The FBI Sent MLK A Letter Urging Him To Kill Himself: The civil rights movement’s most visible voice and leader from 1954 to 1968 was Martin Luther King, Jr., an American Baptist clergyman who was born in Atlanta and raised in Mississippi.
By 1955, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had begun to keep an eye on King, particularly during his participation in the Montgomery bus boycott. King was being watched by the FBI at the time.
J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s director at the time, was “personally hostile” toward King because he suspected that the civil rights leader was under the sway of Communist organizations. So in the 1960s, Hoover and his agency launched a series of covert operations against King, which were ultimately successful.
The situation deteriorated further after King delivered his “I Have a Dream” address in front of large crowds at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, D.C. in August 1963.
Two days after the speech, FBI Domestic Intelligence Chief William Sullivan stated in a report that “we must identify him now, if we have not done so previously, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.”
The address, which is considered to be one of the most famous in American history and a watershed point in the civil rights movement, called for civil and economic rights as well as an end to racism in the United States.
According to accounts, King was subjected to numerous types of FBI surveillance while working under the FBI’s domestic counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO). Despite the fact that the extensive surveillance failed to establish that King was a communist, it did turn up supposed evidence of King’s extramarital affairs.
Using the so-called sex films of King, bureau technicians constructed a package that was delivered to his home along with a letter from the director of the bureau. The wife of the civil rights leader was the one who opened the package.
“All of your adulterous activities, as well as your sexual orgies that date back decades, have been documented. “Please keep in mind that this is only a small sample,” the letter stated.
The fact that you have ‘honorary’ degrees, a Nobel Prize (such a ghastly farce), and other honors will not save you. In the anonymous letter, which was discovered by Yale historian Beverly Gage in 2014, the king said, “I repeat, you are finished.”
The only thing left for you to do is accept the challenge. You’re aware of what it is. It continued, seemingly asking King to take his own life. “You have only 34 days,” the letter stated.
However, even though the letter was written in the tone of an aggrieved black person, King, and his advisors were astute enough to recognize that it came from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The renowned leader did not back down, and his civil rights initiatives continued uninterrupted.
It should be noted that he had participated in a number of rallies and had spent time in jail, in addition to being threatened with death.
Several months before his death in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. planned a second March on Washington to resurrect his cause and draw attention to a slew of issues.
In his final and prophetic speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” delivered on April 3, he told supporters gathered at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, that he had “seen the promised land.” It’s possible that I won’t make it with you. The promised land is within our grasp as a nation. I want you to realize that tonight.
He passed on the following day.
You can read the entire letter the FBI issued him here:
