UNCENSORED: FBI Pushed MLK to Kill Himself Over Threatened Sex Stories

FILE - The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, speaks to thousands during his "I Have a Dream" speech. (AP Photo)
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Nearly 50 years ago, the FBI sent civil Martin Luther King, Jr. a letter threatening to make public sordid details of his sex life if the civil rights icon failed to do the “one thing left for you to do.”

That one thing, King believed, was to commit suicide. Obviously he didn’t heed the warning, and even after King’s affairs were revealed he continued to be remembered for his civil rights legacy.

The New York Times Magazine on Tuesday published an uncensored copy of the 1964 letter, which Yale historian Beverly Gage stumbled upon in the National Archives. Here’s Gage on the letter’s origins:

When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. received this letter, nearly 50 years ago, he quietly informed friends that someone wanted him to kill himself — and he thought he knew who that someone was. Despite its half-baked prose, self-conscious amateurism and other attempts at misdirection, King was certain the letter had come from the F.B.I. Its infamous director, J. Edgar Hoover, made no secret of his desire to see King discredited. A little more than a decade later, the Senate’s Church Committee on intelligence overreach confirmed King’s suspicion.

The letter repeatedly calls King a “fraud” and makes reference to what is possibly a recording that accompanied the letter, purporting to show evidence of “all your adulterous acts, your sexual orgies extending far into the past.”

View the uncensored letter below, courtesy of the National Archives via the Times:

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Notable Replies

  1. Hoover was sociopathic paranoid scum. Fitting buddy for Dick Nixon.

  2. Avatar for estamm estamm says:

    Wow. Just Wow.

  3. It is worth reading Beverly Gage’s full article as she suggests that we should remember this letter when considering today’s spying on citizens:

    ¨The current F.B.I. director, James Comey, keeps a copy of the King wiretap request on his desk as a reminder of the bureau’s capacity to do wrong. But elsewhere in Washington, the debate over how much the government should know about our private lives has never been more heated: Should intelligence agencies be able to sweep our email, read our texts, track our phone calls, locate us by GPS? Much of the conversation swirls around the possibility that agencies like the N.S.A. or the F.B.I. will use such information not to serve national security but to carry out personal and political vendettas. King’s experience reminds us that these are far from idle fears, conjured in the fevered minds of civil libertarians. They are based in the hard facts of history.¨

  4. See, this is the tragedy of our society’s creeping secularism – I can’t read this and comfort myself that Hoover is broasting in a lake of fire, forced to watch his scene from Angels in America over and over again for all eternity…

  5. Once I offered a fellow teacher a copy of the film “Boycott”–Jeffrey Wright as MLK and the story of the Montgomery bus boycott–for use in class. He told me–approvingly–of the retired FBI agent who spoke of hearing King use the foulest language he’d ever heard, on a surveillance tape.
    So it’s not just Hoover. It’s the myrmidon lackies who avidly carried out every order, still preaching the evangel, and their avid listeners, still out there, waiting for another dirty story or blurred picture.
    Creeps.

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