The FBI Sheds Light on Who Martin Luther King Really Was

3,903 words

Of all the towering luminaries of the civil rights movement, Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) stands out as the most notable. In fact, it’s hardly too much to say that his name was practically synonymous with the movement itself during the tumultuous times in which his presence so galvanized the country. Who could deny that his deeds changed America profoundly, and without them, that things might be much different?

By massive concurrence of popular opinion, this holy, blissful martyr was the embodiment of all that is good, pure, just, virtuous, and morally righteous. By that reckoning of such a modern-day saint as he, any new testament that might surface, further illuminating his life and work, would be like uncovering a fifth Gospel. A document that appeared in 2017 therefore came as exactly such a marvelous find.

A sneak preview of more to come

The FBI had voluminous files on MLK. They were sealed by court order until 2027, however. A lawsuit brought by some of MLK’s associates in 1977 had sought to have the records destroyed. Instead, the judge compromised and ordered that they be locked away for 50 years. What could be in them that the litigants didn’t want to become known about their wonderful comrade in the great struggle?

A tiny amount of the documentation ended up being released ten years early because it also pertained to background information concerning John F. Kennedy that was declassified during the Trump administration. Of course, there will be far more released from the archives in another five years — unless further lawfare maneuvering again buries the truth about who MLK really was.

This summary of 20 pages, not counting the front matter, is called “Martin Luther King, Jr., A Current Analysis,” and was originally classified. Even the cover is evocative. Dated March 12, 1968, the document’s subject had about three more weeks to live. A stamp indicates that it was “Reviewed by FBI/JFK Task Force” in 1994, and received the new classification “Total Denial (NAR).” It’s not clear what the abbreviation means — perhaps our friends in Quantico could fill us in — but it certainly looks like they didn’t want to admit the document existed.

It’s well known that the FBI had a remarkably frosty relationship with MLK, and J. Edgar Hoover himself made some choice remarks about him. There are reasons for this, as shall be seen shortly. However, this does not mean that the FBI was opposed to the civil rights movement in its entirety, or its objectives. The document’s author wouldn’t have had any reason to hide personal biases since he was writing for an internal audience and probably never expected that his summary would ever be declassified. Even so, it opens in a very neutral tone, simply noting MLK’s pivotal role in the movement:

Since 1956, Martin Luther King, Jr., has occupied a prominent role in the drive for equal rights for Negroes in the United States. During this critical period in our Nation’s history, much has depended on him as the individual Negroes in great numbers have looked to for leadership in their drive to achieve equality. Much depends on him still in these times when racial tensions have created an atmosphere of fear and foreboding among many Negroes and whites alike. The course King chooses to follow at this critical time cold have momentous impact on the future of race relations in the United States . . .

Presumably, someone with a pro-segregation bias would’ve given quite a different introduction.

Washington Spring Project

MLK was planning an event with the potential to produce massive chaos:

Martin Luther King, Jr., President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), has stated publicly that he and 3,000 of his followers will march on Washington, D. C., this spring. He has announced that he will lead a massive civil disobedience campaign that will disrupt the normal course of business and, in fact, close down the Nation’s Capital.

Now that was a mighty bold plot.

King predicted that this massive civil disobedience will be more effective than riots. Concerning civil disobedience, King declared, “To dislocate the function of a city without destroying it can be more effective than a riot because it can be longer lasting, costly to society, but not wantonly destructive.”

It’s nice to know that he was committed to good optics while shutting down cities.

King has referred to this campaign as the “Washington Spring Project” and the “Poor People’s March,” which is reportedly being staged to pressure Congress into passing legislation favorable to the Negro. It is King’s contention that the Government of the United States does not move until it is confronted dramatically. To add to the dramatic confrontation, King has boasted that he and his entourage are coming to Washington to stay; that his followers will conduct sit-ins, camp-ins, and sleep-ins at every Government facility available including the lawn of the White House. He has bragged that he will fill up the jails of Washington and surrounding towns.

