Original subtitles

At this time l have the honour to present to you,

the moral leader of our nation.

From 1955 to 1968,

Martin Luther King led a peaceful ZOth century American revolution.

In the short span of 13 years,

the non violent 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.

You know this about humans, what we‘re best at is convincing ourselves

of our own righteousness.

And I think this entire episode represents the darkest part

of the bureau‘s history.

Tapes from the hotel rooms,

uh. 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,

our duty is to understand.

Hello.

In the traditional motion picture story,

the villains are usually defeated,

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.

We're almost there.

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 Darussalam.

Hi. Hello. Hi.

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 going to fight our white brethren with malice

nor are we going to fight them

with any falsified stories,

nor are we going to fight them with hatred,

but we're going to fight them with love.

When they hate us, we gonna solve their hatred in love.

When they speak against us,

we gonna speak things of love toward them.

We are not gonna let their hatred turn us around,

but we 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 realised

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 fights.

One day right there in Alabama,

little Black boys and Black gins

will be able to join hands with little white boys

and white girls as sisters and brothers.

l 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 mobilise 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, it may have been 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."

Let me hear you say,

- Freedom! - Let me hear you say,

Freedom!

1956, 20,000 Blacks

walked 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 Junior.

Is this just a test that you're getting ready for?

That's what we're doing. The next one will be for real.

I'm sure that I voice the sentiment

of the 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 who live by the sword would 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 young folks

no guns, no political power,

are gonna change this nation.

We were trusting in the power of God,

and only kind of crazy people of faith

would be willing to put their lives on the line and,

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 Bayard Rustin,

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

Stanley David Levison...

was white.

He was Jewish. He was a lawyer,

he was a certified public accountant,

an 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 middle and late 1950 years.

Even though Stanley Levison and King

have a very close personal relationship from 1957 fonivard,

only at the very beginning of 1962,

four, five years later,

does the FBI tardily realise

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,

uh, a week later I get a phone call.

They told me that they will accept me if I pass the physical.

On my uh, gosh, 21st birthday,

I was driving my carto Washington D.C.,

took an oath of office and, uh,

almost quit that day because it was just,

very surreal.

They were talking about when the bomb goes off,

where to go, and stuff like that, 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.

Uh-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 your ever been a member

of the Communist Party?

I stand on my constitutional rights under the 5th Amendment.

It 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 1950's.

He had dropped off the radar

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

and 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 House of Representatives Unamerican Activities Committee.

Among the well informed witnesses testifying

is J. Edgar Hoover,

head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

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 organised than were the Nazis

in occupied countries prior to their capitulation.

They are seeking to weaken America.

Their goal is the overthrow 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 symbolised the FBI.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is as close to you

as your nearest telephone.

It seems to be your protector in all manners

within 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 back water 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 ideals,

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 organisation.

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 its central slogan,

"Abolition of the whole system of race discrimination...

"...fu|| 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 fora 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 1960's 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 cannot 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 discrimination

been peculiar to any one part of our country.

How bad is the complaint today?

After all the United States has changed a lot, uh,

the Negros 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,

urn, it is far from what it ought to be, but, uh, I can see many,

many changes that have taken place over the last few years.

The problem now is to move from, from token integration to,

uh, overall integration, where it, uh,

involves more than just a few students in school,

more than just a few lunch counters open, more than, uh,

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 sun/ival.

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 is no middle ground in this program.

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

and you've heard that said time and time again.

Yes, my friends,

you are either for us, or you are against us.

We were 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 down town will have to say,

"We can't stop this movement, and the only way to deal with 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.

Because 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 the racial demonstrations in this country, and, uh,

I have only--I have a statement here

that J. Edgar Hoover made in 1958,

quote "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 communists."

Kennedy said, "You know, we're in this thing together

"pretty closely, you know; if anything happens to you,

"it's 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

and 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 Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover,

who gave some testimony recently to the contrary.

I would hope that the, 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 that 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.

FBI Headquarters.

When the FBI begins wiretapping Levison,

what they're hoping to find is evidence that he's still--

- Yes? - --in some manner a communist agent.

- Oh, it is? - 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 realises that the relationship continues

because they're wiretapping, and 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, um,

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.

Drama! Thrills! Action!

The FBI in peace and war.

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, "Oh, no, 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, uh...

shortly after that, I began to think that, ah, okay...

my phone is 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 shifts.

- Yes? - O'Hara?

- Yes. - Gaines.

Maybe I got something.

- I'll be right over. - Great.

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 promise.

