Original subtitles

- At this time I have the honor to present to you,

the moral leader of our nation.

- From 1955 to 1968, Martin Luther King led a peaceful

20th century American revolution.

In the short span of 13 years,

the nonviolent civil rights movement, which he headed,

changed the face of American society.

- You know, when you construct a man as a great man,

there's nothing almost more satisfying

than also seeing him represented as the opposite.

- When the National Archives

puts government documents up on the web, in public,

one has to confront them.

One cannot pretend they don't exist.

- I think one of the difficulties for historians

in dealing with really,

the fruits of all of this surveillance of King,

is whether or not we then become complicit

in what the FBI was doing.

- But you know this about humans.

What we're best at is convincing ourselves

of our own righteousness.

I think this entire episode

represents the darkest part of the Bureau's history.

- Tapes from the hotel rooms,

the FBI reports of what was going on,

those are pieces of information that we shouldn't have.

Whatever comes out will certainly help us

understand him as a person,

and that's kind of our duty, is to understand.

- Hello.

In the traditional motion picture story,

the villains are usually defeated,

and the ending is a happy one.

I can make no such promise

for the picture you're about to watch.

The story isn't over.

- They came from Los Angeles and San Francisco,

or about the distance from Moscow to Bombay.

They came from Cleveland, from Chicago,

or about the distance

from Buenos Aires to Rio de Janeiro.

They came from Jackson, Mississippi,

from Birmingham, Alabama,

or about the distance from Johannesburg to Dar es Salaam.

He had been insulted, beaten, jailed,

drenched with water, chased by dogs,

but he was coming to Washington, he said,

to swallow up hatred in love,

to overcome violence by peaceful protest.

- We are not gonna fight

out White brethren with malice,

nor are we gonna fight them

with any falsified stories,

nor are we gonna fight them with hatred,

but we are gonna fight them with love.

When they hate us, we're gonna absorb their hatred in love.

When they speak against us,

we're gonna speak things of love toward them.

We're not gonna let their hatred turn us around,

but we're gonna love them on every side.

- We had been through the battles in Birmingham.

We thought that was the movement.

And it was,

but after it was over,

we realized that what had happened was

that the March on Washington

took a Black Southern movement

and turned it into a national,

and international movement for human rights.

- One day right there in Alabama,

little Black boys and Black girls

will be able to join hands

with little White boys and White girls

as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

- The FBI was most alarmed about King

because of his success.

And they were particularly concerned

that he was this powerful, charismatic figure

who had the ability to mobilize people.

- And if America is to be a great nation,

this must become true.

So let freedom ring.

- When you look at the social movements

from the point of view of the FBI,

it looks very different.

You know, J. Edgar Hoover is famous for saying

that he feared the rise of a Black Messiah.

- Free at last, free at last.

Thank God Almighty. We are free at last.

- After Dr. King gave

his famous March on Washington speech,

Wednesday, August 28th, 1963,

in a memo dated the 30th of August, no later than that,

the second person in the FBI, Bill Sullivan,

sends a urgent memo in which he says,

"After the March on Washington,

"it's clear that Martin Luther King Jr.,

"is the most dangerous Negro in America.

"And we have to use every resource at our disposal

"to destroy him."

- 1956, 20,000 Blacks

walk the streets of Montgomery, Alabama

to protest segregation on city buses.

The Montgomery bus boycott

focuses national attention on its leader,

a 27 year old Baptist minister,

Martin Luther King, Jr..

- Is this just a test that we're getting ready to go.

- That's what we've done.

Next time we go, it will be for real.

- I'm sure that I voice the sentiment

of more than 40,000 Negro citizens of Montgomery.

We still have the attitude of love,

we still have the method of passive resistance,

and we are still insisting, emphatically,

that violence is self-defeating.

That he will lives by the sword, will perish by the sword.

- He let us accept the fact,

and made us accept the fact,

that what we were doing was insane.

He'd say you've got to be certifiably insane

to think that a bunch of crazy folk like you all,

with no money and no guns, no political power,

are gonna change this nation.

We were trusting in the power of God

and only a kind of crazy people of faith

would be willing to put their lives on the line

and trust in God.

In an era of science and technology,

ambiguous spiritual phenomena like moral power,

you know, it didn't make sense.

- This morning, the long-awaited mandate

from the United States Supreme Court came to Montgomery.

Segregation in public transportation

is both legally and sociologically invalid.

In the light of this mandate,

the Negro citizens of Montgomery

are urged to return to the buses tomorrow morning

on a non-segregated basis.

- As the boycott wins

in the United States Supreme Court

come the end of 1956,

civil rights activists take a strong interest

in this unprecedented community action

in the capital of the old Confederacy.

Now, one of the most important

of those long time civil rights activists

who took a real interest in Montgomery

was Byard Rustin.

And it's through Rustin that Stanley Levison meets Dr. King.

- Stanley David Levison was White, he was Jewish,

he was a lawyer who was a certified public accountant,

and unsung hero in the civil rights movement

as related to Martin Luther King, Jr..

And Dr. King adored him.

- From 1955 forward,

the FBI takes some degree of interest

in local Black protest movements in the South,

in Montgomery, in Birmingham,

in Nashville, Tennessee.

But it's standard FBI vacuum cleaner information gathering.

They're not particularly focused on Martin Luther King Jr.

in those mid and late 1950 years.

Even though Stanley Levison and King

have a very close personal relationship from 1957 forward,

only at the very beginning of 1962,

four or five years later,

does the FBI tardily realize that Levison

has become a very important advisor to King.

- I always tell people

I was strolling down the student union one day

and the Bureau had a table there and they were recruiting,

so I filled out the application

and lo and behold, a week later, I get a phone call.

They told me that they will accept me

if I pass the physical.

On my gosh, 21st birthday,

I was driving my car to Washington D. C.,

took an oath of office and almost quit that day

because it was just very surreal.

And they were talking about

when the bomb goes off, where to go and stuff like that,

and I'm thinking, "This is like out of a movie."

- The new FBI will not be the product of one individual.

No one man can build it, but one man can pull it down.

- There were two big themes that came across

in the popular culture that was produced about the FBI.

One of those was crime,

and the other was the struggle against communism.

- Mm hmm.

- Sometime in 1962, Levison got a subpoena

from the House Un-American Activities Committee.

And he was really, I don't wanna say petrified,

but he was very concerned.

- Are you now, or have you ever been

a member of the Communist Party?

- I stand on my constitutional rights

under the Fifth Amendment.

- There was an old saying

that once you're a member of the communist Party,

you're always a member of the Communist Party.

That's what everybody believed.

- And it's pretty clear, in fact,

that Stanley Levison was deeply involved

in communist politics in the 1950s.

- He had dropped off the radar,

but even after he went totally off the grid, if you will,

when the relationship with Dr. King started,

they would still get reports

from people inside the Communist Party

of what Levison was doing.

The concern with Dr. King

and his connections with Stanley Levison

was that he was being influenced by the Communist Party.

