Original subtitles

The most powerful man in America.

Hoover had more power than any president of the United States.

The secret persecution of an iconic civil rights leader.

What Dr.

King gave to people was hope and inspiration.

Just how far did J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI go to silence Martin Luther King

Jr.? Hoover says, I want a document so explosive that it will destroy Martin

Luther King.

In 1968, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

was brutally murdered in Memphis, Tennessee.

But in the years leading up to that dark day,

Dr. King was also the target of a secret and coordinated government plot to

assassinate his character.

Why did the FBI conduct a vicious campaign to destroy King's reputation,

his most intimate secrets, and possibly try to persuade him to take his own

life?

Perhaps the answers to these questions can be found in America's book of

secrets.

Summer 2020

In response to multiple incidents of police brutality against African

a wave of political protest sweeps across the United

States.

Millions of Americans take to the streets and march in a call for racial

justice.

When you see an atrocity, it makes you sick to your

stomach.

It makes you think, are we not growing at all?

The sobering images of civil unrest from the summer of 2020 bear a striking

resemblance to some that took place more than half a century earlier.

In the 1950s, many of the southern states had what were known as Jim Crow

State and local statutes.

that legalized racial segregation in both public facilities and

It's right in your face.

Colored toilet, white toilet. Colored fountain for drinking, white fountain

drinking. Jim Crow is like one little small step removed from slavery.

It's this inhumane treatment of fellow citizens.

Literally anyone who had a different color skin, anyone who was white,

especially in the South, could order anyone to do whatever.

But in 1954, the U .S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation of public

schools was unconstitutional.

It was in this charged environment that a 25 -year -old Martin Luther King Jr.

accepted the position of pastor.

at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

Martin Luther King was a person that, at the beginning of his journey, I don't

believe it was his ambition at all to be the leader of the civil rights

movement.

Martin Luther King just wanted to have that little church and teach at a

university.

Fate overtook him.

He's a young man.

He's not that known yet. It was like he was chosen.

It was almost like a script out of Hollywood. This is the right guy for the

right time. Just like Rosa Parks was the right person for what she did.

On December 1st, 1955,

Rosa Parks was arrested for defying the segregation rules of the bus system in

Montgomery, Alabama.

By law.

blacks were only allowed to sit in the back of the bus.

I had taken a seat on the bus. The driver demanded that I give this seat up

a white man.

I said no, and I wouldn't give it up.

Negro citizens decided not to ride the buses until these conditions were

changed. They asked me to serve as a spokesman and the president of the

Montgomery Improvement Association, and from this time...

I found myself in a leadership position in the civil rights struggle.

The black citizens of Montgomery demonstrated their resolve by walking

organizing carpools instead of riding the bus.

Bus ridership plummeted, and the economic impact was felt immediately.

Up until that point, white America did not even appreciate the clout of the

spending power of the black dollar because it was just taken for granted.

When Dr.

King said, okay, well, we're going to boycott.

You're not going to let us sit anywhere we want to on the bus? Then we won't

ride the bus.

The Montgomery bus boycott lasted 372 days.

In that time...

Dr. King and several of his colleagues were arrested and charged with

conspiracy.

But in the end, the U .S. Supreme Court ruled that the Alabama and Montgomery

laws that segregated white and black bus passengers were unconstitutional.

When the bus boycott ended, it was the first really tangible achievement.

of the post -World War II civil rights emergence in the Deep South.

King became a public figure nationally, in the press, speaking all over the

country. We are still insisting emphatically that violence is self

Becoming the face of the civil rights movement made King a target, not only

white supremacists,

but also for the FBI.

The FBI collected public intelligence information on pretty much any

form of civic activism, and so the Federal Bureau of Investigation paid

amount of attention to the boycott as it was taking place.

The FBI's resident agent in Montgomery spoke regularly with one of the pastors

who was participating in the boycott.

The FBI was run by J. Edgar Hoover, who had served as the Bureau's director

since 1924.

After three decades, he was arguably the most powerful man in America.

Hoover had more power in those days than any president of the United States.

Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy.