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 covered? Oh, yes, there's a microphone over there.

Uh, do you visit here often?

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

Quietly though.

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.

All right.

- Being a Baptist clergyman— - Ah.

--they keep me involved in other areas.

Right.

- Your home is actually in Atlanta. - Atlanta.

Atlanta, Georgia.

Have you lived there all your life?

I was born in Atlanta, and, uh, went to school in Atlanta through college,

and then I went to theological seminary

and graduate school in, uh, the north.

Mrs. King. of course, lives in Atlanta.

- Oh, yeah. - And there are..

She was from Alabama originally, but, uh,

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-- What would their ages be, Doctor?

Eleven, uh, nine, six, and four.

We have two girls and two boys.

Do you have a church at this time in Atlanta?

Yes, I am the co-pastor

of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and my father is pastor, so.

- Both you and your father?

Well, he makes it clear, uh, sometimes consciously

and sometimes unconsciously, that he is the pastor--

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

Hey, everybody.

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, uh, somebody-Mess.

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

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 gentleman, 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'm very happy indeed to have

this opportunity of appearing with you on yourtelevision program.

Uh, Mr. Hoover, uh, to what extent do you in your work use wiretapping?

That's always a question that people wonder about.

I'm very glad that you asked me that question, uh, Congressman Keating.

The FBI was authorised to utilise wire taps 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 wire taps in the entire United States

and territories of our country.

Well, I am sure that will disabuse many people's minds of the wide use of it.

The FBI had a sort of interesting set

of policies about surveillance.

There had 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 Court of the land.

Citing the danger of Levison and King's apparent dishonesty...

Robert Kennedy authorises, 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 confidantes, 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 extra-marital 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 Blanden.

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 in fact listen to the recordings,

monitor what was going on, and sometimes, you know,

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

because when you have a recording, a-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, uh,

who was in the room, uh, 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 honour

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 laboured 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 honour to me personally,

but a tribute to the discipline,

wise restraint, and majestic courage

of the millions of gallant Negroes and white persons of good will,

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 in person, do you?

Yes, I definitely plan to.

Will Mrs. King go with you?

Uh, well I certainly hope so,

and, uh, 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 for her to get away all the time,

but, uh, 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 organisation,

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

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

Well, naturally I was, uh, shocked and greatly surprised

that Mr. Hoover would make such an unwarranted and vicious accusation.

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

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

Do you believe the FBI is doing all it can

to resolve civil rights complaints?

Well, I don't know all of the inner workings of the FBI.

I do know that in cases

that do not involve Negroes and civil rights,

the FBI moves with dispatch, it has a machinery, the know-how.

The fact remains that in spite of all of the brutalities

that we faced in Alabama and 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, uh, 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 no comment to make on that.

- Any, uh-- - How are you feeling, Mr. Hoover?

Excellent.

Is there any, uh, response in your part to the suggestions that you resign?

That's the wish father to the thought.

Thank you very much, sir.

Thank you.

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

They agreed to sit down, uh,

on Hoovei’s turf in Hoover's office,

and try to make peace.

Testing, one, two.

All right.

King showed up.

He brought a few of his closest advisors and aids with him.

There was not press inside that office when they sat down together.

By all accounts, Hoover kind of talked at them for a while...

and then King emerged saying, you know, "All good."

Did he apologise to you or in any way indicate the threats

from what he had said?

Well, I must say that the conference, uh, was very friendly,

and that, uh, Mr. Hoover talked in a very amiable way

so that, uh, in a very friendly manner.

The whole talk was very friendly, and uh,

I think he sought to get over to us some of the--

Do you feel your visit here then was a success,

or how would you characterise it?

Well, I would say it was a success in, in the sense that I think

we develop new levels of understanding.

And as I said to him in the beginning, I felt that this was a basic necessity.

Did you specifically mention his comment about being a liar?

Uh, 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, uh, do you think of Martin Luther King?

Well, sir, I don't know.

Uh, | read a lot about him.

I don't, 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, uh, Hoover thought about him.

- I think he was about-- - He said he was the most--

--10 times as bad as Hoover said.

Why, why do you feel that way, sir?

Well, just from all the trouble that he's caused in this country,

all this rioting and things.

Ijust think he's about the worst, he, he is a human, but the worst in the world.

Probably my favourite 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 legitimise the FBI

is American popular culture.

The FBI.

I think that we're constantly battling with popular representations

of police, FBI, and federal agents...

NY20, go ahead.

...as our saviours.

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.