That last sentence is a doozy. It looks like the ol’ Drum Major of Social Justice wasn’t above using his followers as pawns. Indeed, he had a reputation for provocative tactics, hoping that the local police would take the bait and go after his followers. That would have delivered him a propaganda victory, thanks to favorable media coverage.

The next subsection is “Black Nationalist Terror,” discussing King seeking alliances with black radicals like Stokely Carmichael. (During the 1960s, summer was informally known as the race riot season. MLK’s untimely demise would bring it on early in 1968.) Well, imagine that! Back in the day, the FBI observed megariots and drew correct conclusions about who was burning down the cities. This is quite different from today’s dim-bulb glowies who were knocking down pears with their dicks[1] while the George Floyd riots raged on for three months. Then, after they shirked their duty to protect the public, the gun-toting bureaucrats concluded that white people are Public Enemy Number One.

King is aware of the possibility of violence because one of his aides proclaimed recently to the press, “Jail will be the safest place in Washington this spring.” However, in spite of this potentially explosive situation, King continues his plans. He adroitly uses this possibility as a lever to attempt to pressure Congress into action by warning that the “Washington Spring Project” may be the last chance in this country for peaceful change with respect to civil rights needs.

Such barely-veiled threats, agitating for more preferential treatment for blacks or else, don’t quite fit with MLK’s popular image as a great peacemaker. More troubling, the next subsection is “Strong Communist Influence”:

Another complicating factor in the picture is the degree of communist influence on King. One of King’s principal advisors is Stanley David Levison. Ostensibly only a New York City attorney and businessman, Levison is, in fact, a shrewd, dedicated communist. Levison has spent the major part of his life advancing communist interests.

It states that their association began in 1956. (By the document’s chronology, that would coincide with the time that MLK attained prominence in the civil rights movement. It seems that his political efforts didn’t get into the fast lane until Comrade Levison took him under his wing.) He performed some important activities on MLK’s behalf:

He has actively involved himself in fund-raising drives for King, served as his legal counsel in certain matters, suggested speech material for him, discussed with King demonstrations in which King was involved, guided him in regard to acceptance or rejection of various public appearances and speaking commitments, and helped him with matters related to articles and books King has prepared.

It must be great to have such talented and devoted friends like that! On the other hand, was he helping the civil rights movement out of selfless dedication and love for the woebegone colored people, or did Comrade Levison have some other agenda in mind? I’ll let the reader ponder that one.

Levison edited most of the chapters of King’s new book entitled “Where Do We Go From Here; Chaos Or Community?” Levison wrote one chapter of this book and the publisher’s representative complained to King and Levison that it was obvious certain sections of the book were written by different individuals.

That tended to stand out prominently, given MLK’s mediocre intellect. According to one analysis of his habitual literary theft, “King’s plagiarisms are easy to detect because their style rises above the level of his pedestrian student prose. In general, if the sentences are eloquent, witty, insightful, or pithy, or contain allusions, analogies, metaphors, or similes, it is safe to assume that the section has been purloined.”

Stanley Levison has told Clarence Jones, another advisor to King, that under no circumstances should King be permitted to say anything without their approving it. Levison also informed Jones that King is such a slow thinker he is usually not prepared to make statements without help from someone.

Ouch! All told, this paints a picture of what their working relationship was like. Not only was he managing MLK’s finances, organizing his publicity, and providing legal counsel, he also was ghostwriting for him and protecting his dull-witted proxy from making a fool of himself in unprepared statements. It’s clear that MLK had become essentially a figurehead — or, not to put too fine a point on it, a golem. Meanwhile, his handler happened to be a diehard Communist. The report’s first section wraps up with this:

The combined forces of the communist influence and the black nationalists advocating violence give the “Washington Spring Project” a potential for an extremely explosive situation.