- The growing menace of communism

arouses the the House of Representatives

Un-American Activities Committee.

Among the well-informed witnesses testifying

is J. Edgar Hoover,

head of the Federal Bureau of Investigations.

Mr. Hoover speaks with authority on the subject.

- The Communist Party of the United States

is a fifth column if there ever was one.

It is far better organized than were the Nazis

in occupied countries prior to their capitulation.

They are seeking to weaken America.

Their goal is the overflow of our government.

- To some people, J. Edgar Hoover

was a great American,

a hero who stood up against crime and communism.

To others, he was a figure of profound evil

who terrified those he disapproved of

with police powers at his command.

To everybody, he symbolized the FBI.

- The Federal Bureau of Investigations

is as close to you as your nearest telephone.

It seeks to be your protector

in all matters with its jurisdiction.

It belongs to you.

- J. Edgar Hoover was the head of the FBI

for 48 years, from 1924 to 1972.

And it's a really astounding span of time.

He went from a period in which Washington

was kind of a nothing backwater

to a moment when it was really

the pinnacle of American power,

and he helped build a lot of that.

- The communists have been, still are,

and always will be a menace to freedom,

to democratic ideal, to the worship of God

and to America's way of life.

- From the moment that he entered government,

it was his job to figure out

who was dangerous to the country, who was too revolutionary,

who belonged to a subversive organization.

Hoover understood himself really

as the guardian of the American way of life.

But he had a very particular vision of what that meant.

He understood it really as a society

of certain kinds of racial and gender hierarchies,

a society in which White men were the natural actors,

the natural rulers.

- I want to talk to you, fighting men and women,

about the battle of the United States.

- I think for Hoover,

particularly in his early years,

communists were in some sense,

the ultimate subversives.

He saw them as disruptive of a kind of law and order,

of a certain kind of social order.

He saw them as disruptive on questions of race.

- The Workers Communist Party of America

puts forward correctly as it's central slogan,

abolition of the whole system of race discrimination,

full racial, social and political equality

for the Negro people.

- Black America was always

a particular focus of the FBI,

because there was the presumption that Black people

are somehow more susceptible to recruitment

for a dangerous ideology.

- We are all familiar with the fact

that the communists have been agitating racial problems,

racial disunity in our nation

for the last several years.

That's the reason that you've seen

racial agitators like Martin Luther King rise on the scene

and get all kinds of national publicity.

This was intended.

They would like nothing more than to see a civil war

in the 1960s in the United States.

- The FBI quite understandably asks itself,

How come has someone who was once

so important in American communism

now turned up at the right hand

of Martin Luther King Jr.?

Within a few weeks,

the FBI goes to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy

for Kennedy's approval

to begin wiretapping Levison

at his home and office in New York.

- Among the most familiar words

of the founders of the Republic,

are those affirming that all men are created equal,

and that they are endowed with certain rights

of which they can not be deprived.

It is a sad shortcoming of our history,

that while asserting these high principles of equality,

we have never completely lived up to them,

nor have these injustices and discriminations

been peculiar to any one part of our country.

- How bad is the complaint today?

After all, the United States has changed a lot,

the Negro's rights are protected under the law.

What exactly, how much has this system changed

between then and now?

- Well, it has changed a good deal.

It is far from what it ought to be,

but I can see many, many changes

that have taken place over the last few years.

And the problem now is to move from token integration

to overall integration,

where it involves more than just

a few students in a school.

More than just a few lunch counters open,

more than gaining justice in the courts

in a few situations, but in every situation.

- The next target of the civil rights movement

was Birmingham, Alabama.

In 1963, the most segregated city in the nation,

and for Blacks, a place to die

if you tried to be a person.

- Staying calm under fire

is necessary for your survival.

It's also necessary for your success,

but it's very hard not to get emotional

when people are trying to kill you.

- There is no middle ground in this fight,

there's no middle ground in this struggle.

You're either for us, or you're against us.

You've heard that said time and time again.

Yes my friends, you are either for us,

or you are against us.

- We will trying to reveal the truth

about segregation in the South.

- I will not rest

until we are able to make this kind of witness in this city,

so that the power structure downtown will have to say,

we can't stop this movement,

and the only way to deal it

is to give these people what we owe them

and what their God-given rights

and their constitutional rights demand.

- In a very emotional and volatile environment,

it was important for us to come off

as reasonable, sane and patriotic.

'Cause we were.

We just wanted America to be what America

said it was supposed to be.

- And they go talking about these little levels of progress

that we see here and there and they say,

you know, you've made great progress.

Aren't you satisfied?

No, we are not satisfied.

- Well, of course, I feel that the communist movement

is behind all of the racial demonstrations in this country,

and I have only, I have a statement here

that J. Edgar Hoover made in 1958.

"The Negro situation is also being exploited

"fully and continuously by communists on a national scale.

"So as to create unrest, dissension and confusion

"in the minds of the American people."

- Both Bobby Kennedy

and his brother, the president,

were on record as supporters of Dr. King.

As supporters of the civil rights movement.

But when the FBI begins insisting,

that King is susceptible to influence

from this dangerous Soviet-connected figure,

Robert Kennedy, and in time his brother, the president too,

tell him that he needs to distance himself,

and really sever his connection with Levison.

- The leaders of the march are now coming

down the northwest driveway of the white House.

They'll shortly be going in to see the president.

- It was June 22nd, 1963.

President Kennedy is meeting

with several civil rights leaders.

- They are being led by Walter Reuther of the UAW,

Martin Luther King, James Farmer,

Whitney Young of the Urban League.

- President Kennedy,

he asked Dr. King to stay behind

and he and Dr. King went for a walk in the Rose Garden.

And Kennedy said,

My brother, the Attorney General and J. Edgar Hoover,

we have some, we've got some bad news.

Some people you're very close to are openly communist.

Kennedy said, you know, we're in this thing

together pretty closely, you know?

Anything happens to you

is gonna reflect very badly on myself

and Bobby as Attorney General.

You gotta distance yourself.

You can't have anything to do with these people.

- Even hearing it from President Kennedy,

King is unwilling to believe

that these FBI allegations about Levison

have any real truth to them.

- Dr. King, it's been alleged that you have been slow

to sever your ties with alleged communists

in the civil rights movement,

even after government officials

have warned you against them.

- The only person that they identified

that had any connection

with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

was removed.

- Dr. King was advised again and again,

to avoid getting into any public spat with J. Edgar Hoover.

- Well, this places you in the direct opposite position

of the Director of the federal Bureau of Investigations,

J. Edgar Hoover, who gave some testimony recently

to the contrary.

- I would hope that the FBI would come out

and say something that I think is much more significant.

And that is that it is amazing

that so few Negroes have turned to communism

in the light of their desperate plight.

I think it is one of the amazing developments

of the 20th century,

how loyal the Negro has remained to America,

in spite of his long night of oppression and discrimination.

- When the FBI begins wiretapping Levison,

what they're hoping to find is evidence

that he is still in some manner, a communist agent.

