FBI recordings: MLK laughed and offered suggestions as another black minister forcibly raped a woman… An “Open Secret”, Feet of Clay!
INDEPENDENT | By Peter Stubley, Chris Baynes
The FBI’s attempt to discredit Martin Luther King Jr – new details of which are only just emerging some 55 years later – was a mammoth operation involving undercover informants, wiretapped phones and bugged hotel rooms.
J Edgar Hoover, the bureau’s notorious director, believed the material gathered by his agents in the Sixties exposed the civil rights leader as a “notorious liar” and “one of the lowest characters in the country”.
It included a tape which, according to an FBI summary, recorded King laughing and offering “advice” as a fellow Baptist minister “forcibly raped” a woman just a few minutes walk from The White House in Washington DC.
But despite their attempts to spread the story of King’s “sex orgies” and 40-plus extramarital affairs, the story never appeared in the media.
“They tried, but the press would not touch it,” said David Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who has dived into a recent release of files previously buried in the US National Archives collection relating to the assassination of John F Kennedy.
“There is this sort of dual reality where, across the government, there are hundreds of people who know this exists yet it is never publicly exposed,” Mr Garrow told The Independent.
“At that time there was an ethic in the US that prominent men’s private affairs didn’t qualify as news. That was what also protected JFK.”
He believes the FBI files show the intelligence operation targeting King was almost unparalleled, rivalled only by the surveillance of Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, and the US Communist Party.
However, most of it never saw the light of day. In the end Hoover resorted to ordering an agent to send King the notorious “suicide letter” which threatened to expose his “filthy, abnormal” behaviour and urged him to kill himself before Christmas.