I’ll add that history turned out a little differently. Soon after the time of writing, plans for the Washington Spring Project were temporarily interrupted by MLK’s untimely demise via ballistic lead poisoning. Ralph Abernathy, his successor in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), carried it out a month later.

The events didn’t include camping out on the White House lawn as originally conceived. However, apparently it was quite a public nuisance — as usual for the civil rights crowd — which lasted six weeks until they clashed with police and got kicked out. The Washington Spring Project ultimately involved more chaos that was orders of magnitude above that of the previous year’s half-baked sit-in. (That only lasted two hours, but hysterical liberal politicians are still flipping and tripping and wetting their panties about it.) Fortunately for civil rights leaders, they can get away with turning Washington, DC into a three-ring circus, since these darlings are exempt from criticism.

Formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

This section begins by discussing some biographical details. MLK got his Ph.D. in 1955. (It doesn’t go into the plagiarism issue; this wasn’t known at the time.) Then he became a pastor. “After becoming established in his church, he founded the Montgomery Improvement Association and led local Negroes in the Montgomery Bus Boycott that attracted national attention.” I’ll add that this likely was what got Comrade Levison’s notice. (Either that, or did the pinkos have talent scouts for demagogues in need of a mentor?) The document states that he became the SCLC’s Assistant Treasurer in 1961:

Prior to joining forces with King, Levison led a double life for the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA). Outwardly he was a successful businessman but he was also the clandestine fund-raiser for the CPUSA. He was entrusted with raising and handling secret funds for the Party and used some of these funds to finance his own activities.

To be specific, I’ll add that before MLK’s top consigliere involved himself in the Negro uplift racket, his activities for the CPUSA included illegal money laundering to channel funds from the Soviet Union, which had a large Active Measures budget. Obviously, Comrade Levison had to be highly trusted for a duty like that. On that note, there has been much discussion of MLK’s relationship to Communism. The document lays it out:

The reason King enjoyed this close relationship with communists is best explained by the fact that Levison, in February, 1962, passed the word to Gus Hall, General Secretary, CPUSA, “King is a whole-hearted Marxist who has studied it (Marxism), believes in it and agrees with it, but because of his being a minister of religion, does not dare to espouse it publicly.” Further in March, 1962, Levison told a CPUSA functionary that King was concerned about a “communist label” being “pinned on us” but that, at the same time, he wanted to do everything possible to evidence friendship toward the Soviet Union. In addition, King has been described within the CPUSA as a true, genuine Marxist-Leninist “from the top of his head to the tips of his toes.” The feeling within the CPUSA at that time was, and still is, that King definitely follows a Marxist-Leninist line.

Then it discusses another Communist in the outfit, Hunter Pitts “Jack” O’Dell. King was under pressure to purge him. It turns out that he duplicitously kept ties to him using a cutout. Meanwhile, O’Dell became an Associate Managing Editor of Freedomways, a publication operating as a CPUSA front:

On February 23, 1968, King was the guest speaker at a rally of more than a thousand people at Carnegie Hall, New York City, sponsored by “Freedomways,” celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of W. E. B. DuBois, famous Negro civil rights crusader who joined the Communist Party at age 93.

Apparently the pinkos didn’t have much trouble renting public venues even in the middle of the Cold War. O’Dell attended that one, too. Levison noted that MLK botched the speech: “King has never read anything as badly . . . as though he did not understand what he was reading”:

On June 22, 1964, an advisory and research committee was formed, with King’s approval, for the purpose of writing King’s speeches and guiding his actions. Among the members of the group were Lawrence Reddick, Bayard Rustin, Clarence Jones and Harry Wachtel.

As we can see, others eventually joined Levison in choreographing MLK and using him for a mouthpiece. All those named were either known Communists or front group members. Then the document lists eight pinkos with officer positions in the SCLC.