The FBI's theory was disproven.

- All right, I'll tell him. Thank you.

- But at the same time, King was less than honest

with both Robert Kennedy and John Kennedy,

in telling them that he would break off

contact with Levison.

- The FBI realizes

that the relationship continues,

'cause they're wiretapping.

They can see this all playing out.

This of course enraged the FBI.

Hoover was very upset about this,

because he saw it as evidence

that just as he had suspected all along,

King was lying, he was deceiving,

that there was in fact a plot,

that these ties were very close.

It really only reinforced his sense

that there was something bigger going on.

- By mid 1963, the FBI was fully aware

that King was remaining in touch with Levison,

through their mutual friend, Clarence Jones.

- The FBI in Peace and War.

Tonight's story, the fixer.

- One day, I come home and my wife says,

"I didn't know you had arranged

"for the telephone company to come

"and put in new wiring for our phones."

I said, "What are you talking about?"

She said, "I don't know, they just put in

"a whole new thing into one of our closets."

I thought about it maybe several hours later and I said,

I said "Ann, did they call you?"

"Yeah, they called me up.

"They said they had talked to you."

And shortly after that, I began to think that,

okay, my phone was tapped.

- Just a few weeks later in early August of 1963,

Dr. King goes to stay at Jones' home for a few days.

Hearing Dr. King on the Jones' home wiretap

is the accidental way by which the FBI first learns

that King has this non-monogamous private life.

And with those intercepts of King at Clarence Jones' home,

the Bureau's motivation shift.

- Yes.

- O'Hara? - Yes?

- Gaines. Maybe I got something.

- I'll be right over.

- Right.

- It's crystal clear that what the Bureau,

by the end of 1963 wants,

is to get recordings of King having sexual relations

with various girlfriends.

- Here's the rare opportunity we promised.

Here's one of the great voices in America,

Dr. Martin Luther King.

- It's rare, Doctor, that we get a chance

to see you in New York.

Are we cover,

oh yes, with the microphone over there.

Do you visit here often?

- Oh, I'm in New York almost every other week at least.

There's always something happening in New York,

so you can't avoid coming to New York.

- You've discovered it's a fun city?

- Well, I haven't...

- I haven't quite discovered that side of New York.

Being a Baptist clergyman,

they keep me involved in other areas.

- Right.

- Your home is actually in Atlanta.

- Atlanta, that's right. - Atlanta, Georgia.

Have you lived there all your life?

- I was born in Atlanta

and went to school in Atlanta through college,

and then I went to theological seminary

and graduate school in the North.

- Mrs. King, of course lives in Atlanta.

- Oh yes, she is from Alabama originally, but,

- All along, I have supported my husband.

Whatever happens to him, it happens to me.

- And children?

- Yes, we have four children.

- Ah, What would their ages be, Doctor?

- 11, 9, 6 and 4.

We have two girls and two boys.

- Do you have a church at this time in Atlanta?

- Yes, I'm the co-pastor

of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta,

and my father is pastor.

- Both you and your father.

- Well, he makes it clear sometimes consciously

and sometimes unconsciously, that he is the pastor.

- Right. - And I'm the co-pastor.

- What has the civil rights movement done

to the Negro individually?

- Well, I think the greatest thing that it has done

is that it has given the Negro

a new sense of somebodiness.

The Negro has straightened his back up, so to speak,

and you can't ride a man's back unless it's bent.

And I'm not at all pessimistic about the future,

because I think the Negro has a kind of determination,

and I think there are numerous allies in the White community

with the same kind of determination.

And with this kind of creative and constructive coalition,

we can move forward,

even to solve these more difficult problems

that I have mentioned.

- Welcome, ladies and gentlemen,

to "Let's Look at Congress".

Today I have a guest for you

that I know will be a great treat to see.

- Congressman Keating, I am very happy indeed

to have this opportunity

of appearing with you on your television program.

- And Mr. Hoover, to what extent

do you in your work use wiretapping?

That's always a question that people wonder about.

- I'm very glad you asked me that question,

Congressman Keating.

The FBI was authorized to utilize wiretaps

only in those cases involving treason,

or subversive activities, sabotage and espionage.

And I can say to you as of this moment,

there are less than 90 wiretaps in the entire United States

and territories of our country.

- While I'm sure that will disabuse many people's minds

of the wide use of it,

- The FBI had sort of interesting set of policies

about surveillance.

There'd been a lot of public discussion,

a lot of court cases around wiretapping.

So that's the telephone.

- Often, when the FBI was gonna wiretap someone,

they had to get the authority of the Attorney General.

That was policy that was more or less law.

- My colleagues and I in the Department of Justice

are your representatives in the federal courts of the land.

- Citing the danger of Levison

and King's apparent dishonesty,

Robert Kennedy authorizes for the first time,

wiretaps on King himself in Atlanta.

The FBI is not really telling Attorney General Kennedy

that it has this other agenda.

- When the FBI first started conducting

overt surveillance of King,

it really had something of a national security logic,

or at least they presented it that way.

The theory was, there were communists

within the civil rights movement,

the Communist Party was very tied to the Soviet Union,

but one of the things that I think we can take from this

is how easy it is for that to morph into something else.

As those taps, and as that surveillance really began,

the FBI found out all sorts of things about King.

And very quickly, while they still had some concern

with the communist question,

it begins to become something

that's much more about King's personal life,

about him as a man, about his sex life,

about his family, about his confidants,

and about really his private life.

It happened really without the approval

or authority of anyone outside of the FBI.

- As soon as the wiretap on King's home

begins in late 1963,

within weeks, the FBI begins convening meetings

to discuss, how can we further exploit

all of these extramarital recordings?

And that is transparently why Bill Sullivan,

as the head of FBI Domestic Intelligence,

made the decision that the FBI should expand

its electronic surveillance of Dr. King,

from just wiretapping, to also using microphones, AKA bugs.

Sullivan's focus was collecting

salacious sexual material on King.

- And the FBI had a very elaborate

and very complicated process

for getting those bugs to the right places.

- Call Blandon.

- Now, in a Willard Hotel type of situation,

the FBI and its buddies on the hotel staff

could decide in advance,

what room is Martin Luther King gonna be assigned to,

and have the microphones in place.

- They would set up the bugs in his hotel rooms,

and usually would take the room either next door

or downstairs somewhere,

where they could affect listen to the recordings,

monitor what was going on,

and sometimes, you know,

observe physically who was going in and out of the room,

'cause when you have a recording,

all you have are a bunch of voices.

One of the challenges of those recordings

is trying to figure out,

particularly in sexual situations

with more than a couple of people involved,

who's saying what, who's doing what?

And so there was physical surveillance then involved,

to know who was in the room, who appeared to sound what way,

and what they might be up to.

- Down this Avenue of sadness,

they bring President John F. Kennedy, martyred hero,

to lie in state under the great dome of the Capitol.

- No memorial, oration or eulogy

could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory,

than the earliest possible passage

of the Civil Rights Bill for which he fought so long.

- Congress passes

the most sweeping civil rights bill

ever to be written into the law.

And thus reaffirms the conception of equality for all men,

that began with Lincoln and the Civil War, 100 years ago.

The Negro won his freedom then,

he wins his dignity now.

Five hours after the House passes the measure,

the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is signed at the white House

by President Johnson.

Before an audience of legislators and civil rights leaders

who have labored long and hard for passage of the bill,

President Johnson calls for all Americans,

to back what he calls, "A turning point in history."

Integration leader, Martin Luther King, receives his pen,

a gift he said he would cherish.

The Department of Justice will enforce the law if necessary,

And G-man chief, J. Edgar Hoover, is present.

Now in this summer of 1964,

the Civil Rights Bill is the law of the land.

In the words of the president,

it restricts no one's freedom,

so long as he respects the rights of others.

- This is an extremely moving moment in my life.

- We didn't know anything about it.

We didn't even know that Dr. King had been nominated

until it was announced that he had received the Nobel Prize.

- I do not consider this, merely an honor to me personally,

but a tribute to the discipline, wise restraint

and majestic courage of the millions of gallant Negros

and White persons of goodwill

who have followed a non-violent course

in seeking to establish the reign of justice

and the rule of love across this nation of ours.

- Do you plan to go personally, do you?

- Yes, I definitely plan to go.

- The missus can go with you?

- Well, I certainly hope so,

and I'm sure that we can work out

a way for her to get there,

being a mother and four children,

it's not easy to get away all the time,

but I'm sure that on this occasion,

she will be accompanying me.

- I was with him down in Bimini,

shortly after the announcement.

Bimini didn't have any phones and there was no television.

There was nothing much to do on Bimini,

and he was working on his Nobel Prize speech,

but all of a sudden,

you know, these helicopters started coming in.

It was all the national press

that had found out where we were.

And they came and they told us

that Hoover had made the speech to a women's organization,

that Martin Luther King was the world's most notorious liar.

Well, I don't know what he was lying about.

- Well, naturally I was shocked and greatly surprised

that Mr. Hoover would make such an unwarranted

and vicious accusation.

I don't think Mr. Hoover would have made such a statement

if he had not been under a great deal of pressure.

- Do you believe the FBI is doing all it can

to resolve civil rights complaints?

- While I don't know all of the inner workings of the FBI,

I do know that in cases

that do not involve Negros and civil rights,

the FBI moves with dispatch,

it has the machinery, the know-how.

The fact remains that in spite

of all of the brutalities we faced in Albany, Georgia,

not a single arrest was made,

in spite of the fact that four

unoffending innocent Negro girls

were brutally murdered in a church in Birmingham, Alabama,

not a single arrest has been made.

And in spite of the fact that the civil rights workers

were killed this summer in Mississippi,

we haven't seen a single arrest.

- After Hoover denounced Martin Luther King

as the most notorious liar in the United States,

it produced a real showdown between Hoover and King.

- I have an old comment to make on that.

- How are you feeling, Mr. Hoover?

- Excellent.

- Is there any response on your part

to the suggestions that you resign?

- That's the wish.

- Thank you very much, sir.

- Hoover and King only met face-to-face once.

They agreed to sit down on Hoover's turf in Hoover's office,

and try to make peace.

King showed up.

He brought a few of his closest advisers and aides with him.

There was no press inside that office

when they sat down together.

By all accounts, Hoover kinda talked at them for awhile,

and then King emerged saying,

You know, all good.

- Did he apologize to you or in any way indicate regret

for what he had said?

- Well, I must say that the conference was friendly

and that Mr. Hoover talked in a very amiable away,

so that, in a very friendly manner.

The whole talk was very friendly,

and I think he saw it to get over through some of the,

- Do you feel your visit here then was a success,

or how would you characterize it?

- Well, I would say it was a success

in the sense that I think we developed

new levels of understanding,

and as I said to him in the beginning,

I felt that this was a basic necessity.

- Did he specifically mention his comment

about being a liar?

- I think we'll have to end it here.

- Ultimately King and Hoover

pretended to come to some sort of accord out of that,

but it was a big controversy

and it was a polarizing controversy.

- What do you think of Martin Luther King?

- Well sir, I don't know.

I read a lot about him.

- Well, I don't care for him. He's too bossy.

Thinks he's too smart.

- I think he's a very wonderful man trying to help our race.

- Well, you know what Hoover thought about him.

I think he's about 10 times as bad as Hoover said.

- Wait, why do you feel that way, sir?

- Well, I guess from all the trouble

he's caused in this country,

all this rioting and things,

I just think he's about the worst,

if he is a human, about the worst in the world.

- Probably my favorite public opinion poll,

which tells us something

about how radically different this moment was,

in the aftermath of that showdown,

fully 50% of the public sided with J. Edgar Hoover,

around 15, 20% sided with Martin Luther King,

and a bunch of other people

said they weren't following it and didn't know,

but Hoover was the universally beloved figure,

King was the controversial figure,

and I think we tend to forget that.

- One of the things

that's helped to legitimize the FBI

is American popular culture.

- The FBI.

- I think that we're constantly battling

with popular representations of police, FBI,

and federal agents,

- NY-20, go ahead.

- As our saviors.

- The FBI was incredibly good under Hoover

at promoting an image of itself,

really as the heroes of America.

- Hey Mr. Hoover, your G-men sure are good.

I'd like to be one when I grow up.

- If you work hard, play hard, you're gonna one.

- one of the most important things that Hoover did

was to create a Bureau, really in his own image.

That meant that he hired a very particular kind of person

as an agent.

A relatively conservative White man

of a certain height and a certain weight.

He particularly liked fraternity boys and football players,

but there's a reason that people know

when you say that's a G-man,

there's something that you have in mind.

It's a man in a suit, a White man,

probably about six feet tall, buff, conservative,

that was what Hoover wanted.

- Time Magazine says that Martin Luther King, Jr.

has made himself the unchallenged voice of the Negro people.

That he has become to millions

in the North and in the South,

the symbol of the Negro revolution.

He is a member of the clergy,

he has been called the American Gandhi,

he is with us today from Atlanta, Georgia,

where he is president

of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

We'll have a question now from Gay Pauley.

- The non-violence always end up with violence,

or almost always, Dr. King.

What excuse or what reason

do you offer for this approach

of creating a crisis atmosphere in a community,

which leads to bloodshed,

as it has in many Southern cities and some Northern?

- Well, I think we should see

the source of the bloodshed first,

and we must understand the real non-violent creed.

- Well, doesn't this crisis atmosphere though,

create or endanger the Negro's cause

by creating among the Whites a resentment

or feeling that the Negro is moving too rapidly,

asking too much so suddenly?

Does this worry you that this atmosphere

could be created, or is?

- Well, I think this is a temporary response

in any social revolution.

- Or doesn't it hurt your cause?

- I don't think so.

Ultimately I think it helps it

in the final analysis.

