
J. Edgar Hoover, who was smashing gender norms before it was cool, had his panties in a bunch about Martin Luther King Jr. MLK had a suspicious proclivity to exercise his First Amendment rights, which, if allowed to spread, might undermine the Republic by forcing it to live up to its ideals.
So Hoover did what Americans expect an FBI chief to do: He drove a Ford spied on a United States citizen:
Under the FBI’s domestic counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) King was subjected to various kinds of FBI surveillance that produced alleged evidence of extramarital affairs, though no evidence of Communist influence.
What kinds of surveillance? Well, for starters, how about this:
Hoover deployed agents to find subversive material on King, and Robert Kennedy authorized wiretaps on King’s home and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) offices in October 1963.
(Readers of a Certain Age may only remember Bobby Kennedy as a Sainted Martyr. But he was also Brother Jack’s attack dog as attorney general, and before that, a rabid anti-Communist working for Joe McCarthy. History is fun!)
Read more »
NOJO • The Reckoning Four years later: Uhhh, how’d that work out?
JNOV • Hanging by a Thread @nojo: yeah. I had a feeling you’d say that.
NOJO • Hanging by a Thread @JNOV: Haven’t touched a thing — checked it the other day, worked from here. But that’s my…
JNOV • Hanging by a Thread Oh! My edits worked! Praise nojo!
JNOV • Hanging by a Thread Glad you’re feeling sunny. I have my moments which are then squashed by some shitheads’…
NOJO • Hanging by a Thread @nojo: The Long View: 1972: Nixon 61% 1984: Reagan 59% 2004: Bush 51% 2024: Trump 50%…
NOJO • Hanging by a Thread Power is power, but… About 11 million votes remain to be counted. Nate Silver (I know, I know)…
JNOV • The Values We Profess Yeah. So. When my kid came back from basically getting frog-marched from a store downtown (the…
JNOV • The Values We Profess @nojo: We love you! I was thinking, even though we don't truly celebrate x-mas, some people in…
NOJO • The Values We Profess @nojo: Also, I love saying stuff like “heading uptown”. Brooklyn is fun!