The intelligence operation began after the August 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech, when agency leadership unsuccessfully attempted to link the civil rights icon to communism. Technicians instead compiled audio recordings of King's extramarital liaisons and packaged them with an unsigned, threatening note delivered directly to his residence. The mailing arrived at King's home and was opened by his wife. Despite the coercive threat to publicly expose his personal affairs within 34 days, King and his inner circle correctly identified the federal agency as the source and resisted the pressure.
Key points
The bureau attempted to disguise the extortion threat by drafting the anonymous letter to…: The bureau attempted to disguise the extortion threat by drafting the anonymous letter to imply the sender was Black.
The coercive message directly referenced King's honorary degrees and Nobel Prize while gi…: The coercive message directly referenced King's honorary degrees and Nobel Prize while giving him a strict 34-day deadline to comply.
King and his advisers recognized the government's involvement immediately and refused to…: King and his advisers recognized the government's involvement immediately and refused to back down from his public leadership role.
Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1
When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech before huge crowds on the National Mall in August 1963, the FBI took notice.
Read the letter the FBI sent MLK to try to convince him to kill himself
“We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security,” FBI Domestic Intelligence Chief William Sullivan wrote in a memo two days later.
A massive surveillance operation on King was quickly approved, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover became increasingly fixated on proving that King had communist ties and discrediting him generally.
The surveillance failed to show that King was a communist, but it did result in many tapes of extramarital sexual liaisons by King. So the next year, Sullivan sent the following unsigned letter to King's home. An unredacted version of it was only recently unearthed by Yale historian Beverly Gage, and published in the New York Times in November 2014:
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