The only way people can grapple with their prejudices

is to admit that they have them.

And so often people don't realize they have them,

and so often people don't realize

or honestly acknowledge that that is a problem.

And it is necessary, in the nonviolent movement,

to bring the issue to the surface

so that people are forced to deal with it,

and to deal with their conscience on the issue.

- I call upon you.

I have the great honor on behalf of the Nobel Committee,

to hand over to you the insignia of the Nobel Peace Prize,

the Diploma and the gold medal.

- Thank you very much. - Thank you very much.

- Now, this is the greatest honor that King has received.

And the fact that King is now being

internationally celebrated as a moral leader,

deeply angers and offends both Hoover and Sullivan.

- He was upset that this young Black man,

who I think at that time was 34, 35,

is being recognized around the world

as a pioneer in peace and justice.

Hoover was being ignored, and he blamed us.

- Now, what am I gonna do about Martin Luther King

with all these reports that are coming in on him all night?

And there's somebody,

did somebody tell him, watch his conduct?

now, they're pressing me to attend a dinner in his honor

in New York.

I can't do that, can I?

- I would think you could,

but I wouldn't advise you to.

I'd find some other reason why you can't.

- The FBI is frustrated

that even though they've successfully caught King

in 15 or more hotel rooms,

and they've distributed this behind the scenes

to church leaders, to reporters,

nothing's publicly happened.

That despite all of the hundreds and hundreds of man hours

that they've put into this,

King has not been personally destroyed.

- For Hoover, you know, a lot of this is framed

as a matter of hypocrisy.

Here's the sainted minister

presenting himself as this great moral authority,

but we actually know he's this sick,

dirty, perverted creature.

And you see that kind of language all over FBI documents.

- The FBI surveillance of Dr. King,

it was special in the fact that whatever city he went to,

it was all hands on deck.

Everything else stopped.

Hoover was obsessed with Martin Luther King

and his activities.

From what I heard, there were some photographs,

whoever was in them,

that just kind of fed that mindset of Hoover

but this was a dangerous man

and they need to be removed.

- Now, this is not the way

that Sullivan or Hoover themselves would have said it,

but there was a radicalism to King's sexuality

that they viewed as offensive.

- For Hoover in particular,

he himself tried to be a very tightly controlled person

when it came to matters of his personal life

and his sexuality

and the way that he policed the boundaries of that.

Now that's a complicated story in its own right.

- Hoover, and particularly Bill Sullivan,

the head of Domestic Intelligence,

paternalistically thought that Martin Luther King Jr.

was morally unfit to be a leader of Black America.

- I think for Hoover as well,

who was really raised

in a Southern segregationist tradition,

a set of really outsized fears

about Black men's sexuality,

about Black men as rapists,

as people who don't know how to control

their sexual appetites, right?

They're looking at what they're finding out about King

and sort of seeing it through that lens

and narrating it through that kind of language.

- Dr. Martin Luther King can call himself a Christian,

and he mixes White women, colored women

and men and women all together.

- I think that this interest

in the sexual life of King,

this is just inseparable

from the history of racial violence in the United States.

- Now, can you look in these stripes of red on this flag,

knowing very well that your forefathers,

yes, yours, not mine, yours, all of them,

that that stripe represents that blood

that they spilled on this soil, American soil,

something that you have never had to do

to give you this God-given right

of racial character and a inheritance.

- When we think about the U.S.

as it emerges from the Civil War,

you have this idea that formerly enslaved people

should be integrated into the body politic.

And there is an enormous pushback,

not only from supporters of the Confederacy,

but the problem of race is a national problem as well.

One of the core justifications

for preventing Black male suffrage was deviance.

That Black people are deviant.

That Black men in the state house

are a threat to White women.

And it's this representation

of Black political aspiration as sexual threat.

And unfortunately, that's an ever recurring theme.

This mobilization of black sexuality

as a justification for murder, for exclusion,

for discrimination and for incarceration.

This is a fabric of American history.

- This was a way that you could bring down

a very successful, influential Black civil rights leader,

and contain the movement by destroying its figurehead.

And so it's at that moment that the FBI decide

that they're really gonna operationalize,

and go quite overtly after King.

- When you stand up against the forces of evil,

you will be persecuted for righteousness' sake.

In the words of the spiritual,

you will be buked and scorned.

You will be talked about, you will be lied on,

you will be persecuted in many ways,

you will be thrown again,

maybe into narrowed and frustrating jail cells.

I can't promise you that you can avoid this.

- We used to have these conference calls

at least three times a week late at night.

10 or 11 o'clock at night.

And I was convinced then, the FBI was tapping our phones.

I just said, "I'm sure they're doing it."

Dr. King became so annoyed at me for repeatedly saying this.

"Clarence," he said, "Don't you know the FBI

"has got more important and better things to do

"than to be wiretapping our phones?"

But there did come a day when he became more suspicious.

And then there came a day, certain.

When the FBI mailed the tape of Dr. King with other women,

mailed it to him and to Coretta,

with an advice that he should go kill himself,

that's when he knew.

- I think there've always been

a couple of really important tensions within the FBI.

One is being a very rule-bound organization,

a very professional organization,

an organization very attuned to jurisdiction and law,

and then being an organization that was almost law-less.

- The Bureau has all of these

hotel room recordings,

and so Sullivan has his underlings

compose a greatest hits compendium tape,

and then sits down on his own typewriter,

to draft an anonymous threatening letter to King.

- This is a reportedly

from an admirer within the movement

who has found out about King's sexual indiscretions,

feels betrayed by it,

and writes this full page, really scurrilous letter

denouncing King as a beast and a pervert,

and a monster, a hypocrite,

and in fact saying, "I know what you've done."

- It's clearly a very poor quality attempt

of someone who is sort of culturally clueless

to pass as Black.

- They put this package together and send it off,

saying, "King, you know what you have to do."

and giving him a deadline by which he needs to do it.

Many people have interpreted that

to be that you need to kill yourself.

And this is one of the ways that King

and his confidants who saw this letter interpreted it.

There's some ambiguity there,

but it is one of the most notorious and dirty tricks

that the FBI ever, ever conducted in the 1960s.

- Have you read that letter?

- Yes, I have.

I was sick to my stomach, actually.

I mean, I didn't throw up, but I felt ill reading it,

and that's what I mean when I say,

I think this entire episode

represents the darkest part of the Bureau's history.

- The package was sent to the office.

I think it was mailed to us from somewhere in Florida.

We never saw it.

It was put in a box, and sent to Coretta.

So she opened it up and she played it,

and then she called the office and said,

"Look, somebody has sent a tape in here

"trying to get Martin to kill himself.

"And they have a recording

of some man and woman in the bed."

I didn't even want to hear it, you know?

This was designed to upset him.

We always assume that Hoover was behind it.

My philosophy about the movement is that

unless I saw something with my own eyes,

you really have to be careful what you believe.

- I'm here because I want you to know

that I'm with you and that I am with my husband.

