There has been a sustained evolution of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s image in my lifetime. I grew up during a period, about twenty years after his death, where he was mythologized as something akin to a saint. I was given the impression, and I suspect a lot of other kids of my generation were too, that MLK was beloved by virtually everyone but the most virulent racists.
It's been important to disabuse people of that notion. And several recent projects -- including Ava DuVernay's excellent film Selma and the the recent documentary MLK/FBI -- have taken great efforts to convey something closer to the reality of who King was and how he was received by the broader public.
Now, I think more and more people have come to realize that Dr. King was actually reviled by a not insignificant portion of the public, up and including the infamous FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who goaded President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to authorize invasive wiretaps on King to expose his alleged affiliation with the Communist party.
While King did have a close adviser with a Communist past, the wiretaps were really about documenting King's infidelities in his personal life (including a controversial allegation that the civil rights leader may have witnessed and encouraged a sexual assault), which while far from ideal, have nothing to do with his movement and his non violent message.
Hoover's singular obsession with King was motivated by a decades-long racist preoccupation with the idea that a "black messiah" (he'd previously feared this would be Marcus Garvey) would rise up and provoke African-Americans seek and demand equality.
MLK/FBI has some starling soundbites from the era from white people about Dr. King (one woman call him "too bossy," and according to polls at the time 50% of the country took Hoover's side in their clash. Hoover had called King a notorious liar, without offering up any explanations or evidence for his broadside, which seemed to have been said in a fit of pique following King's winning the Nobel Peace Prize at the end of 1964.
Even if this information may not be new to some viewers, MLK/FBI still has a wealth of tremendous archival footage which I would argue is essential.
For instance, a hostile interviewer who could be a transplant from Fox News today accuses King of creating a "crisis atmosphere' and without nuance blames him for spreading violence with his nonviolent protests. LBJ frets over the phone about whether or not to distance himself from King over Hoover's insidious reports about hotel room trysts the minister engaged in. A heckler tells King to "stick to civil rights" after he came out against the Vietnam war. Or even more prescient, an anti-King protestor insisting he'd attended a "Communist training school" based off a single unsubstantiated photo.
By the end of MLK's life, Hoover and by extension the FBI had decided that radicalized black Americans were a greater threat to the security of the United States than any foreign or domestic enemy. That may sound absurd today and it was -- but even if the FBI's paranoia was fantastical, their actions were no less destructive and divisive.
Clearly, their insidious infiltrations helped handicap the Black Panther Party and it's a miracle that King achieved all that he did with spies in his midsts and the federal government on his tail. And while his life was tragically cut short -- he will continue to be vindicated, since all the FBI's skulduggery has done is elevate how revolutionary King was and how impressive his achievements ultimately are.
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