There have always been two FBIs.

One enforces federal law. The other is an intelligence service that spies on

people and secretly collects intelligence and information.

J. Edgar Hoover was far more concerned with running the FBI as an intelligence

agency. Hoover believed all his life that communism was the greatest threat

this country, by far. It was the boogeyman during that time. Anything

with communism was just the inner.

Now, the American Communist Party did make a major effort to attract black

support, to propound an agenda of black equality.

And it's not surprising that the FBI, as a domestic intelligence agency, was

concerned about the degree of black support for American communism.

By the early 1960s, J. Edgar Hoover was shifting his anti -communism

surveillance to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

But could Dr. King really be tied to the Communist Party?

The mere suspicion would drive Hoover into an obsessive crusade against

America's leading civil rights activist, one ultimately designed to destroy him.

October 1962.

The United States discovers that the Soviet Union has installed nuclear

on the island nation of Cuba, just 90 miles from Florida's southern coast.

The world's two top superpowers would soon be on the brink of World War III.

It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched

from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the

Soviet Union on the United States.

requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.

In the wake of this near catastrophe, many Americans fear the threat of

communism more than ever before.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoop vows to uncover any communist agents operating

United States, including those he believes have infiltrated the civil

movement.

J. Edgar Hoover saw the civil rights movement as a subversive movement, and

was linked inextricably in his mind with communism.

Both were an attack on the power structure of white America.

In 1962, FBI informants revealed that a known communist sympathizer was now

an important part of Martin Luther King's organization.

That communist sympathizer...

was Stanley Levison, a wealthy businessman, financier, lawyer, and a

friend of Dr. King.

But Levison had also once had extremely close ties to the Communist Party USA.

Stanley Levison, who became very close to Dr. King in 1957, 58, 59,

had a few years earlier been a subject of great interest on the part of the

because the FBI understood that he was one of the most important secret figures

in the financial workings of the American Communist Party.

J. Edgar Hoover discovers that there is an ex -communist, and Hoover doesn't

believe that he's an ex -communist. Close to Martin Luther King, that's it.

starting in 1962, he goes after Martin Luther King, hammer and tong.

Hoover convinced President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Attorney

Robert F. Kennedy, to authorize a warrant to wiretap Levison's phones.

From early 1962 into early 1963, the FBI's

full -scale electronic surveillance of Levison produces no evidence whatsoever.

that Levison is manipulating Dr.

King in any way for subversive communist purposes.

But the federal government's stark fears about Stanley Levison's influence on

Martin Luther King Jr.

were not simply on the part of the FBI.

John F. Kennedy's White House completely shared the FBI's concern.

For President Kennedy.

Even the suggestion that Dr. King was being influenced by communists was

politically dangerous, particularly since tensions surrounding the civil

movement were once again on the rise.

During the spring of 1963, civil rights leaders staged a series of dramatic and

influential anti -segregation demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama.

Television made a big difference.

Dr. King embarrassed.

This country before the world.

It was brilliant to have protests where you have young children out protesting

and demonstrating and then to show just how devious this country could be.

To stick dogs on them.

To put high -pressure water hoses on them.

And the rest of the world looked at that and said, You're trying to inform us on

how to be civilized, and look what you're doing to your own citizens.

Television brought the Birmingham protests into living rooms across

shocking the nation and prompting President Kennedy to give a national

on June 11, 1963.

We just say to the world,

And much more importantly to each other, that this is a land of the free, except

for the Negroes, that we have no second -class citizens, except Negroes, that we

have no class or caste system, no ghettos, no master race, except with

respect to Negroes.

Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise.

Eleven days after President Kennedy's address, Dr. King and other civil rights

leaders were invited to the White House, where Kennedy gave King a stern warning

to cut all ties with the suspected communist, Levison.

Now, when Levison learns from Dr.

King about this personal warning from the president, Levison tells King, we

have to separate. But King is unwilling to completely sever the friendship with

Levison.

King devised a way to secretly communicate with his friend Levison

third party, a mutual colleague and attorney named Clarence Jones.

