Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to American Scandal add-free on Amazon Music. Download the app today.

From Wondering, I'm Lindsey Graham and this is American Scandal.

Today we wrap up our series on the Feds vs. the Actvists. By the mid-1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. had faced his fair share of threats.

The Civil Rights leader had been attacked by an angry mob, stabbed in the chest and nearly died. His home was bombed while his wife and child were inside.

Yet in many ways, those attacks paled in comparison to the threat the FBI had become.

King learned that the FBI was investigating him on suspicions that he was associating with communists.

But King did not know he was also the subject of a secret FBI program known as Cointel Pro. This campaign was used to destroy civil rights leaders through spying, harassment and psychological warfare.

Cointel Pro was overseen by Jay Edgar Hoover, the powerful FBI director who deeply distrusted King. Under Hoover's leadership, the Bureau tried to destroy the influential civil rights leader.

The FBI began by spying on King, but soon resorted to blackmailing him, threatening to share a recording of him cheating on his wife.

The Bureau suggested that the only way he could avoid embarrassment was to kill himself. King refused to yield and continued his activism until his assassination in 1968.

My guest today is Clayborn Carson. He's both studied and witnessed the way the US government has erected barriers to civil rights activism from the March on Washington to the Black Lives Matter movement today.

Carson is the founding director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University and the author of the book Malcolm X, the FBI file.

I'll speak with him about the FBI's investigations of Dr. King and Malcolm X and how those events echo what's happening now between law enforcement and activists. Here's our conversation.

Hello, it is Matt and Alice from British scandal here and we wanted to let you know that this season we are very excited to be covering the Cambridge spies.

It's got everything you could possibly want from a series of British scandal, treachery in the establishment, overconfident public schoolboys and strange meetings on park benches.

Check, check and double check. You can search and follow British scandal wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and add free via the OneDriPlus subscription in Apple Podcasts or the OneDri app.

Hi, I'm Sarah Hegey, co-host of OneDri's podcast Scample Inswers. In our recent two-part series, three weddings and a funeral,

we dive into the story of a German con man who built an entire life on fake names, lies and schemes and the unlikely true-kind twist that brought this decades-long charade crashing down.

Listen to Scample Inswers on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.

Dr. Carson, welcome to American Scandal.

You're going to be here with you.

Second-class citizenship, disenfranchisement, intimidation, violence. These were all regular parts of the black American experience since the end of the Civil War entrenched and normalized in American culture and unfortunately codified into law for close to a century

...