Well, if you work hard, play hard, live clean, you certainly will be 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,

a 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, uh, non-violence always end up with violence or almost always, Dr. King.

Um, what, what excuse or what, uh, 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 that,

we must understand the real non violent creed.

Well, doesn't this crisis atmosphere, though, uh, create or endanger

the Negro's cause by creating among the whites a resentment of feeling

that the Negro is moving too rapidly, uh, too, um, asking too much so suddenlf?

Does this worry you that this atmosphere could be creating, or is?

Well, I think this is a temporary response in any social revolution.

Well, doesn't that hurt your cause?

Uh, 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 realise they have them, uh,

and so often people don't realise or honestly acknowledge

that there is a problem.

And, uh, it is necessary in the non-violent 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 honour

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 honour 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 or 35,

is being recognised 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 the time?

And then somebody— can somebody tell him,

uh, watch his conduct?

Lord... looks to me like he's too far gone.

Well, a lot of it,

as far as his relationships with girls is concerned,

there's been many...

Maybe... maybe they're getting the Nobel Prize...

Of course, Hoover loves that,

he doesn't like King.

Now, they're pressing me to attend a dinner in his honour 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 is the sainted minister presenting himself

as this great moral authority,

but we actually know he's this sick, dirty penrerted creature.

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

The FBI surveillance of Dr. King, uh, 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, uh, Martin Luther King and his activities.

From what I heard, there were some photographs.

Whoever was in 'em, that just kind of fed that,

that mindset of Hoover, that, uh, this was a dangerous man

and that he needed 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, um, 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 is calling himself a Christian,

and he mixes white women, coloured 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.

And how 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 purity and our heritage.

When we think about the US as it emerges from the Civil War,

you have this idea that formeiiy 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 mobilisation 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

operationalise and go quite overtly after King.

When you stand up against the forces of evil...

you will be persecuted for righteousness sake.

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,

uh, 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--I just as—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

ofDr. 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 have always been a couple

of really important tensions within the FBI.

One is being a very rule-bound organisation,

a very professional organisation,

an organisation very attuned to, uh, jurisdiction and law...

and then being a-- an organisation that was almost lawless.

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 at his own typewriter

to draft an anonymous threatening letter to King.

This is purportedly from an admirer within the movement, uh,

who has found out about King's sexual indiscretions, uh,

feels betrayed by it and writes, uh, 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's sort of culturally clueless,

to pass as Black.

They put this package together and send it off, uh,

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 confidantes

who saw this letter interpreted it.

There's some ambiguity there, but it is one of the most notorious

and diny tricks that the FBI ever, ever conducted in the 1960's.

- 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 wanna hear it, you know?

This was designed to upset him.

We always assumed that Hoover was behind it.

My philosophy about the movement

is that unless I saw something

with my own eyes, um,

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 of, um, a major symbol of the Civil Rights movement,

I think I can say that, um, without boasting,

I think it's a fact, um...

I have had the privilege of being perhaps, uh, closer to him than anybody else,

and perhaps that maybe I understand him better than anyone else.

And, uh, 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 twenty four 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,

uh, 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.

Dick Gregory said that, um,

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 waited a long time for freedom.

Now is the time to 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, please.

- Hello? Hello? - Yes, Dr. King.

Yeah, Mr. President. How are you today?

Oh, I'm doing pretty good.

But now you better get your thinking cap on,

on this conference because we're going to have to rush it.

We don't want to rush it too much.

We want to have plenty of preliminary work on the panels and things--

- Uh-huh. - --but you better--

you can see here that, uh,

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 in your thing--

refer to that Howard University speech.

Nobody ever publicised that.

Almost every speech I've made, because, uh,

I think it's the best statement and analysis of the problem

I've seen everywhere, certainly no president

has ever said it like that before.

But if you got any suggestions or recommendations, why,

I'm just as close as the telephone if you got enough money to pay it,

if you haven't money, call Collect.

All right. Goodbye.

Increasingly now, Americans are functioning directly

in the fight for freedom in this far, foreign 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 non-violence 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,

richest nation on the face of the 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,

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, uh,

the indignities our people are suffering.

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

Yeah. He was hurt and depressed, and he, you know,

the pressure of the home and his marriage and so forth, you know,

it was-- it was getting to him.

It wasn't that he was right or wrong.

He didn't have any business having an opinion.

He realised how sick this country was,

and he felt that he couldn't slow down,

and he had to push on, regardless.

I weighed the criticisms that I would get.

Yes, sir.

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 cause 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 the administration if there isn't a change in the policy

and an all-out effort to de-escalate the war and bring an end to it.