That way, the phone records of both King and Levison would show no calls placed

directly between them.

King and Levison believe they can get away with this mechanism of each talking

to Jones and not talking directly to each other.

But the FBI, listening in on Levison, knows exactly what's transpiring.

Because of King's deception, the FBI obtained a warrant to tap Clarence

telephone, which yielded a surprise bombshell.

In early August of 1963,

Martin Luther King Jr.

preparing for the March on Washington, goes to stay at Attorney Jones's home in

suburban New York, where the Bureau has its telephone wiretaps already

installed. And as a result, the FBI for the first time learns over those

wiretapped telephone lines that Dr.

King is carrying on extramarital relationships and King's...

Extramarital affairs are now of prime interest to the FBI.

Hoover was a little thrown off because he was thinking he was going to find

communism, and what he found was sex.

While the FBI was poring over reports of Dr. King's alleged infidelities, the

leader of the civil rights movement was busy orchestrating a watershed moment

for racial justice.

On August 28, 1963,

King gave a speech in front of an estimated 250 ,000 people who had

the historic March on Washington.

The March on Washington is one of those rare moments in history

that become iconic and then live on forever.

still strikes a chord.

King's famous I Have a Dream speech went on to be regarded as one of the most

respected and esteemed speeches. But at the FBI that day, when they heard Martin

Luther King's speech, they regarded it as the speech of a demagogue and decided

we've got to bring him down. That day, they started a different kind of

strategy, something to destroy him.

J. Edgar Hoover's plot against Dr. King was now set in motion.

In the coming weeks and months, his FBI would conduct unprecedented surveillance

in direct violation of the civil rights of America's leading civil rights

activists.

But would their shocking discoveries help or harm their mission?

Dallas, Texas.

November 22, 1963,

12 .30 p .m.

While riding in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza,

President

John F. Kennedy is assassinated.

Two hours and eight minutes later, Lyndon Baines Johnson is sworn in as the

President of the United States.

On Johnson's third day in office, with the country still reeling from Kennedy's

assassination, the president made time for a telephone conversation with Martin

Luther King Jr.

I think one of the great tributes that we can pay in memory of President

is to try to enact some of the great progressive policies that he sought to

initiate.

Well, I'm going to support them all, and you can count on that, and I'm going to

do my best to get other men to do likewise, and I'll have to have y 'all's

I never needed more than I do now.

Well, you know you have it, and just feel free to call on us for anything.

Thank you so much, Martin.

At the time of the call, King's home and office phones were wiretapped.

At the demand of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and with the knowledge... Of the

newly sworn in president, Lyndon Johnson is fully informed about the FBI's

pursuit of Dr. King.

He knew what the FBI had and that the FBI was doing this.

Daniel Hoover shared all the dirt he had on Dr. King with Lyndon Johnson. And

LBJ had a full appreciation of the powers that Hoover wielded.

Exactly one month and a day after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, there

was a meeting at FBI headquarters.

They met December the 23rd of 1963, a meeting called by Hoover, and the

topic was the neutralization of Martin Luther King.

It was going to be a concerted effort to get the goods on him such that they

could try to destroy his followers' confidence in the man.

The FBI's motive by that time was to further surveil King's private life,

they did not share with Attorney General Kennedy.

So the FBI's pursuit of King went off the rails in 1963.

William Sullivan was Hoover's intelligence chief. And when Hoover went

Martin Luther King, Sullivan was the point man for this attack.

Phones were tapped in his home, in his office, in his hotel room.

Bugs were placed in all of those places.

Informers were following him.

Really, it was a blanket surveillance.

I doubt that anything was missed.

There was an invitation sent out by London Johnson to Dr. King to come to

Washington for talks.

And so he came to Washington, and he stayed at the Willard Hotel.

And the FBI used that to get him to come there so that they could do more

tapings. The FBI put bugs in all the rooms that were allocated to Dr. King

his entourage.

For the next 18 months, wherever King traveled, the FBI was watching and

listening. And Hoover made it a point to personally listen to every tape his men

made of King.