As the wife a major symbol of the civil rights movement,

I think I can say that, without boasting,

I think it's a fact,

I have had the privilege of being perhaps

closer to him than anybody else,

and perhaps that maybe I understand him

better than anyone else.

And therefore, I think I have a pretty good understanding

of the whole struggle.

- In the immediate wake of Mrs. King,

Dr. King and King's closest aides

listening to the anonymous,

embarrassing tape recording from the FBI,

Dr. King undergoes a real emotional crisis.

And it's an emotional crisis

that the FBI is listening in on,

thanks to its telephone wiretaps.

Dr. King is desperately afraid

that his sex life is going to be exposed in raw detail

to the American public.

Now, his life is so busy on a day-to-day basis

in early 1965,

that he's not able to worry about this

24 hours a day, seven days a week.

He's distracted from his worries

a good portion of the time.

But the emotional impact on King

of what the FBI was doing to him,

cannot be gainsaid.

King was clearly in very serious emotional turmoil

or emotional fear,

and even as a few weeks went by and nothing happened,

King always has that worry in the back of his mind,

that at some point the FBI is going to get lucky,

and some journalist, some magazine

is going to print all of this.

- This is Highway number 80, Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

You can fly it in a matter of minutes.

You can drive it in less than an hour,

or you can walk it in five days,

which is what this is all about.

- We knew that the FBI was following closely.

Almost everywhere we went,

we identified the agents.

We assumed that the rooms were bugged,

we knew that the telephones were tapped.

Dick Gregory said that,

if you're Black and not slightly paranoid,

you're really sick.

And we were slightly paranoid,

but we never let that paranoia

interfere with what we were trying to do.

- We've lived with slavery and segregation 345 years.

We've waited a long time for freedom.

Now is the time.

Make real the promises of democracy.

Now is the time to make justice a reality

for all of God's children.

- Today is a triumph for freedom,

as huge as any victory

that's ever been won on any battlefield.

- The triumphal passage of the Voting Rights Act

really highlights what a close political alliance

has developed between Martin Luther King

and President Lyndon Johnson's administration.

- Okay, hold on for this.

- Hello? - Hello?

- Is this Dr. King?

- Yeah, it's pretty bad. How are you today?

- Well, I'm doing pretty good,

and you better get thinking cap on on this conference,

because we're gonna have to rush it.

We don't wanna rush you too much,

we wanna have plenty of preliminary work

on the panels and things,

but you better, you can see here

that my Howard University speech

wasn't any too early.

- That's right, that's right.

You said, you said it right there.

That's right.

- But you put

a little of that stuff into your thing.

Refer that Howard university speech.

Nobody ever publicized that.

- Almost every speech I've made,

it's because I think it's the best statement

and analysis of the problem I've seen anywhere.

Certainly, no president has ever said it like that before.

- But if you got any suggestions

or recommendation,

why, I'm just as close as the telephone

if you got enough money to pay it,

you have my call collect.

- All right. - Goodbye.

- Increasingly now, Americans are functioning directly

in the fight for freedom

on this far forlorn corner of the earth.

The risks are real.

- We intend to convince the communists

that we cannot be defeated by force of arms

or by superior power.

They're not easily convinced.

- When Martin Luther King Jr.

first speaks out publicly against the Vietnam war

in August, 1965,

he quite quickly is forced back into line

by hostile criticism directed at him

by democratic allies of President Johnson.

- We will not be forced out of South Vietnam.

- And so King then remains silent about Vietnam,

for almost 18 months.

- During our tour in the Republic of Vietnam,

we have all seen what communism can do

to a struggling nation in our world community.

- When King is on his way to Jamaica in early 1967,

and while waiting for a flight,

he buys some magazines in an airport gift shop.

And in an issue of Ramparts magazine,

he sees a whole series of photos about the impact

of US Air Force napalm bombing on Vietnamese civilians.

Non-violence for King was not simply

a civil rights protest tactic.

King believed that nonviolence was a Christian ethic

that should be applied around the world,

not just by Black demonstrators.

- Let us pray.

- Only in early 1967 does King's conscience

begin to so trouble him about his prolonged silence,

that he forces himself to go public once again,

knowing full well that in doing so,

it will break his political alliance with Lyndon Johnson,

and bring down very widespread

political criticism on his head.

- And of course, it's always good to come back to Riverside.

- The worst press

that Martin Luther King received, I think in his lifetime,

was exactly one year before his assassination.

- I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight,

because my conscience leaves me no other choice.

A time comes when silence is betrayal.

And that time has come for us, in relation to Vietnam.

- He reminded President Johnson, he could count.

- How was there gonna be any money for the war on poverty

when all the money

that was being set aside for the war on poverty

was being spent to build bombs?

- You know, America is a rich nation.

The richest nation on the face of earth.

Now, you know what's wrong?

Our national priorities are mixed up.

And I'm afraid the national administration of our country

is more concerned about winning the war in Vietnam

than winning the war against poverty

right here in the United States.

- He was attacked from coast to coast,

simply from describing the world as it really is.

And this was not the racist Southern press.

This was the New York Times and the Washington Post

and the LA Times, and you know?

I mean, everybody blasted him for having an opinion.

- King went to communist training school,

and I don't want anything to do with communists.

- Are you sure of this?

- Look right here.

- Is that your only proof?

- We have proof, and we are satisfied that it's true proof.

- When he publicly spoke out against the war,

the persons he had known and been close to for years,

turned against him.

- And we don't see any reason

for downgrading civil rights

and elevating the peace movement above it,

especially the indignities our people are suffering.

The main show for us is right here, it's civil rights.

- Yeah, he was hurting and depressed,

and he is, you know, the pressure of the home

and his marriage and so forth.

You know, it was getting to him.

- It wasn't that he was right or wrong.

He didn't have any business having an opinion.

see?

He realized how sick this country was,

and he felt that he couldn't slow down

and he had the push on regardless.

- I weighed the criticisms that I would get.

I thought about even the fact

that some Negroes wouldn't understand,

and some respectable Negro leaders

who are more concerned

about being invited to the White House

than invited to the calls of justice would be against me.

- In the wake of Dr. King's

Riverside Church speech,

Lyndon Johnson's White House,

very explicitly identifies King

as a major threat to the president's policies.

- I'm convinced that it will lead to widespread discontent

and disenchantment with administration

if there isn't a change in the policy,

and an all out effort to deescalate the war

and bring an end to it.

- Stick with civil rights.

Leave the war to the generals.

- Now, Lyndon Johnson's White House

had always been privy to the FBI's

sexual surveillance of Dr. King.

But now, Lyndon Johnson comes to view Martin Luther King

as an enemy.

And the FBI is eager to strengthen

its own relationship with president Johnson,

by jumping on this anti-King bandwagon with greater fervor.

- I just got word that Martin Luther King

will give a press conference

at 11 o'clock this morning in Atlanta.

King was told by Levison,

who is his principal advisor,

and who is a secret communist,

that he has more to gain nationally

by agreeing with the violence

that is coming out against it.