Communist Objectives

This section describes Communist efforts to form alliances with blacks. (It kept matters short, though the subject in general could fill a book.) The Vietnam War provided them further opportunities for a united front:

Abandoning its previous efforts to form a Negro-labor coalition, the CPUSA now started touting a Negro-peace coalition that would form a massive movement to force the United States Government to change its foreign and domestic policies.

I’ll add that this obviously would help advance Communist geopolitical objectives in Southeast Asia. (This kind of conniving during a war was treasonous, but who’s counting?) It turned out to be strategically sound; after the Fall of Saigon, the United States wasn’t in a position to stop the Marxist insurgencies that took over Laos and ravaged Cambodia.

The Emergence of the Peace Issue in King’s Group

The next act came when MLK first dipped his toes into the Vietnam matter on August 12, 1965 at the prompting of some members of his Marxist advisory committee:

This move on the part of King was engineered by Bayard Rustin and Harry Wachtel. In early August they met and discussed how to inject King into the Vietnam issue . . . This action, they felt, would cast an image on King as a great moral leader and extend his influence beyond the civil rights movement.

Subsequently, a leading newspaper sent King 12 questions to answer which would clarify his position on Vietnam. Upon receipt of these questions, King referred them to Stanley Levison to answer.

This prompted a backlash, so this advisory committee decided to back off temporarily. One of MLK’s major supporters raised an objection, but

Wachtel reminded King, “When we went into this Vietnam thing, we decided that he who controls the purse strings doesn’t control our philosophy.”

But wait! There’s more!

After the resumption of bombing of North Vietnam in February, 1966, King conferred with Stanley Levison and Bayard Rustin concerning a statement for the press. King informed them that the press had been bothering him for a statement, but he dared not take any action until he discussed the matter with them.

Then they cooked up a reply for him to use. Not long after, the SCLC top brass assembled to write up an anti-war resolution, with comrades Levison and Wachtel continuing “to argue for a stronger resolution that was presented.” In May, MLK was to be interviewed on CBS’ Face the Nation, and comrades Levison and Jones gave him some talking points ahead of time. There’s a lot more where that came from: again and again, the document recounts MLK’s top consigliere telling him what to say, guiding his moves, suggesting initiatives to promote, and even deciding when it was time to put the peace issue on the back burner. By the end of all this, MLK comes across looking like a marionette operated by some clever ventriloquists.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference Finances

Comrade Levison also figures prominently in this section, of course. The SCLC’s revenue in FY 1966 was $901,021.52 — nice! They still had real money back in the 1960s; that’s the equivalent of $7.5 million today. (Imagine what we could do with that kind of funding!) The SCLC set up a tax dodge to handle the surplus.

Much of the funding came from rich do-gooders — what we’d now call “woke capital” — as well as some robber baron foundations formed by Leftists. These included the precursor to Merrill Lynch, Edward Lamb, the Ford Foundation, Nelson Rockefeller, Harry Belafonte, and Anne Labouisse Farnsworth (the Singer Sewing Machine Company’s heiress). There were even a couple of government grants; at least one of the two was arranged by Comrade Levison. Sweet!

King’s Personal Conduct

The final section gets into rather explosive territory. Everyone has their shortcomings, but in this case, it’s too much of a stretch to invoke the “what happens in Vegas” rule writ large. Sexual behavior is normally considered a private matter. However, as Spencer J. Quinn noted (covering the same material in a broad overview), someone who attends drunken orgies with hookers that are paid for by foundation grants has abrogated any right to privacy, since behavior like that clearly exceeds personal matters. Be that as it may, his companion Jesse Jackson — a better man, despite his foibles — has been put through the wringer over far less.

With the funds that he had received from the Ford Foundation, King held the first of two workshops in Miami, Florida, in February, 1968, to train Negro ministers in urban leadership. One Negro minister in attendance later expressed his disgust with the behind-the-scene drinking, fornication, and homosexuality that went on at the conference. Several Negro and white prostitutes were brought in from the Miami area. An all-night sex orgy was held with these prostitutes and some of the delegates in attendance.

