How the FBI Was Involved in MLK's Murder

(people chatting) - If you don't come out within 10 days, you and your family will be killed. Now, in Montgomery, our house was bombed twice. Today we still face threats through phone calls and mail. (creepy music) - It's 1964 and a package has just been sent to Martin Luther King Jr's home in Atlanta, Georgia. The package contains reels of tape and on that tape is Blackmail in addition to this one-page letter. The letter is written in the voice of one of King's supporters. It is riddled with typos and corrections and the letter tells King that he should "look into his heart" because he is "a complete fraud, a great liability to black people." It refers to the tapes that are in this package, which is a super cut of audio evidence that shows King committing adulterous acts, sexual encounters with his girlfriends and lovers.

The letter calls him "Dissolute, abnormal, moral imbecile, abnormal animal, a beast, what incredible evil, Satan could not do more." The letter tells King that his end is near and that there is only one thing left for him to do and he knows what it is. He has 34 days to do it. This letter suggesting that Martin Luther King Jr. should end his own life was not sent by a disenchanted follower and was not typical hate mail. This letter was sent by some of the most powerful men in the United States, the top leaders of the FBI. (creepy music) - And of course, I received numerous threatening letters.

You and your family will be killed. - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee. (dramatic music) - More than half of Americans do not believe the official story that a lone racist gunman was behind Martin Luther King's death that day in Memphis in the late 1960s. That number is more like 88% for black Americans. . Those who don't believe it include those who were with him when it happened. They include his family. An exhaustive congressional investigation found that King's assassination was "probably a conspiracy," but there's actually much more to the story than who pulled the trigger.

And thanks to recently declassified documents, thousands of them that we've been reviewing, we can now shed light on the FBI in the 1960s, what it did, and what that teaches us about who really killed Martin Luther King. Before continuing, a brief note from our sponsor. Sponsors allow us to do these deep dives where we spend months and months looking at FBI documents. So thank you Incogni for sponsoring today's video. We live in a world full of spam, spam calls and all kinds of predatory material on the Internet. This world is made possible by the shadowy industry of data brokers who try to collect all your information, where you live, what you like to do on the Internet, how old you are, and sell that information on an open market.

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The other man was from America's long-oppressed minority and waged this war using the weapons of compelling words and a deep philosophical commitment to nonviolent protest. -My feeling is that the vast majority of blacks in the United States believe in nonviolence as a basic tactic for social change. Nonviolent. Nonviolence is really the only path we can follow. That if all black people in America turn against nonviolence, I will stand up as a lone force and say this is the wrong path. (crowd applauding) - In the United States of the 1960s, nonviolence turned out to be an incredibly powerful tool in waging this fight because it always resulted in the same thing: the inevitable suppression of excessive violence by law enforcement and the counter-protesters.

And when that was covered and shown to the general population, it became absolutely clear who was right and who was wrong in the situation. - King felt strategic in terms of changing the hearts and minds of America, seeing boys, girls, teenagers and adults being beaten, whipped, shot,

murder

ed, mutilated simply for wanting to exercise their rights as citizens. These images were very powerful. - You have to keep the whites and the blacks separated. - A visual spectacle that represented what African Americans knew very well: how the American system treated them, but now it was only public. (soft music) King led 40,000 people in protesting segregated buses for over a year, resulting in the desegregation of public buses in Montgomery, Alabama.

He went to the most segregated city in America to lead sit-ins at segregated restaurants and lunch counters. Protesters would kneel peacefully in churches and libraries. They marched to City Hall and King always rose with his powerful, moving words to remind these marchers of the importance of his core philosophy. - Let's get back to the buses, let's be loving enough to turn an enemy into a friend. Non-violent protest against the injustices and indignities experienced. -That the idea that you were going to hit your enemies or destroy them to convert them into some form of solidarity where they were not simply permanently armed camps, he thought was an illusion.

The persistent illusion that we constantly make, that is one of the objections to militarism that is based on a fantasy. - King and many of these protesters were arrested. From prison, King wrote a letter explaining why he was leading these demonstrations in Birmingham. August 1963, letter from Birmingham prison. "We know from painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed. And that now was their time, they had waited for over 340 years for their God-given constitutional rights. "This is the only way to change what was the status quo in America, where ruthless mobs lynch your mothers and fathers, hateful police curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters.

