964, someone from the FBI wrote Martin Luther King, Jr. an ugly letter threatening to reveal details of his extramarital affairs unless he did the “one thing left for you to do.” King believed that “one thing” was committing suicide.
While the details of the letter have been well known for some time, until recently only redacted copies have been available to the public. But while researching a biography on Hoover, Gage stumbled on an unredacted copy of the letter in Hoover’s files at the National Archives. Even those who know about the ugly, nakedly aggressive, and outright illegal tactics Hoover employed during his 48-year reign at the FBI will be shocked at the tenor of this letter. The anonymous writer claims to have intimate knowledge of King’s affairs with “filthy dirty evil companions.” In 34 days, the letter says, King will be exposed as “an evil, amoral beast”–unless he took the “one way out for you.” When King got that letter, he suspected two things. One was that despite the attempt to make it look like it came from an angry and disillusioned follower, that letter came from the FBI. The second was that the FBI wanted him to commit suicide.
Gage reveals further details on what is now known as “the suicide letter” in an essay which is due to run in this coming Sunday’s edition of The New York Times Magazine. After the March on Washington, the FBI tapped King’s phones and bugged the numerous hotels where he stayed as part of its notorious COINTELPRO scheme. This came after it emerged that King had ignored quiet warnings from the White House to steer clear of his closest white adviser, Stanley Levison. Initially, the FBI had been suspicious of Levison due to his past role in the Communist Party. Although the FBI found no evidence of Communist hankering on King’s part, it did turn up evidence that King was cheating on his wife, Coretta.
Hoover was dumbfounded that King was, as he put it in a memo, acting like “a tom cat.” Although King’s philandering was common knowledge in the civil rights movement, it didn’t seem to be hurting his standing. In 1964, when attempts to interest the press in the story went nowhere, Hoover decided to ramp up the stakes. On November 18, he gave a speech denouncing King as “the most notorious liar in the country.” In 1975, the Church Committee, a select Senate committee that investigated overreach by the nation’s intelligence community, revealed that three days after that speech, FBI domestic intelligence chief William Sullivan wrote the “suicide letter.” He gave it to an agent in Miami, who sent it to King’s home in Atlanta. In an ironic twist, Sullivan would be pushed out of the FBI in 1971 for criticizing Hoover’s overemphasis on chasing down suspected Communists while paying little attention to violations of civil rights laws. King had made the same critique more than eight years earlier.
While King believed the FBI wanted him to commit suicide, some survivors of the Hoover era maintain that they only wanted to push King out. Whatever the case, there is a name for what this letter was–extortion. Whatever one may think about King’s behavior, this letter would have been outrageously illegal even in that era. Had this been done today, whoever wrote it–especially if he or she had a badge–would be facing a long stay in prison. It looks like the FBI wanted King to take the “one way out” before the Nobel ceremony. As it turned out, King didn’t even get the letter until after he returned from Oslo. When Coretta gave him the letter, he and several confidants met to figure out a response. All agreed that the letter could have only come from the FBI.
Gage calls the King letter “the most notorious and embarrassing example of Hoover’s FBI run amok.” While there may very well be more egregious cases than this, when all is said and done, this letter will probably rank at least in the the top five. There is another bit of grotesque irony to this letter besides the fact that the man who wrote it, Sullivan, was pushed out for criticizing the underlying tactics behind it. As any student of the FBI knows, Hoover paid almost no attention to the Mafia for most of his tenure–an egregious blunder that in hindsight allowed the Mafia to run rampant until a massive FBI crackdown from the mid-1970s to the early-2000s. However, this letter reads like something a mafioso would use to shake down someone. It only proves that at bottom, Hoover’s mentality was little different from that of a Mob boss.
Let us know your thoughts at the Liberal America Facebook page. Sign up for our free daily newsletter to receive more great stories like this one.
Darrell Lucus, also known as Christian Dem in NC on Daily Kos, is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