One room had a large table in it which was filled with whiskey. The two Negro prostitutes were paid $50.00 to put on a sex show for the entertainment of guests. A variety of sex acts deviating from the normal were observed.

On a positive note, this phony preacher was wasting the Ford Foundation’s $230,000 grant “to train Negro ministers in 25 cities throughout the Nation to become qualified leaders in the ghetto areas.” It doesn’t say what happened to the rest of these “workshops,” but presumably it also involved partying away funding intended to promote Leftist agitation.

This activity is not new to King and his associates. As early as January, 1964, King engaged in another, two-day, drunken sex orgy in Washington, D. C. Many of those present engaged in sexual acts, natural as well as unnatural, for the entertainment of onlookers. When one of the females shied away from engaging in an unnatural act, King and other of the males present discussed how she was to be taught and initiated in this respect.

This tends to make the skin crawl, almost as much as the Joe Bidet “inappropriate showers” business.

Throughout the ensuing years and until this date King has continued to carry on his sexual aberrations secretly while holding himself out to public view as a moral leader of religious conviction.

That’s quite true. Since MLK was a minister, and nowadays touted as a “moral giant” and secular demigod, that stuff just doesn’t fly. I’m even less inclined to cut him slack, since berating America for failing to live up to its lofty ideals (as per the fourth of Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals) was his go-to shtick.

After that, the document discusses some baby daddy drama rather similar to that in which Jesse Jackson would later become entangled. Then it mentions three ongoing extramarital liaisons, one of which was with a celebrity folk singer.

I’ll add that he continued his detestable behavior up through his last night on Earth. His “I’m not a Negro tonight!” remark, made while beating a white prostitute, wasn’t the best choice for a final statement. When MLK met his sidekick Jesus the next day, He likely wasn’t impressed with the “I’m fucking for God!” remark, either.

The report concludes with an ironic quote from the Saint Who Ain’t:

History has thrust me into this position. It would be immoral and a sign of ingratitude if I did not face my moral responsibility to do what I can in the civil rights struggle.

That, of course, is just the sort of “holy man” puffery with which this colossally overrated demagogue has become known for spouting.

And just because

As I would later come to understand things, MLK and Malcolm X constituted a sort of “good cop/bad cop” dialectic that they presented to the white public during the 1960s. In retrospect, however, Malcolm X emerges as the better person. Although he was explicitly militant, his honesty about where he stood was preferable to the sneaky hypocrisy of MLK’s provocations and veiled threats while holding himself up as a peacemaker. Moreover, Malcolm X didn’t let himself get tooled by a coterie of pinkos.

So that was the real MLK. Documents from the usual TLA agencies should be taken with a grain of salt, of course. However, his successor Ralph Abernathy’s account, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, describes the moral turpitude in somewhat worse terms. KGB insider Vasili Mitrokhin’s tell-all book The Sword and the Shield does confirm the Levison connection, though with misplaced pessimism.

Now we have a national holiday for the plastic demigod, and there is even a massive monument to him in the capital. I discussed that briefly in Deplorable Diatribes and can’t help sharing it:

“On a side note, here are some unintentionally funny facts about the MLK memorial statue:

• This monument to adorn Washington, DC was made in China. (Everything is made in China these days, but c’mon . . .)
• African folk art includes statuary, so why not get one of those guys to build it, since hiring an American (black or otherwise) apparently wasn’t on the table?
• The sculptor used to make statues of Mao Zedong.
• Consequentially, the Socialist Realism style looks similar to Chairman Mao’s iconography.
• The statue’s facial expression is something else that depicts MLK’s inner thoughts too accurately.
• It was carved from white stone. (Tóngzhì, did you do your research?)”

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Note

[1] From the colorful Russian expression for being idle: хуем груши околачивать.