And after trying many different ways of addressing this, nonviolent direct action would create creative tension in society. I would dramatize these problems so that they could no longer be ignored. This was his strategy for change in equality for his people and it was working. and drinking fountains were removed throughout Birmingham and, as King predicted, the spectacle of violently suppressed peaceful protesters spread across the country, elevating the movement to an unequivocal moral position that could not be quelled by force, arrests and violence by law enforcement. - Now I will continue with our massive protest. (crowd applauding) - But Martin Luther King was challenging an old, entrenched system, and when you disrupt a system like that, you create enemies. -Either you give the black man his God-given rights and his freedom or you face the fact of continued social disruption and chaos. -Among his enemies were those one might imagine as the Ku Klux Klan, whose leaders allied themselves with local police in the South and who claimed that killing MLK would eliminate all racial problems in the South.

There were also pro-segregation groups like the White Citizens Council that tried to convince the federal government that King's growing movement had communist connections, but it wasn't just these openly bigoted groups. His enemies also included business owners, real estate developers, landlords and employers, all of whom benefited from the status quo, discrimination in hiring practices, housing and mortgages. Then, of course, there were a lot of legislators and governors, most of them from the South, almost all of them from the South, but among King's enemies was a powerful Justice Department agency whose job it was to protect Americans and enforce the laws of the country. - J.

Edgar Hoover served as agency director for the FBI building that houses the Bureau's headquarters in Washington. (dramatic music) (soft music) (typewriter typing) - Remember this is the 1960s, it's the Cold War. There is an obsession with finding communist sympathizers, anyone who sympathizes with our great enemy, the Soviet Union, and the director of the FBI at the time was named J. Edgar Hoover. He would be director of the FBI for decades. Then, as King's movement grew, Hoover began to suspect that the movement was not a popular uprising for equality and racial justice, but rather a communist plot to sow division in American society.

It's 1963, Martin Luther King and his followers are planning this massive march on Washington DC and Hoover tasks his head of national intelligence, William Sullivan, to go out and investigate how much influence the Communist Party has over this movement. And five days before the march on Washington, Sullivan delivers this report. (tense music) The report concludes that although the Soviet Union had spent enormous sums of money and time and had issued much propaganda to try to infiltrate this movement, there was actually "no known substantial implementation of communism within the movement." "The movement was about racial inequality in America, a really pressing issue.

Communism had nothing to offer and nothing to do with him, says this report that was delivered to Hoover five days before the march on Washington. But as you can see here, Hoover didn't like it. You can see here, at the end of the memo, that this is Hoover's handwriting in this declassified document. It's kind of an angry moment. The influence of communism on King is not infinitesimal, as Sullivan's report concluded. Sullivan says that Hoover was so angry about this that he stopped talking to Sullivan for months. Sullivan had to: "Change our ways or we'd all be on the streets, give Hoover what he wanted or risk the consequences." And what Hoover wanted was to link King to communism so he would have an excuse to spy on him. -99% of people, unfortunately, do not go to his boss and say: "You are a horrible affront to human decency.

I will leave this job rather than follow your directives." They go and do their job. They say, "Oh yeah, you were right, boss." -And soon the FBI would give him exactly what he wanted. - They called it the March on Washington for jobs and freedom, led by Martin Luther King. - Today, many of these people receive not far from millions of dollars in federal subsidies. And they are the same people who tell the black man that he should pull himself up by his bootstraps. - Determination that American society will not rest until it is a society of free men, regardless of their color. (tense music) - Two days after the March on Washington, Sullivan begins his repentance process by delivering this memo from W.C.

Sullivan, August 30, 1963. Sullivan, who again just produced this great report saying that King had nothing to do with communism, changed his mind just a few days later. It turns out that the Communist Party wields substantial influence over blacks in America, and in light of King's powerful demagogue speech, oh, and by the way, the demagogue speech he's talking about is this. - I have a dream. - King now stands head and shoulders above all other black leaders in the country and we must now mark him as the most dangerous black person in the nation from the standpoint of communism, race and national security.