Stick with Civil rights!

Leave the war to the generals, back to Hanoi!

Now, Lyndon Johnson's White House had always been privy

to the FBI's sexual sun/eillances 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 byjumping on this anti-King bandwagon

with greater fervour.

I just got word that Martin Luther King will give

King has, uh, uh, 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 tacticals,

and 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, but I wouldn't be a damn bit surprised

if this poverty group here is not stirring up some of this.

We'll dig into that very thoroughly.

All right. Okay, fine.

Thank you, Mr. President.

So many resources are mobilised

against suppressing dissent in the US.

The FBI has done extensive surveillance

of all kinds of Black organisations.

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

We want Black power.

-We want Black power. -Black power!

- We want Black power. -That's right.

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.

We are fighting lit 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 anti-communist,

but I'd say its 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,

uh, in the time of Moses.

Uh, certainly you cannot expect

to be able to penetrate

the secret conspiratorial organisations

without using secret agents.

There were FBI informants

in most domestic groups in the United States.

That was the only way you could investigate them,

especially if they were Black organisations.

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

so you had to have individuals inside that organisation

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 organisations.

So it's notjust surveillance for surveillance sake.

It is to observe the organisations,

to figure out what their points of vulnerability are

and then purposely insert people into those conflicts.

It's in the late 1950's 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 organisations

quite explicitly,

spread rumours within the organisation,

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,

Ernest Withers is 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 ouroffice.

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 travelling,

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 it in fact,

but I believed that he was,

and I tried to counsel Martin

that-- 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 notjust 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.

ls itjust the fact that Negros are black?

The fact is that the Negro was a slave

in this country for 244 years.

That led to the thing-ification 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, uh, to the winds and rains of heaven.

It was freedom without food to eat or land to cultivate,

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

And when white Americans tell the Negro to lift himself

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, uh, it's a cruel jest to say to a bootless man

that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.

Hello, everybody back here.

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, uh, 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

to demand a redress of their 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 cut of this.

They thought it could be a significant threat

to the national capital in particular.

Power for poor people

will really mean 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 King's sexual history,

particularly the most explosive allegation that's been made.

Handwritten annotations on this document allege that,

King was present at the rape

of a Black female parishioner by a Baltimore minister,

and that he, quote, 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're 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 thinkthat we have to understand

that FBI agents were making their own

very subjective judgments

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 organisations.

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.

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,

uh, increasing concerns about violence,

and he was really making the claim that in Memphis

it wasn'tjust the rights of workers,

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

but it was also, uh, 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 haven't committed themselves to that over there,

but somewhere I read

of the freedom of assembly.

Somewhere I read

-of the freedom of speech. -Yeah.

Somewhere I read

- of the freedom of press. -Yeah.

Somewhere I read that the greatness of America

is the right to protest for rights.

Good evening. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King,

39-years-old and a Nobel Peace Prize winner

and the leader of the non-violent

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.

A special bulletin flashed on the television

that Dr. King had been shot,

and | just stood there, you know, a long time.

And then a little while later,

they said Dr. King was dead.

And H was angry,

as a whole lot of other people were angry.

because we 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 riot and everything like that,

and today many people are out here on the street

wondering which way they're gonna turn

because we don't know where we're gonna do.

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 labour-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,

uh, they poured enormous resources

into trying to bring that case home.

Ray's life and civil rights

were being guarded more closely

than those of Martin Luther King,

whcm Ray is accused of murdering.

I am always amazed that, you know,

with the surveillance by the FBI

24/7 around Dr. King and the SCLC

that they wouldn't be aware of James Earl Ray

at 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, uh, is always 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,

uh, and chose not to do anything.

I never saw that. I never heard that.

But it was the question everybody had

because it was a legitimate question, you know, why?

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.

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 colour violence.

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

He said, "Look, you 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 only 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,

uh, re-understanding of King as a political figure,

but I do thinkthat it will probably give us

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

There's always been this unresolved,

uh, tension in who we are

and who we say we are

and who we want to be.

But there was always this...

emotional enthusiasm

that we could change the world.

Did he have, uh,

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 rights leader?

No, it does not.

I just don't think that the tapes should see the light of day.

As I said, it would serve no purpose whatsoever,

and I don't see anything good that could 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,

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

ofJ. Edgar Hoover as being

some sort of rogue actcr 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.

Um, 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 1960's, 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 Hoovers own

particular history and person,

but I think that these are attitudes

that have been core

to how the racial order operates in the US.

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 this core of 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.