The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. by David J. Garrow

Author:David J. Garrow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504011532
Publisher: Open Road Media

6

The Radical Challenge of Martin King

The first two phases of the King investigation have been explained by the FBI’s preoccupation first with Stanley Levison’s past and then with Martin King’s personal life. The third and last phase of the King probe was marked by an emphasis upon information about King’s political plans. That focus did not emerge until the late summer or fall of 1965.

Some who support this “political-intelligence” thesis contend that the true purpose of the FBI’s pursuit of King and SCLC had always been to gather information on political strategy and demonstration plans, information that domestic security police obviously would want to obtain. Any ostensible FBI concern with “subversives” or with King’s personal life, this argument says, was either a “cover” for or a concommitant of this larger political purpose. Proponents of this view have based their argument more on this presumption about the natural function of domestic security police than upon specific evidence.

Like the “conservatism” argument, the political-intelligence thesis is true, but only in part. As early as the 1962 wiretapping of Stanley Levison, the Bureau was using what it overheard to report King’s and SCLC’s political plans to the Attorney General and other officials. In May, 1963, the substance of King-Levison conversations about Birmingham was furnished to the Attorney General and apparently the President. Even in 1964, at the height of the obsession with King’s private life, Bureau documents still spoke of how the wiretaps on King’s home and office were supplying important “intelligence on the racial movement.” Furthermore, what could be a clearer example of the use of FBI surveillance for political-intelligence purposes than the activities of DeLoach’s “special squad” at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, and the hourly reports that were furnished to the White House?1

All of this, of course, can be cited to support the claim that the Bureau principally used the surveillance of King to gather political information useful to a government worried about racial protests and mass demonstrations.2 The problem, however, is that indications of such a focus before mid or late 1965 are the exception, rather than the rule, in FBI files on King and SCLC. Nothing presents this contrast more sharply than the Atlantic City events. The communications concerning that operation reflect a clear awareness of the strictly political purpose of the undertaking. Those indications are not mirrored in documents dealing with the Bureau’s other electronic activities directed against King and his associates, and it is important to remember that the Atlantic City squad was created not at the Bureau’s own initiative, but at the specific behest of Lyndon Johnson. As of the fall of 1964, the FBI had only an incidental interest in using its surveillances of King to gather purely political information for the government’s own use.

Why did a greater interest in political intelligence not emerge sooner? First, through late 1963 there was an overpowering focus on the activities of Stanley Levison, and indications of a broader orientation to the King case were rare. Indeed, most of

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