The planIt would be, according to Sullivan, to completely discredit him to "remove him from his pedestal." The thing is, they were a little stagnant. They had no grand plan to quell this movement. King had achieved moral authority and so they needed to fight morality with morality. They could undermine him and his moral philosophy and then perhaps they could stop his movement so that the African American community would be left "without a national leader to guide them in the right direction." (soft music) So Hoover and his agents gather some flimsy evidence that Ty Martin Luther King is a communist, and get the Attorney General's approval to spy on King.

But what they don't tell the Attorney General is that they're not actually looking for communism. Communism does not exist. here and they know it. What they're looking for is anything they can get to knock him off his pedestal (tense music). Well, what we do. What we're looking at here is a list of all the wiretaps and mistakes that were put on Martin Luther King. Side note: Every time I see these big blocks of redacted text, I have to know what could have been so juicy that they had to cross it out. As if we were already seeing the sins of the FBI, and there was something even more secret that we will never see, too bad.

We're looking at wiretapping, which is basically the ability to listen to phone conversations in a variety of locations. There's his house in Georgia and then there's a couple of hotels in California. There's a house in New York City and then there's a bunch of microphones. Microphone or microphone is just when the FBI invades someone's space and plants a microphone that then records everything that happens in that space. So you see them doing this at the Willard Hotel here in Washington DC, hotels in California and Hawaii, hotels in New York City. So the main tactic here was to follow MLK as he traveled the country and put bugs and wiretaps on his hotel and phone and spy on everything he said, every person he talked to.

Here, in the middle of all these memos, you have this handwritten note to the director that says: "This is obviously particularly sensitive surveillance. We have to be very cautious in terms of people outside the FBI who from time to time may necessarily be

involved

." in some aspect of the installation." We really have to keep this a secret because what we're doing isn't quite right. In short, what they created was "the most comprehensive surveillance imaginable." Unsurprisingly, even after all this spying, they didn't find communism. There was no communism here. But what they did find is exactly what they needed: to "take it off its pedestal." They found sex tapes. (tense music) (typewriter sound) (unintelligible chatter) These FBI documents that were declassified a few years ago contain summaries of what FBI agents say they heard on these tapes.

We don't have the actual tapes yet, and they paint a picture of Dr. King as a womanizer with girlfriends and prostitutes in Las Vegas, New York, Washington DC. These memos say that King became excessively drunk and slept with women while using "the vilest language imaginable, excessive drinking, which served only as a backdrop for acts of degeneration and depravity, many of which were committed in a communal atmosphere." I mean, it's a lot of graphic descriptions, some of which don't shed a good light on Dr. King. Drunk, naked white prostitutes run through the hallways of a Las Vegas hotel. -They saw his alleged infidelity as exactly the kind of deviance that would allow them to stigmatize the black community at large, undermine King's leadership, put his life in crisis, render him unable to do this work, and diminish his standing among the public. wider. - This surveillance, which again was supposed to have to do with communist connections, was used to gather a lot of ammunition for this war in which Hoover and Sullivan were trying to knock King off his moral pedestal, to undermine the morality that he did that King's movement was so powerful and unstoppable.

But wait real quick, we can't really move forward before talking about how to think about this evidence, and we wrestled with this a lot, we talked to a lot of different people with different views on how they interpret this, and here's my take. Well, these documents, in most of the stories I do, would be rock solid. This is declassified FBI intelligence, and these analysts typically report objective, dispassionate evidence that we can use. The problem here is that I know too much about the context surrounding how this information was collected and the reason for doing so. Future research would clearly indicate that the FBI was rife with racism and was a group of white agents vying for the approval of their leader, J.

Edgar Hoover, a man we now know in Black and White we have seen was willing to ignore. analyzes and intelligence that contradicted his own personal views, and he was willing to drag the entire office along with his theories. Not agreeing with him meant being on the street. The agency would produce what he wanted to hear or there would be consequences. So when I read these reports of agents going out with a mandate to collect evidence that will knock Martin Luther King off his pedestal, I have a little trouble trusting how they're interpreting it, especially when I'm not looking at the primary source.

