How Far Has the F.B.I. Gone to Protect White Supremacy?

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2021

⏱️ 17 minutes

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Summary

Today, Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s work on civil rights is celebrated as bringing about one of the turning points of the twentieth century in America. But, in his own time, King was a divisive figure, unloved by millions of Americans—many members of government among them. The F.B.I. surveilled him constantly. President Lyndon Johnson worked with King to shape benchmark civil-rights legislation, but, after King spoke out against the Vietnam War, he was effectively alienated by the Administration. Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover’s agents at the F.B.I. began active measures to destroy King’s reputation and end his public influence, threatening to expose an extramarital affair. The documentary “MLK/FBI,” directed by Sam Pollard, examines this low point in the federal government’s abuse of power. Pollard tells Jelani Cobb that Hoover must have wondered, “ ‘How dare a Black man try to change the America I grew up in?’ The America he knew and loved was on a road to change. And he was totally against it.” Even today, as a leaked document shows, some within the F.B.I. see Black activists’ calls for justice and recognition as potential dangers to be watched carefully.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.1	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. On Monday, we'll honor Martin Luther King, Jr., whose work on civil rights was one of the turning points of the 20th century in America.
0:22.0	But King in his time was a wholly divisive figure unloved by millions of Americans, particularly white Americans,
0:28.0	who despised him for his righteous opposition to white supremacy, and for his holding up a mirror
0:33.9	to American history and our violent realities.
0:42.3	The same government that eventually cooperated with some of Martin Luther King's legislative agenda also tried to end his public life.
0:46.3	Jay Edgar Hoover and the FBI went to fantastic lengths to disgrace Dr. King to get him
0:51.1	off the political map once and for all.
0:54.0	This FBI effort is the subject of a
0:56.4	new documentary film called MLK FBI. Here's Jelani Cobb, a staff writer, and a historian.
1:05.2	As we see in the film, the FBI opened a dossier on Dr. King in 1955, purportedly out of concern that the movement had been infiltrated by people with ties to the Communist Party.
1:17.7	But as the movement grew and developed, the FBI's tactics switched from mere surveillance to an active campaign to discredit King and his work.
1:27.9	The film was directed by Sam Pollard,
1:30.2	whose documentaries on American history go back to his work on Eyes on the Prize,
1:34.8	the series from the late 1980s.
1:38.2	So can you talk about how the surveillance of Dr. King began?
1:50.0	The surveillance began around when King started to become a nationally prominent figure in the late 50s, 20s, 60. Now, remember, the FBI started a thing called Cointel Pro, counterintelligence programming,
1:57.0	where they were surveilling and wiretapping, you know, and eavesdropping on people who they thought were dangerous.
2:03.9	I mean, it went beyond King. It was also Malcolm X. It was the nation of Islam. It would later be the Black Panther Party. It would be Angela Davis.
2:12.5	Anybody they thought that they felt was going to change the status quo of America. They wanted to surveil and
2:18.2	keep constant vigilance over. Jagger Hoover and William Sullivan saw him as a, basically saw him as a
2:24.2	terrorist, a domestic terrorist. And they felt like what he was doing, you know, it was going to
	...

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