That's the substance of information.

We've got that highly confidentially

over the technicals.

Well, I'll have for you tomorrow

that memorandum you want on all the riots in the country.

- That's right,

and I want you to keep your men busy

to find a central connection.

I wouldn't be a damn bit surprised

that this poverty group here

is not stirring up some of this.

- We'll dig into that very thoroughly.

- Okay.

- Fine, thank you, Mr. President.

- So many resources are mobilized

against suppressing dissent in the U. S.

The FBI has done extensive surveillance

of all kinds of Black organizations.

- Don't be afraid. Don't be ashamed.

We want Black power.

Black power!

- We want Black power.

- Black power!

- We want Black power.

- Black power!

- We want Black power.

- When you look at the social movements

from the point of view of these law enforcement agencies,

it looks very different.

- We stand on the eve of a Black revolution, brothers.

Masses of our people are in the streets.

They're fighting tit-for-tat,

tooth for tooth, an eye for an eye and a life for a life.

The rebellions that we see are merely dress rehearsals

for the revolution that's to come.

We better get ourselves some guns and prepare ourselves.

- The Bureau was of course anticommunist,

but I'd say it's most consistent campaigns

were against Black people.

Whether it's William Sullivan or J. Edgar Hoover,

the policy was consistent.

They saw African Americans as,

you know, J. Edgar Hoover

has said about the Black Panther Party,

that they were the greatest threat

to the internal security of the United States.

- The use of informants has existed for years and years

by law enforcement agencies.

You even find reference to it in the Bible.

In the time of Moses.

Certainly you cannot expect to be able to penetrate

the secret, conspiratorial organizations

without using secret agents.

- There were FBI informants in most domestic groups

in the United States.

That was the only way you can investigate them,

especially if they were Black organizations.

You know, we didn't have that many Black agents back then,

so you had to have individuals inside that organization

to get inside information.

It was just, you had to.

- The general strategy of intelligence services

is that they use surveillance in order to figure out

how to break apart these organizations.

So it's not just surveillance for surveillance sake.

It is to observe the organizations

to figure out what their points of vulnerability are,

and then purposely insert people into those conflicts.

- It's in the late 1950s that the FBI

founds this super secret program, COINTELPRO,

counter-intelligence program,

that allows them not just to conduct surveillance,

but to begin to disrupt the organizations quite explicitly.

Spread rumors within the organization,

foment violence, et cetera.

- You have to be astonished

just at the number of sources that they had.

When you look through these FBI reports,

I mean, they've got scores and scores of people.

Ernest Withers was probably the most successful

civil rights photographer you never heard of.

He was very much a movement insider

and covered the civil rights movement

from its very dawn.

He shot a very monumental picture of Dr. King on the bus

at the end of the Montgomery bus boycott.

You know, a very radical,

revolutionary moment in American history,

and Ernest Withers was right there in the middle of it.

Ernest had a completely different side to him

that no one knew about,

and that was that he doubled as an informant for the FBI

for as many as 18 years.

- We had an informant in our office.

- James Harrison?

- I'm not calling the names.

- Jim Harrison is a paid FBI informant

in SCLC's office

sitting a few yards from Martin Luther King, Jr..

Having someone like Harrison,

would allow for a very efficient daily reporting

on where's King gonna be traveling,

what's he gonna be doing?

What are people in the office concerned about?

- I did not know

that he was in fact, an FBI informant.

I did not know in fact,

but I believed that he was.

And I tried to counsel Martin,

to don't let him know more than he needs to know.

- We now know that Harrison had worked

as an informant for the FBI in two other cities.

It seems beyond a possible coincidence

that he moves to Atlanta

and volunteers to work at SCLC

without some suggestion or instruction from the FBI.

- It's not really that surprising,

knowing now what we know about what the FBI was doing.

Anybody who was to the left of mainstream,

anyone who supported the anti-war movement,

anyone who got what they considered militant in civil rights

was deemed a subversive.

And they were keeping files on them.

They were running a surveillance state.

- This is where it began, the rural South.

And here where it began,

for the Negro, the problem remains.

There's no ghetto here, just poverty.

The worst kind of poverty.

The kind of poverty that makes you wonder,

can this be the United States of America,

the richest country in the world in the year 1967?

It is not just material poverty,

there is also a poverty of the spirit.

- What is it about the Negro?

I mean, every other group that came as an immigrant somehow,

not easily, but somehow got around it.

Is it just the fact that the Negroes are Black?

- The fact is that the Negro

was a slave in this country for 244 years.

That led to the thingification of the Negro.

So he was not looked upon as a person,

he was not looked upon as a human being

with the same status and worth as other human beings.

And it seems to me that White America must see

that no other ethnic group

has been a slave on American soil.

And so emancipation for the Negro

was really freedom to hunger.

It was freedom to the winds and rains of heaven.

It was freedom without food, deed, a land to cultivate,

and therefore it was freedom and famine at the same time.

And when White Americans tell the Negro

to lift themselves by his own bootstraps,

they don't look over the legacy of slavery and segregation.

I believe we ought to do all we can,

and seek to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps,

but it's a cruel jest to say to a bootless man

that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.

- King is deeply pessimistic

that America will ever undertake

the pursuit of real equality for Black people.

- Ladies and gentlemen of the press,

I'm gonna read an opening statement.

- And that leads him to announce the idea

of holding a poor people's campaign in Washington,

in the spring of 1968.

- The Southern Christian Leadership Conference

will lead waves of the nation's poor and disinherited

to Washington D. C. next spring

do demand redress of grievances

by the United States government.

We will go there, we will demand to be heard,

and we will stay until America responds.

- The FBI was deeply alarmed by these plans.

For Hoover, you know, this was his home turf.

But they're also very concerned about the kind of conflict

that might emerge out of this.

They thought it could be a significant threat

to the national Capitol in particular.

- Powerful poor people,

well really means having the ability, the togetherness,

the assertiveness and the aggressiveness

to make the power structure of this nation say, yes,

when they may be desirous of saying, no.

Black people, Mexican Americans,

American Indians, Puerto Ricans, Appalachian Whites,

all working together to solve the problem of poverty.

- It bears emphasis that William Sullivan,

the head of American Domestic Intelligence,

in late March of 1968,

begins revising and expanding the FBI's primary document

to indict Dr. King.

And chooses to add for the first time,

the rape participation allegation

to his revision of this document.

- It's unclear how much we're ever going to know

about any particular incident in Kings sexual history,

particularly the most explosive allegation that's been made.

- Handwritten annotations on this document,

alleged that King was present at the rape

of a black female parishioner by a Baltimore minister,

and that he "Looked on and laughed."

I have many, many questions about this.

It's supposed to be an audio tape,

but concluded within this document,

is the assertion that King looked on,

which I thought was strange.

That in itself to me was a huge red flag.

- The agents who were listening in in live time,

in a room right next door to where this was taking place,

did nothing.

Their focus was on gaining embarrassing material.

- We are gonna have to not assume

that everything that's said in those documents is true.