I'm looking at the agent's interpretation of the audio recordings. These are not transcripts, they are summaries. They are not visual, they are audio and, to me, they are contaminated with deep racist prejudice. As someone who seeks truth and evidence, that's a problem. Now, in 2027, all the tapes will be released and at that time we will have the opportunity to listen to them and evaluate whether or not they change in any way our legacy and our view of Martin Luther King as an individual. But for now, this is not to me conclusive proof of anything other than abuse of power in the FBI. (tape whir) (typewriter sound) (tense music) It's 1964, the FBI has been spying on King's every move.

They have all these reports about his adulterous behavior, and that's when Hoover's nightmare comes true. Martin Luther King Jr. is selected to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, the highest moral authority. Hoover writes a letter to Sullivan telling him that now is the time to act, to expose him, and just a couple of days later, the FBI sends that package to King's House in Atlanta with the tapes full of sexual blackmail and a letter insinuating that Era time for King to end his own life in the next 34 days. We know for a fact that this letter came from the FBI.

It's like it's not speculation. A copy of the letter was found in Sullivan's files, although he claims it was placed there, but what we don't know is exactly what was on those tapes. The tapes were also sent to the media who did not end up publishing them, but they also did not expose the fact that the FBI was spying on Martin Luther King. It was a different media environment back then, but what we do know is that Hoover's plan to take down King by gathering all this blackmail and sending it to his house didn't work. The king was distraught.

It was his wife who opened the package, listened to the tapes, but King didn't stop. He was not knocked off his pedestal. (dramatic music) King continues towards Oslo. He receives the award from him, is suddenly Person of the Year on the cover of magazines, and continues to lead a variety of social justice causes. His list of enemies continues to grow, especially when he joins the chorus of anti-Vietnam War protesters. - And we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam. We have been detrimental to the lives of the Vietnamese people. There's something about a war like this that makes people callous.

It dulls consciousness. It strengthens the forces of reaction and generates bitterness, hatred and violence. -His movement expands to represent poor and underserved people of all races. He plans to lead another march on Washington, this one larger than the last. (crowd applauding) (tense music) (typewriter sound) About a month before the next big march on Washington happened. King was in Memphis, Tennessee, supporting the strike of mostly black garbage collectors protesting their lack of safety standards and low wages. And that night, Martin Luther King gave his last speech. - We have some tough days ahead of us (audience cries) but I don't really care right now.

Like anyone, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place, but that doesn't worry me right now. I just want to do God's will and he has allowed me to go up the mountain, and I have looked and seen the Promised Land. (Audience cries) I may not get there with you, but I want you to know the night when we, as a people, will reach the Promised Land. (Audience applauds) So I'm happy tonight, I'm not worried about anything. I fear no man. My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. (audience applause) That night, he returned to his hotel, staying in a room he stayed in so often that it was actually named after him.

And at 6:01 p.m. m. On April 4, 1968, as he stood here on this balcony, a single gunshot rang out, hitting King in the jaw. He was rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead an hour later. - The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, 39, Nobel Peace Prize winner and leader of the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement in the United States, was assassinated tonight in Memphis. The sniper's bullet killed Dr. King while he stood on the balcony of a hotel in Memphis. Within an hour, Dr. King was dead. That happened at 7:00 p.m. Eastern Time. (unintelligible chatter) (tense music) (typing) - The FBI began an investigation that led them to this man, James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old fugitive who had escaped from a Missouri prison in a bread truck one year before. .

Ray had rented a room across the street from King's motel earlier that day. Ray allegedly aimed and fired his rifle from this bathroom window. Shortly after the shooting, Ray fled to Canada, then to England, then to Portugal and back to England. His ultimate goal was a southern African country called Rhodesia, present-day Zimbabwe. But he was detained at the airport in England and sent back to the United States, where he was arrested. -He said that Ray was carrying two Canadian passports and a fully loaded pistol when he landed in London from Lisbon. -He immediately pleaded guilty, presumably to avoid the risk of the electric chair, and was later sentenced to 99 years in prison.

