Dave the Sage posted: "Between the Vietnam War, the Sexual Revolution,
and the Civil Right Movement, the Sixties were an extremely turbulent time
any way you look at it. Long held institutions, morals, traditions,
relations, and ways of doing things were all in flux. The ris" Respond
to this post by replying above this line
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<http://ratnation.me/author/davethesage/> Full Text Of FBI’s “Kill
Yourself” Letter To MLK Is Revealed
<http://ratnation.me/2014/12/03/full-text-of-fbis-kill-yourself-letter-to-mlk-is-revealed/>
by
Dave the Sage <http://ratnation.me/author/davethesage/>
Between the Vietnam War, the Sexual Revolution, and the Civil Right
Movement, the Sixties were an extremely turbulent time any way you look at
it. Long held institutions, morals, traditions, relations, and ways of
doing things were all in flux.
The rise of Rev. Martin Luther King to a position of prominence in the
Civil Rights Movement was seen as a challenge to the status quo on two
distinct fronts, both in regards to race relations and later in relation to
the nations involvement in the Vietnam War itself.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech at the 1963 March on
Washington marked a significant point in US history. Unfortunately for
King, it also unhinged FBI director Edgar Hoover and his senior aides. The
day after the speech, William Sullivan, a top Hoover aide, noted in a memo,
"In the light of King's powerful demagogic speech…We must mark him now, if
we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in
this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national
security." Six weeks later, pressured by Hoover, Bobby Kennedy authorized
full electronic surveillance of King. FBI agents placed bugs in King's
hotel rooms, tapped his phones, and bugged his private apartment in Atlanta.
While Hoover found little of the Communist subterfuge he was initially
looking for he did unexpectedly find something potentially as explosive and
damaging to King. What the wiretaps discovered was that the married and
Christian minister Martin Luther King was not all restrained in the
extra-marital sexual escapades department. All dutifully recorded by the
FBI eavesdroppers.
By most accounts that was already an open secret within the civil rights
movement’s leadership. However, Hoover and the Feds seem to have been
genuinely shocked by King’s behavior. Here was a minister, the leader of a
moral movement, acting like “a tom cat with obsessive degenerate sexual
urges,” as Hoover wrote on one memo.
In an effort to eliminate this particular "threat" to national stability
and the status quo, William Sullivan wrote and sent the now infamous
letter, complete with the threat of sexual blackmail, to King suggesting he
kill himself. The note was just a single typewritten and tightly spaced
page. It was rife with typos and misspellings. The packet delivered to
King's home also included a packet of sex tapes prepared by the FBI's lab
technicians containing recording of his extramarital sexual trysts.
The so-called “suicide letter” has occupied a unique place in the history
of American intelligence. For several decades, however, only significantly
redacted copies of the letter were available for public scrutiny. This
summer, while researching a biography of Hoover, Yale historian Beverly
Gage was surprised to find a full, uncensored version of the letter tucked
away in a reprocessed set of his official and confidential files at the
National Archives.
It begins with an accusation: “You are a colossal fraud and an evil,
vicious one at that.” In the paragraphs that follow, the recipient’s sexual
partners get the worst of it. They are described as “filthy dirty evil
companions” and “evil playmates,” all engaged in “dirt, filth, evil and
moronic talk.” “What incredible evilness,” the letter proclaims, listing
off “sexual orgies,” “adulterous acts” and “immoral conduct.”
The newly unredacted portions shed light on the government’s sordid scheme
to harass and discredit Dr. King. One paragraph states:
No person can overcome the facts, no even a fraud like yourself. Lend your
sexually psychotic ear to the enclosure. You will find yourself and in all
your dirt, filth, evil and moronic talk exposed on the record for all time.
. . . Listen to yourself, you filthy, abnormal animal. You are on the
record.
The letter concludes with a deadline of 34 days “before your filthy,
abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.” It also appears that the
FBI tried to encourage King to kill himself.
“There is only one thing left for you to do,” the letter warns vaguely in
the final paragraph. “You know what it is.”
[image: yep]
<https://constitutionclub.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/yep11.jpg>
According to his biographer David Garrow, it was King’s wife, Coretta, who
first opened it expecting to find a recording of one of her husband’s
speeches. She turned the contents over to King, who assembled a group of
confidants to sort out a response. Coretta Scott King said she didn't
discuss infidelity with her husband because "I just wouldn't have burdened
him with anything so trivial." As King’s closest friends and associates
recalled, everyone immediately agreed the letter could only be the work of
one institution: Hoover’s F.B.I. When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
received this letter, he quietly informed friends that someone wanted him
to kill himself — and he thought he knew who that someone was.
The FBI also sent damning evidence to his colleagues, politicians and major
media outlets (who, for reasons unclear, declined to publicize them). Some
of what these anonymous letters claimed — such as King’s penchant for white
prostitutes and his use of church donations to pay for drunken orgies —
have been hotly disputed, even by those who admit that King was a serial
adulterer.
His wife and friends said he was racked by guilt about his personal
failings. King found it uncomfortable to be put on a pedestal when all he
wanted to do was end the injustice of segregation. On Sundays, at his
Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, King would tell his congregation that
he was a ‘sinner’. He added: ‘There is a Mr. Hyde and a Dr. Jekyll in all
of us . . . you don’t need to go out this morning saying that Martin Luther
King is a saint.’
Interestingly enough, Hoover’s campaign against King mostly flopped, and
the F.B.I. never succeeded in seriously damaging King’s public image.
*Dave the Sage <http://ratnation.me/author/davethesage/>* | December 3,
2014 at 1:41 pm | Tags: Martin Luther King Jr.
<http://ratnation.me/?tag=martin-luther-king-jr> | Categories: American
History <http://ratnation.me/?cat=44861>, Food for Thought
<http://ratnation.me/?cat=819>, Government <http://ratnation.me/?cat=2311>
| URL: http://wp.me/p1bb2w-gQP
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