Famous Disputes: J. Edgar Hoover vs. Martin Luther King Jr.
Source: Addicting Info
While Martin Luther King national US icon, one man truly detested him – FBI director and eccentric J. Edgar Hoover. Although the FBI had already been monitoring Martin Luther King Jr. as part of their Racial Matters Program, after his involvement in the Montgomery bus boycott of December 1955 the FBI director held a rather personal animosity towards him.
Unable to shake the Cold War context that defined the times, Hoover believed that the civil rights leader was influenced by Communists, and thus in March 1956 raised concerns that King was associating with card-carrying members of the Communist Party. It wasn’t until 1962—after Hoover disclosed to then Attorney General, Robert Kennedy—that surveillance properly began. In the months that followed, Robert Kennedy authorized wiretaps on King’s home and offices, and Hoover deployed agents to find subversive material on King.
In 1964 King retaliated in kind by labeling the FBI as “completely ineffectual in resolving the continued mayhem and brutality inflicted upon the Negro in the deep South”, which began the verbal sparring. Hoover responded to King’s criticisms in a press conference in November 1964, saying that King was the “most notorious liar in the country”. Hoover continued covert operations to discredit King’s standing among financial supporters, church leaders, government officials, and the media. The FBI even went as far as to threaten King anonymously, sending him a tape recording of King allegedly in a compromising position in a hotel room, along with an anonymous letter that was interpreted as encouraging King to commit suicide.
After King’s assassination in 1968, a US Senate Committee convened in the 1970s to investigate the FBI’s domestic intelligence operations. The committee determined that the impact and efforts to discredit King were unquestionable:
“Rather than trying to discredit the alleged Communists it believed were attempting to influence Dr. King, the Bureau adopted the curious tactic of trying to discredit the supposed target of Communist Party interest—Dr. King himself”.
