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• • • AMERICA: Uncensored FBI 'Suicide Letter' to Martin Luther King Revealed • • •


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'There is but one way out for you': Uncensored 'suicide letter' sent from FBI to Martin Luther King made public for the first time

By James Rush

Date: 13th November 2014

Source: The Independent

 

 

The uncensored contents of a letter sent from the FBI to Martin Luther King in which he is called an "evil, abnormal beast" and apparently encouraged to kill himself have been made public for the first time.

 

 

In what appears to be a heavy-handed attempt to unsettle the civil rights leader, the anonymous letter was written by a deputy of the bureau's director J Edgar Hoover, posing as a disappointed activist, and sent to King in the weeks before he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

 

While the existence of the document, dubbed the "suicide letter", has been known for some time, only heavily redacted versions had previously been available.

 

It has now been published in full in The New York Times Magazine after an unredacted version was discovered in the National Archive by Yale University historian Beverly Gage, as she researched a book on Hoover.

 

J Edgar Hoover, the FBI boss, in his office (Getty Images) J Edgar Hoover, the FBI boss, in his office (Getty Images)

 

It shows the FBI director was apparently willing to use King's extra-marital affairs in an attempt to disconcert the pastor.

 

Writing in The New York Times, Ms Gage describes how: "The largest unredacted section focuses on King's sex life, recounting in graphic language what the bureau believed it knew."

 

Littered with apparently deliberate typos and mistakes, the letter warns King: "There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudalant [sic] self is bared to the nation.â€

 

At the time King and his associates suspected the letter had come from the FBI, a belief that was confirmed a decade later by the Senate’s Church Committee on intelligence overreach.

 

The FBI's attempt to keep tabs and discredit King, who was assassinated in 1968, has been reported to have come under the umbrella of the Cointelpro programme.

 

Launched in the 1950s, the programme was initially intended to trail and, if possible, discredit members of the Communist Party.

 

Through the 1960s however it shifted its focus to civil rights activists.

 

In September last year, historical archives released to researchers at George Washington University showed the National Security Agency (NSA), under a programme dubbed 'Minaret', was monitoring the overseas phone calls and cables of a number of figures of note including King and heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali.

 

The documents, discussed by the researchers Matthew Aid and William Burr in an article in Foreign Policy, relate to a period from 1967 to 1973, a time when it appears paranoia about foreign governments allegedly stoking the anti-Vietnam War movement was rife.

 

The NSA was forced to release the papers to researchers at the university’s National Security Archive following an appeal to the Security Classification Appeals Panel.

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That is crazy! I was not aware that the FBI did not support the civil rights' movement. 

Or that MLK had an affair...O.o

They kept trying to claim he was a communist. The affair/womanizer stuff is difficult to confirm after the FBI's strong contempt for him, but you can check the evidence and be the judge.

 

He was put into the wringer for so much stuff that he needs that holiday.

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Or that MLK had an affair...O.o

"... most of it is actually about his sex life and is about these kind of over-the-top, really racially charged, very graphic accusations about extramarital affairs, about orgies. And the implication is that all of this is on the tapes that accompanied the letter and that whoever is sending this letter has more information where all of that comes from, and they’re threatening to expose it.... This letter is probably the most notorious symbol of a much wider campaign against King and against the civil rights movement, against the left in general in the 1960s. But for King, in particular, the FBI had started wiretapping several of his associates well before this letter, mostly people who were suspected of having ties to the Communist Party in the 1950s..."

- Yale University professor Beverly Gage, who uncovered the unredacted letter [ x ]

 

The tapped evidence about his affairs were not found.

 

 

There's an interesting part about John F. Kennedy's thought and involvements...

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