I think also not assume that everything

that's said in those documents is false.

And I also think that we have to understand

that FBI agents were making

their own very subjective judgements

about what's actually happening.

- One of the things I was really struck by this

is how much it adheres to J. Edgar Hoover

and William C. Sullivan

and the FBI's representations of King.

The agents were really rewarded

for finding this kind of material

that would undermine the civil rights movement

and other Black organizations.

And so in some ways, it provides this grand narrative

that has this allegedly big revelation

in the context of this larger life of misconduct.

- Sullivan is updating and expanding this document,

because of the political threat

to the Johnson administration

that this Poor People's Campaign represents.

All of a sudden, Sullivan's work on this revision halts.

And it halts because Dr. King is murdered.

- The night before his assassination,

King gave one of the most remarkable speeches

of his whole career.

One of the themes was the idea

that protest itself was really in peril.

You were seeing crackdowns all across the country

increasing concerns about violence,

and he was really making a claim that in Memphis,

it wasn't just the rights of workers,

it wasn't just racial justice that was on the line,

but it was also the right to speech,

the right to protest, the First Amendment itself.

- If I lived in China or even Russia,

or any totalitarian country,

Maybe I could understand the denial

of certain basic First Amendment privileges,

because they hadn't committed themselves to that over there.

But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly.

Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech.

Somewhere I read of the freedom of press.

Somewhere I read that the greatness of America

is the right to protest for right.

- Good evening.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, 39 years old,

and a Nobel Peace Prize winner,

and the leader of the nonviolent

civil rights movement in the United States

was assassinated in Memphis tonight.

A sniper's bullet cut down Dr. King,

as he stood on a hotel balcony in Memphis.

- The special bulletin phrased on the television

that Dr. King had been shot.

And I just stood there, you know, a long time.

And then little while later,

they said Dr. King was dead.

And I was angry.

There was a whole lot of other people who were angry.

- We are very upset today,

because we've lost in our generation,

somebody like a father.

In our lifetimes, people 25 and 26,

he's the first major man we ever saw

who started a bus ride and everything like that.

And today, many people are out here on the street

wondering which way they're going to turn,

because we don't know where we're going to go.

Do we go to the right, do we go to the left?

We're not sure today.

- I don't think the FBI had a deep interest

in protecting King.

In fact, there are many moments

in which the FBI refused to act

in a kind of bodyguard capacity or even a warning capacity

when King was under threat.

In the end, after Hoover felt

that he was under enormous pressure,

the FBI did conduct a pretty decent, wide-ranging,

incredibly labor intensive investigation

to find someone who was involved in King's assassination.

- The man named as James Earl Ray

was arrested at quarter past 11 this morning

by two Scotland Yard detectives

as he passed through the British immigration offices

for a flight to Brussels.

An announcement

by the American FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover,

said the man was fully armed with a loaded pistol,

and he carried two Canadian passports

and a false name.

- I think once they understood

that the FBI's investigative reputation

was gonna be at stake in this case,

they poured enormous resources

to try and to bring that case home.

- Ray's life and civil rights

were being guarded more closely

than those of Martin Luther King,

whom Ray is accused of murdering.

- I was amazed that with the surveillance by the FBI,

24/7 around Dr. King and the SCLC,

that they wouldn't be aware of James Earl Ray

and the Lorraine Motel.

- I don't think James Earl Ray

had anything to do with Dr. King's assassination.

So I can't really comment on that.

- The assassination of King

and the fact that we were doing surveillance that day

when he was shot,

it's always been in the back of your mind going,

you know, did we not know this?

Could we not prevent this?

I didn't hear anything that would indicate

that headquarters knew and chose not to do anything.

I'd never saw that, I never heard that,

but it was a question everybody had,

because it was a legitimate question.

You know, why did we not intercede if we were there?

- This was an emotional,

frustrated, outraged nation.

Other people were trying to incite to violence.

We always said that the only thing that could defeat us

was violence.

And I think that's still true in this country.

I don't think,

violence will not succeed in changing this nation.

Whether it's White violence or Black violence,

or any other color violence.

- Dr. King used to laugh and joke about his death.

He said, "Look, you're gonna die.

"Death is the ultimate democracy.

"Everybody's got to die and you don't have anything to say

"about when you die, where you die.

"Your own choice is,

"what is it you give your life for?"

- Here's my first question to you.

What do you see your responsibility as a historian

when you're dealing with someone like Martin Luther King,

what's your responsibility?

- Hmm.

It varies over time.

- So, when these tapes come out in 2027,

I think it's gonna be very interesting

to see what the reaction is.

I don't know that it will create

a fundamental re-understanding

of King as a political figure,

but I do think that it will probably give us

a slightly more complicated sense of him as a human being.

- There's always been this unresolved tension

in who we are and who we say we are,

and who we wanna be.

But there was always this emotional enthusiasm

that we could change the world.

- Did he have sexual relationships with women

other than his married wife?

Yes, he did.

I can't change that.

That's a matter of factual history.

Does that make him, in my mind,

less of an historic civil leader?

No, it does not.

- I just don't think that the tapes

should see the light of day.

As I said, they would serve no purpose whatsoever.

And I don't see anything good that can come about it.

I see bad things that could come about it.

- I don't know enough about

what might be in the tapes to react,

except I'd say this:

I've never met a perfect human.

There are no perfect humans.

There's not one speaking to you now,

and so I would hope that no matter what is revealed,

and maybe there'll be nothing new revealed about Dr. King,

people are able to understand that people are complex,

and it doesn't detract from what a person did for the good.

- I think it's easy for us to look back

at what the FBI was doing during Hoover's years

and be outraged by it, and rightly so,

but I also think there's an image

of J. Edgar Hoover as being some sort of rogue actor,

behind the scenes,

and being kind of out of step with the American mainstream.

But the truth is that a lot of this

wasn't particularly secret.

A lot of people understood what the FBI was up to,

and in fact, they supported it.

- The FBI was not a renegade agency.

It was fundamentally a part, a core part

of the existing mainstream American political order.

- I don't know what's in the 2027 releases,

but I don't think that this will impact

the assessment of Dr. King's legacy.

The 1960s, the post-war years

are a period of real transformation.

One thing that's really important is that we acknowledge

that Black people have only truly had citizen rights

for the last 50 plus years. It's so recent.

Looking at the FBI campaigns against King,

the Black Panther Party, and many other people,

I think there's a core component to this

that really is structural and functional.

People hold these attitudes,

and we focus on J. Edgar Hoover's

own particular history and person,

but I think that these are attitudes

that have been core to how the racial order

operates in the U. S.

What helped motivate these campaigns was the real fear

that Black people could undermine

the way the country wanted to see itself.

And this manifested itself,

not only in the targeting of leaders

and people that were visible,

but of ordinary people.

So these core fear and aggressions

towards African-Americans,

I think has a lot to do with White people's

own conception of themselves,

and the danger of Black people

forcing a reckoning with the violence of the American past.