Three days later, Ray again said that he really didn't, that he didn't kill MLK, claiming that he had been set up, that he was part of a larger conspiracy to kill King. (tense music) Those close to King did not accept the official explanation that Ray was the only gunman who did this. Perhaps everyone was too familiar with the horrible tactics used by the United States government to spy on, intimidate, discredit, and threaten Martin Luther King. Throughout the coverage of this story, we opened up many rabbit holes when it comes to the conspiracy theories surrounding this

murder

.

We wanted to really confront them and try to understand what evidence exists and what doesn't, and what's valid and what's not. The lack of faith in the FBI and scrutiny of this case has revealed some pretty significant holes in the explanation, some unexplained things, suspicious circumstances, destroyed evidence, timelines that don't add up, witnesses that contradict the real story. There are many things that make it difficult to accept that a 40-year-old fugitive could carry out a sophisticated one-shot murder and escape across three countries. But investigations since then have concluded that it was Ray who did the shooting.

This includes the House Select Committee, a congressional investigation that concluded that Ray did it. Although they say it was probably a conspiracy, that there were other people

involved

. The financiers, although they say it was not the government. The King family continued to sue and seek answers. Then in the '90s, this guy comes forward and says he was part of it, that they gave him money to hire someone to kill King. The King family took him to court under a wrongful death lawsuit. It was a civil case, so there was no jail sentence. The jury concluded that the murder was a conspiracy that included others, including government agencies.

But to be clear, this lawsuit from the '90s with a guy named Jowers was not legitimate evidence of that. It didn't include any real defense and it didn't include any consequences. There was a token payment of $100 to the King family, but what it did was shed light again on the fact that many people are dissatisfied with the official story of who killed Martin Luther King. The fact is that even after all of these lawsuits and investigations and a mock trial that was like live on television, there is no conclusive evidence linking the FBI or any other government agency to the assassination of Martin Luther King.

And I say that as someone who feels that it wouldn't really be unreasonable forthe FBI did this. After all, the following year they demonstrated that they were willing to murder black men who were subversive in their eyes. (soft music) - We know there were threats to King's life that were not shared with him. We know that they did not insist on protecting him as it is his obligation to do so. One of the only reasons to have an organization like that is to protect people who are subject to secret threats and conspiratorial actions. They didn't do that. -After researching all of this, dealing with it, and understanding the reality of the FBI right now, I think the real reason people think the government killed Martin Luther King is because, in a sense, it did.

What I've shown you today, all these FBI transcripts and evidence from the '60s, are solid evidence of one thing. J. Edgar Hoover and his Office of powerful, unelected men wore his badges of justice and then used his power to threaten the life of Martin Luther King. They did it the moment they saw a black man become too powerful and threaten the power they relied on to stay on top, and they couldn't take it. Hoover and his FBI used the sacred levers of justice given to him by the American people to carry out a personal racist vendetta against King and his movement, a movement that used morality, words, ideas and non-violence to try to level the playing field. for the oppressed class in this country.

But for Hoover, all he could see in this was a black man threatening his power. - I would say that the FBI certainly helped create the atmosphere around King, that he was someone dangerous and that he was trying to destroy the country to help solidify the way that public opinion began to turn against him. -That congressional report not only found that racism was widespread in the FBI, but also noted that the FBI's campaign against Martin Luther King did not end after his death. When Congress was debating whether or not to make MLK's birthday a national holiday, the FBI sent people to pressure Congress to vote against it, and fortunately, they failed.

Today, here in our nation's capital, between Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, King has risen in granite, 30 feet tall, a stone of hope that is cutting through a mountain of despair. (soft music) And yet, just down the street, not far away, is the headquarters of the FBI, a building named after J. Edgar Hoover, in commemoration of a man who professionalized the office during the Cold War, which fought against organized crime. but that he was also the architect of racist corruption and government overreach, not only against King, but against many Americans. He implemented widespread domestic espionage, including against politicians and presidents.

He had dirt on them, the power to blackmail, the power to control. He appropriated the most powerful tools of justice to attack the movement that changed the world, and yet here is his building. Perhaps it's the perfect symbol of how comfortable we are maintaining old broken systems that keep certain people powerful. How we allow those structures to remain in our capital, on our streets, in our politics, in our memories and in our minds. - I tell white America tonight that there will be no rest. There will be no peace in this nation until the Negro has his freedom. (audience applauding) (tense music)