There may start to be a shift in the way
Martin Luther King is viewed as a historic figure; I personally saw several
articles written about MLK’s role as an activist, not simply an icon for peace,
as a result from the 50th anniversary of the assassination. However,
there is much to be desired from the national perception of Civil Rights
history; an article written by the New York Times 4 years ago spins a different
story of MLK, the FBI, and their interactions over equal rights.
I was able to go to The FBI and
Black America: A 50-Year Retrospective’ during the MLK50 festivities. The professors
on the panel gave crucial insight into exactly what this anonymous letter
meant, as well as how the FBI felt about the Civil Rights movement as a whole.
As the article describes, King became part of an FBI investigation as a side
product of fear of the Communist Party, the ‘real’ national security matter. “In
1961, the bureau learned that a former Communist Party insider named Stanley
Levison had become King’s closest white advisor, serving him as a ghostwriter
and fund-raiser.”
However, Dr. David Garrow spoke of
additional events that may have led the FBI to take issue with Dr. King. In
1961, police and the FBI were concerned with identifying outside agitators
within major cities, and keeping them from ‘causing a ruckus’. The notion that
‘others’ were causing trouble was prevalent at this time, due to the rise of
the Invaders and the Black Power movement. Garrow showed several newspaper
clippings of FBI activist arrests. He explained the FBI was focused on
destroying the movement, instituting a police state in cities. They attacked
activists and the Civil Rights movement as a whole from a variety of different
angles, including arresting and targeting interracial couples.
Additionally,
the Times article fails to analyze the contents of the letter; while citing “typos
and misspellings and sprinkled… attempts at emending them. Clearly, some effort
went into perfecting the tone” the article says the author was meant to be a
disappointed admirer. However, Professor Lerone Martin believes there is more
to the story; the letter was written as though it were from an African American
Christian, a demographic with whom King was in generally good graces. The
letter provoked new disapproval of Dr. King, and a group of African American
Christian protestors were granted the security by the FBI not given to
protestors involved in Dr. King’s nonviolence effort. The effort gone through
to discredit King is calculated, a feature not mentioned in the article.
It is possible that both of these
sources are correct; the FBI may have come to target King by several paths.
However, in this nationally published article, the Communist party is solely
blamed for the FBI’s attack of King; the impacts of institutionalized racism
within the government are ignored. The core issue here is that most people do
not have the opportunity to hear a panel of brilliant historians, or have the
time and education to read scholarly texts that acknowledge the role racism and
black history play in our lives. People should not have to be as incredibly
privileged as I am, as we are, to acknowledge the discrimination present in
every part of our history.
It's very interesting to learn more about the link between government abuse and activist activities and I think the more we uncover, the more reasons we have to divert from traditional advocacy efforts. In saying this, I mean that popular media sites and public personas are more and more dangerous when it comes to subversion. In particular, I'm remembering the "probable" targeting of several BLM activists after images of them went viral. Antifa protesters and activists are encouraged to refrain from not only posting pictures of activities, but even taking them, as phones are now more hack-able than ever. It's terrifying to think of the levels of privacy being breached, but this is not new.
ReplyDeleteThe FBI's role in an attack on Dr. King is so fascinating to me. Prior to moving to Memphis I was not aware of the FBI's surveillance of Dr. King and activists in general during the 1960's. Nor was I aware of their attempts to tie them to communism as well as just generally discredit them. It is sad that knowledge of the privileging of some information as well as the bias historical perception of some activists is a privilege. As new information becomes available it is the job of historians to go back and correct past misperceptions but that is incredibly hard when this information is just emerging among scholars for the general public to become aware.
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