When the FBI Spied on MLK

The extent to which the FBI spent the last years of King’s life attempting to neutralize that perceived threat is the subject of an insightful new documentary by the director Sam Pollard. MLK/FBI chronicles the bureau’s attempts to stifle the civil-rights movement through coordinated efforts to spy on King, with the hope of discrediting his righteous public image. With King, as with many Black activists since the beginning of the 20th century, the FBI’s surveillance wasn’t an isolated obsession. It was part of a long-running effort to keep Black Americans from acquiring institutional power, Pollard told me. “I know the history of Ida B. Wells. I understand the history of America after Reconstruction and how African Americans have struggled through the years of Jim Crow and segregation and lynching,” the director said. “I think one of the important things about this film is that it’s an opportunity not just for those of us who know this history, but for those who don’t, to come to grips with the complexity of American history.”

Read: How many attacks will it take until the white-supremacist threat is taken seriously?

Pollard’s documentary places Sullivan’s memo about King in direct conversation with the virulent racism of J. Edgar Hoover, who often cautioned against the rise of a “Black Messiah.” Hoover, who had been the director of the agency when it was known as the “Bureau of Investigation,” became the head of the FBI when it was renamed in 1935. After ascending to that post, Hoover ran the bureau until his death in 1972, his time directing intelligence totaling an astonishing 48 years. MLK/FBI doesn’t just leave viewers to assume that Hoover’s long-running command of the FBI led to the targeting of King and other Black activists, including Ella Baker, Angela Davis, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. The film traces exactly how the surveillance of King started, how it was conducted, and the effects it had on his life.

In doing so, MLK/FBI offers an important corrective to prevailing myths about King and his principles of nonviolent resistance, which were not, in fact, widely embraced. As my colleague Vann Newkirk wrote in 2018, “hostility toward the civil-rights movement turned into a cherry-picked celebration of the revolution’s victories over segregation and over easily caricatured, gap-toothed bigots in the South.” The reality was that opposition to King, and to the racial progress he symbolized, wasn’t restricted by region or by political affiliation. Democrats and Republicans alike had turned against King by his later years, especially after he voiced objection to the Vietnam War.

MLK/FBI also illustrates how the racist belief that Black activists are politically naive has long informed national-intelligence gathering. The film is based on a 1981 book by the historian David Garrow. (Garrow wrote an article for The Atlantic about the “reprocessing” of the FBI documents that detailed King’s surveillance, which made hundreds of pages newly available for public view in 2002.) The documentary shows that the FBI’s primary concern in the 1950s was the Communist Party. To the extent that Black leaders such as King initially caught the bureau’s attention, the documentary notes, it was because government officials believed that Black people as a population were easily susceptible to political manipulation. Well before the FBI invented a now-discontinued category called “Black Identity Extremism” to describe the Black Lives Matter movement in 2017, it formed COINTELPRO, a counterintelligence program meant to fight communism that instead targeted Black organizations as benign as bookstores. In 1958, Hoover suggested that there was a robust propaganda campaign afoot: “The Negro situation is also being exploited fully and continuously by communists on a national scale … so as to create unrest, dissension, and confusion in the minds of the American people.”