After the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, King told his wife Coretta, “This is what is going to happen to me also. I keep telling you, this is a sick society.”
The following story was posted on reddit earlier Wednesday and it has a timely message for those who think the Deep State couldn’t be operating against the people.
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Christian Gold Company Defies Industry’s Retirement Fearmongering Through Prayer and Biblical Hope
If you don’t believe in conspiracy theories and if you trust our government agencies, perhaps this next story will change your mind. I walked with Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963 in D.C. and the crowd was mostly black. After the “I Have a Dream” speech, the FBI apparently sent a memo calling King the “most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.”
The FBI was convinced MLK was a communist. There are reports that even Jackie Kennedy told friends she thought he was a communist. Most of the whites present during his famous speech were hard-left activists. I wasn’t, but I was a Democrat. There were bigots along the road cursing and threatening.
The FBI never turned up evidence that he was. He was acting out of his beliefs.However, as later historians noted, while not a supporter of either party since he saw both parties as having let the black man down, he was closely aligned with the views of the left. His father had been a Republican because from the time they could cast a ballot until 1960, blacks voted Republican.
In 2014, historian Beverly Gage turned up a redacted letter from someone at the FBI threatening King and telling him to kill himself. There are dozens of these types of letters from the FBI in the U.S. archives detailing the FBI’s systematic plot to “neutralize” the civil rights leader.
FBI wiretaps have “given us the most powerful and persuasive source of all for seeing how utterly selfless Martin Luther King was,” as a civil rights leader, according to a leading civil rights scholar.
“You see him being intensely self-critical. King really and truly believed that he was there to be of service to others. This was not a man with any egomaniacal joy of being a famous person, or being a leader,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar David Garrow in a 2014 interview with CNN.
The FBI was convinced King was under the influence of communists and kept him under constant surveillance. While King had communist associates, he appeared to abandon them when the Civil Rights movement began in earnest. The FBI did however find embarrassing information on his sex life which they later used against him. King was an adulterer.
There are tens of thousands of memos from the FBI showing the zeal with which they pursued King. They were following him and his associates. The FBI wiretapped MLK with the permission of Bobby Kennedy though that wasn’t what Hoover usually did. He resisted most of Nixon’s efforts to wiretap.
J. Edgar Hoover, who headed up the FBI, was at times ruthless, perhaps a bigot, but far more a centurion against communism. J. Edgar likely saw King as a dangerous communist and used some lawless tactics to monitor him.
During his lifetime, he was seen as honorable and a man of great integrity, but that changed after his death in 1972. His name was mud for a while, but one thing is certain, he made an indelible mark on the FBI which at the time he took it over was one of America’s most incompetent and corrupt institutions. He did change all that, making science an important part of FBI investigations. He fired a quarter of the agents believed to be corrupt and imposed strict rules of conduct.
CNN reported in 2014 that on a story about King receiving the St. Francis peace medal from the Catholic Church, Hoover wrote “this is disgusting.” On the story “King, Pope to Talk on Race,” he scribbled “astounding.” On a story about King’s meeting with the pope, “I am amazed that the Pope gave an audience to such a degenerate.” On a story about King being the heavy favorite to win the Nobel Prize, he wrote “King could well qualify for the ‘top alley cat’ prize!”
When it was announced that King was to receive the 1964 Nobel Prize, the threatening – kill yourself – letter was sent.
The letters and memos were released after high-profile investigations though many more remain sealed.
In 1966 King confided to his staff:
You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry.Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism. There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.