But while the FBI director may have seen Martin Luther King Jr. as a threat,

much of the country saw an inspiring hero who was courageously fighting for

civil rights and achieving real progress towards racial equality.

My fellow Americans, I am about to sign into law the Civil Rights Act

of 1964.

Let us close the springs of racial poison.

Let us pray for wise and understanding hearts.

Let us lay aside irrelevant differences.

On July 2nd, 1964,

President Johnson honored Dr. King by handing him the pen used to sign the

Rights Act, which overturned racial segregation laws, prohibited

in public places, outlawed employment discrimination.

and mandated the integration of public schools.

King later called the pen one of his most cherished possessions.

That triumph further elevated Martin Luther King's international

stature as the premier spokesperson for black

America and racial equality in the United States.

So at the same time, they're garnering all of this recorded evidence of King's

sexual doings. And so the FBI, both Hoover and Bill Sullivan, are privately

stewing at this incongruity.

Undeterred, Hoover instructed the FBI to send salacious stories of King's sexual

conduct to the press.

Throughout the 1960s, American journalism simply did not report what it

about the private behavior of American public figures. That was true of

President Kennedy, as well as Martin Luther King. And so Hoover clearly

that Sullivan's intelligence division has failed in taking Dr.

King down.

Although the FBI was unsuccessful in their plot to destroy Dr. King's

using the press, they were by no means ready to end J. Edgar Hoover's obsessive

vendetta.

They would now issue a new weapon, one designed to actually provoke Martin

Luther King to do their bidding for them.

November 1964

After their earlier efforts to discredit Martin Luther King Jr.

are unsuccessful, the FBI prepares to send Dr. King an anonymous package

containing a document that will come to be known as the Poison Pen Letter.

FBI Intelligence Chief Bill Sullivan himself takes some plain,

unmarked paper and, pretending to be an American Negro,

types out an anonymous threatening letter addressed simply King.

The letter began by calling Dr. King a fraud and warned that the demise of his

reputation among the public was fast approaching.

The package also contained an audio tape, a compilation of FBI surveillance

allegedly of King engaging in multiple extramarital affairs.

The document's ominous closing, according to some scholars, suggested

King was given a deadline of 34 days to take his own life or suffer the

humiliation of the tape's release.

The interpretation of this by the people that investigated the FBI later

and by just about everybody who has gone through these records believes that

they intended for him to commit suicide.

The FBI sent the package anonymously to Dr. King on November 21st, 1964.

But it went unopened for over a month because King was in Oslo, Norway,

accepting the Nobel Prize.

The first person to eventually open Sullivan's threatening package long

Christmas is Mrs. King.

King and his associates, when they listen to the tape after reading the

threatening letter, have no doubt whatsoever that this is from the FBI.

King goes into a very deep depression.

And of course, the FBI, which is still wiretapping his phones, knows about the

discovery of the package and the emotional impact it has on King.

If the FBI believed in early 1965,

that their threat would intimidate Dr.

King, they would soon find that they were mistaken.

In March of that year, he helped lead the civil rights movement's most iconic

demonstration in Selma, Alabama.

King and other leaders organized a series of marches to demand greater

protection for the rights of black citizens to vote.

Thousands marched from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery.

The first march became known as Bloody Sunday.

After a white mob and state police attacked unarmed demonstrators.

Five months later, King and his colleagues' strategy of nonviolent

off. when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

When President Johnson stood to present Dr. King with another ceremonial pen, he

did so with a full knowledge of the compromising information the FBI had

gathered on him over the previous 18 months.

Across 1965 -1966, the FBI tires of its

obsession with Dr.

King's private life.

In the spring of 1965, King and his family moved from one home to another,

and at that time the FBI decided not to reinstall its wiretap on

King's home telephone.

It seemed that Hoover and the FBI's efforts to neutralize Dr. King were a

failure, and their investigation stalled.

But nearly two years later...

King made a public statement that put him at odds with President Johnson and

him back under FBI scrutiny.

King's stance on the Vietnam War was that it's a war that we had no business

being in.

