The Dismissal of Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker - A special report by Cong. Morris K. Udall

[Octafish]

29. J Edgar Hoover thought Civil Rights Movement was big Commie Plot.

The FBI's Vendetta
Against Martin Luther King, Jr.

excerpted from the book

The Lawless State

The crimes of the U.S. Inteligence Agencies

by Morton Halperin, Jerry Berman, Robert Borosage, Christine Marwick
Penguin Books, 1976

p63
For the FBI, an organization seeking to register blacks in the South was clearly suspicious. Until 1962, the bureau would monitor King and SCLC under the "racial matters" category, which required agents to collect "all pertinent information" about the "proposed or actual activities of individuals and organizations in the racial field." According to the Senate Select Committee, the FBI information on King was "extensive."

The unfolding story of the civil rights protest movement and the leadership role of Martin Luther King, Jr., is a most ignoble chapter in the history of FBI spying and manipulation. As the civil rights movement grew and expanded, the FBI pinpointed every group and emergent leader for intensive investigation and most for harassment and disruption, the FBl's domestic version of CIA covert action abroad. The NAACP was the subject of a COMINFIL investigation. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were listed by the FBI as "Black-Hate" type organizations and selected for covert disruption of their political activities. But the most vicious FBI attack was reserved for King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. All of the arbitrary power and lawless tactics that had accumulated in the bureau over the years were marshaled to destroy King's reputation and the movement he led. The FBI relied on its vague authority to investigate "subversives" to spy on King and SCLC; its vague authority to conduct warrantless wiretapping and microphonic surveillance to tap and bug him; its secrecy to conduct covert operations against him. The campaign began with his rise to leadership and grew more vicious as he reached the height of his power; it continued even after his assassination in 1968.

p77
On August 28, 250,000 persons marched on Washing- 1, ton. The march, sponsored by a cross-section of civil rights, labor, and church organizations, was designed to support the enactment of civil rights legislation. That day,



when Martin Luther King addressed the assemblage, he made his most memorable speech:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ``We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day in the red hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering in the heat of injustice . . freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

The speech brought the crowd to its feet, applauding, echoing the "Amens" that greet evangelical preaching, and shouting "Freedom Now!" The FBI reacted differently. In memoranda to the director, King's speech was characterized as "demagogic," and the presence of "200" Communists among the 250,000 marchers caused the Intelligence Division to state that it had underestimated Communist efforts and influence on American Negroes and the civil rights movement. King was singled out:

He stands head and shoulders over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses of Negroes. We must mark him now . . . as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of Communism the Negro and national security.

More ominously, the FBI suggested that "legal" efforts to deal with King might not be enough. "It may be unrealistic," the memorandum went on, to limit ourselves as we have been doing to legalistic proofs or definitely conclusive evidence that would stand up in testimony in court or before Congressional Committees....

It was up to the FBI to "mark" King and bring him down on its own-to take the law into its own hands.

On October 1, 1963, Hoover received and then approved a combined COMINFIL-COINTELPRO plan against the civil rights movement. The approved plan called for intensifying "coverage of Communist influence on the Negro." It recommended the "use of all possible investigative techniques" and stated an "urgent need for imaginative and aggressive tactics . . . to neutralize or disrupt the Party's activities in the Negro field."

On October 10 and 21, Attorney General Kennedy gave the FBI one of those "investigative techniques" by approving the wiretaps on King.

On October 18, 1963, the FBI distributed a different kind of memorandum on King, not only to the Justice Department, but to officials at the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Defense Department, and Defense Department intelligence agencies. It summarized the bureau's Communist party charges against King and went much further. According to - Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall, it was a personal diatribe . . . a personal attack without evidentiary support on the character, the moral character and person of Dr. Martin Luther King, and it was only peripherally related to anything substantive, like whether or not there was Communist infiltration or influence on the civil rights movement.... It was a personal attack on the man and went far afield from the charges [of possible Communist influence].

The attorney general was outraged and demanded that Hoover seek the return of the report. By October 28, all copies were returned. This was the first-and last-official action to deter Hoover's vendetta against King.

In November, John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Lyndon Johnson became president and the Justice Department was in a state of confusion with the attorney general preoccupied with his personal grief. King viewed the assassination as a tragedy, and hoped it would spawn a new public concern for peace and reconciliation.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/NSA/Vendetta_MLK_LS.html

Wish the guy had been interested in more than just protecting plutocrat's property.