But he went further than that. He went on to say that the United States of

America perpetrated violence throughout the world more than any other entity.

He castigated the United States.

He mentioned the North Koreans and the Viet Cong and all that. He didn't

in passing, but he laid into the United States.

Lyndon Johnson now views Martin Luther King Jr.

as a political enemy and no longer a political colleague.

This change gives the FBI a brand new opportunity to insinuate itself

with Lyndon Johnson and his top aides.

And so the FBI begins a new theme in its reporting on King to

the White House, that King's comments about Vietnam are the Communist Party

line.

The FBI's new attack against King can be heard in a telephone call.

between J. Edgar Hoover and President Johnson.

The call took place just two days after the 1967 Detroit riot, when long

-simmering tensions between the black community and police were ignited by the

raid of an unlicensed bar.

I just got word that Martin Luther King will give a press conference at 11 o

'clock this morning in Atlanta.

King said that the worst has not yet happened in this country in such places

Cleveland, Oakland, and Philadelphia.

King referred specifically to Chicago and said they don't plan to burn down

west side. They are planning to get the loop.

With the threat of nationwide civil unrest erupting in American cities and

suspicion that Dr. King would uncharacteristically embrace violence,

broke out a secret tool in the FBI's arsenal.

It was a counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO.

COINTELPRO was political warfare, and it aimed to destroy organizations, not

simply individuals, but organizations that J. Edgar Hoover thought were a

to the United States.

COINTELPRO involved FBI agents being required to give false testimony to

innocent people to prison.

It was a wide -ranging, extremely damaging program, totally secret.

On August 25, 1967,

J. Edgar Hoover himself issued a COINTELPRO memo targeting black

groups and prominent activists, including Dr.

King. Hoover's memo warned of King becoming a messiah figure who could

black militant movement against the United States government.

For more than a decade, the FBI had failed to eliminate the perceived threat

Martin Luther King Jr.

In fact, he was now more popular than ever and continued to make unprecedented

gains for civil rights in America.

But what happened next would finally bring J. Edgar Hoover's war against Dr.

King to an end.

The Lorraine Motel, Memphis, Tennessee.

2021.

This historic motel is part of the National Civil Rights Museum and has

preserved to look almost exactly as it did in 1968.

At that time, it was one of the few hotels in Memphis that would accept

guests. Dr. King stayed here at the Lurie Motel in April 3rd and 4th, 1968.

He had come to support the Memphis sanitation workers who were striking.

He came with the distinct intention of conducting a peaceful march through

downtown Memphis.

On April 4, 1968, Dr. King was really just relaxing.

He had a catfish lunch with his brother. They called his mother, and he was in a

very good mood.

He was scheduled to go to the home of Reverend Billy Kyle that evening.

And he's out leaning across the balcony talking to friends who are down below in

the courtyard.

He turned back to go into his room, and that's when the fatal shot rang out at 6

.01 p .m.

A bullet fired from a .30 -06 Remington rifle struck King in the right

cheek, fatally wounding him.

Reverend Ralph Abernathy was sharing a room with Dr. King. He runs out to his

friend's aid.

His body is picked up here by the ambulance, and at 7 .05, he is

at St. Joseph's Hospital here in Memphis, Tennessee.

In response to Dr.

King's assassination, more than 100 cities burned with the violent rage that

had spent his career trying to prevent.

The country also burned with two urgent questions.

Who killed Dr.

King and why?

Investigators at the Lorraine Motel zeroed in on a boarding house across the

street as the location from which the assassin fired the fatal shot.

Where we think the shot came from is located just 207 feet this way. And

a small window on the second floor that's a little bit cracked.

And that's where we think the shot came from.

Witnesses described seeing a man fleeing from the boarding house shortly after

Dr. King was shot.

So there was a bundle that was left outside the door on Main Street where

boarding house was located. That contained some of the evidence

the assassination.

The bundle contained binoculars and the Remington hunting rifle, both of which

had fingerprints belonging to an escaped convict named James Earl Ray.

The clerk at the boarding house confirmed that Ray, who had used an

been a guest.

But in the aftermath of King's murder, Ray simply vanished.

James Earl Ray, despite having no apparent means of support, managed to

himself on a bus to Toronto, Canada, across the border with a phony passport

and book a plane to London, thus eluding what was said to be the biggest FBI

manhunt ever mounted.

The circumstances of his escape have raised eyebrows over the years.

How does a basically illiterate escaped convict get a phony passport?

We don't know.

And we'll never know.

James Earl Ray was arrested in London, England on June 8, 1968, just over two

months after King's assassination.

Ray confessed on March 10, 1969.

but recanted three days later.

Ultimately, James Earl Ray was found guilty of Dr. King's murder and

to 99 years in prison.

He died in prison in 1998.

There is no question whatsoever that James Earl Ray was the gunman who

assassinated Martin Luther King Jr.

Now, who else may have encouraged Ray, assisted Ray?

led Ray to believe that there would be a financial reward for him if he pulled

this off, that remains an open and unanswerable question.

Although questions remain about the truth behind that dark day in Memphis,

a few years later, an event occurred that would shine a light on the FBI, not

only exposing the inner workings of the Bureau,

but also its illegal activities against Dr.

Martin Luther King.

Media, Pennsylvania.

March 8, 1971.

After months of planning, political activists used the highly publicized

Muhammad Ali -Joe Frazier fight to distract from the noise of a break -in

would change history.

That's when a group of eight people broke into the FBI office, a small

in a suburb southwest of Philadelphia, and they stole everything in the office,

every piece of paper.

They are a group of people who called themselves the Citizens Commission to

investigate the FBI.

Well, everything changed for Hoover and the FBI the night of March 8, 1971.

After reading through the files, some of which are marked with the cryptic label

COINTELPRO, the burglars leaked the damaging information to the press.

Hoover was described as being apoplectic.

In all of his years, no one had ever appeared to secrecy. There had been no

congressional investigations.

There was no official oversight.

And so the newspapers started immediately.

calling for an investigation of the FBI, further enraging Hoover, of course.

During the subsequent years of investigation, some of the FBI's darkest

were revealed, raising questions about just how aggressively the FBI pursued

truth about King's assassination.

It all comes tumbling out, the war on Martin Luther King, the war on the left.

The illegal wiretaps, the bugging, the break -ins, the black bag jobs, it all

slowly comes tumbling out, and it's still tumbling.

A lot of people have looked at J. Edgar Hoover's animus towards Martin Luther

King and asserted that J. Edgar Hoover somehow was a part, maybe even the

mastermind, of an attempt to kill Martin Luther King. I don't see the evidence

for that. What I do see the evidence for...

that the FBI had warning of assassination plots against Martin

they could have paid much closer attention to.

And after 1965, the FBI was not really serious about trying to stop them.

Dr. King always knew that he would be killed.

And so the final speech of his life that Dr. King gives on the night of April

3rd, at Mason Temple in Memphis. He foresees his own death.

That is of a piece with King's understanding for several years of

his life and his fate.

It's a coincidence that he's assassinated less than 24 hours after

that speech.

I look at King's assassination in the night before he passed, and I think he

knew something was up.

But the beautiful thing about that, though, he said God took him to the

mountaintop and he told people I've seen on the other side, I may not get there

with you, but we as a people, all people will get there.

He said, all we're asking of you white people to do is live up to the laws that

y 'all wrote.

King's legacy is certainly bigger than life, as long as there's a need for

justice.

As long as people are not treated with dignity and respect worldwide,

there will always be a need for Dr. Martin Luther King and his

message.

If you looked at the entire body of files that the FBI accumulated over the

years, I think most people would agree that the most egregious thing that they

did. was what they did against Martin Luther King.

They became convinced that he was a demagogue, had too much power, and must

put down.

The secret recordings that the FBI made of Dr. King are scheduled to be unsealed

in 2027.

Will they provide even more evidence of how J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI plotted

to destroy the iconic civil rights leader?

Until then, the truth about Martin Luther King Jr. and his treatment by the

United States' most powerful law enforcement agency remains hidden in

book of secrets.