The Full Letter Written by the FBI to Martin Luther King Has Been Revealed

Screen Shot 2014-11-12 at 3.12.39 PMMartin Luther King, Jr. is one of my personal heroes. Not just because of his outsized contribution to the civil rights movement, but because of his leadership capabilities and emphasis on non-violent civil disobedience. It also goes without saying, that this wasn’t just a great orator with enlightened tactics, he was also a highly intelligent man with a strong sense of history. This is on full display in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which I highlighted in the piece: Martin Luther King: “Everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was Legal.” Here are some of his timeless words.

One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice.

Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?

Naturally, a man that utters such words and who also has a considerable following would not appeal to the thug in charge of the FBI at the time, J. Edgar Hoover. So what did Mr. Hoover do? He sent a letter to Dr. King, pretending to be a black person and implied that he should kill himself. None of this is news, but until the New York Times released it yesterday, copies of this letter had always been partly redacted. We now have the uncensored version. Here it is:

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Now ask yourself a question. Is the FBI any more ethical today than it was back then? I would argue certainly not. After all, it had a file on on tech prodigy Aaron Swartz, who was driven to suicide by the feds. Now imagine what the FBI could do to political dissidents in a world in which they have a backdoor into all your electronic devices, which is precisely what it wants.

So the next time you think to yourself “so what, I have nothing to hide,” think again. You don’t know what the future holds, do you really want the status quo to have everything you’ve ever done or said accessible in an electronic file on you? What about the threat this poses to other people who put themselves in the arena of fighting for social change? Do you want the FBI to be able to do to them what they did to MLK but 10x worse? Think deeply about that.

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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22 thoughts on “The Full Letter Written by the FBI to Martin Luther King Has Been Revealed”

  1. Unless and until the expansive immunities granted to government agents are curtailed, there is no reason to expect these sorts of abuses to cease.

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  2. This is old news! For the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination, why not declassify all the papers about it, similar to what was done with the JFK papers after Oliver Stone’s movie caused an outcry?

    Why not tell the public the truth, that James Earl Ray was set up to be the patsy? Wikipedia: “The King family has since concluded that Ray did not have anything to do with the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.”

    So, for the 50th anniversary, why not finally pardon James Earl Ray for something he didn’t do? Why not send a message to the U.S. government that it’s wrong to spy on and murder its own citizens?

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  3. “Hmmm, me thinks your credibility just slipped a notch or two.”

    Hmm, you just lost some credibility here,, MLK was a great man.

    Fk your FBI

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  4. peaceful resistance is pure claptrap.

    gandi was not peaceful. he attacked the economic foundations of an empire run on taxes by encouraging people not to pay their taxes, excepting this, NOT TO TRADE.

    that is how wars are fought . petrodollar warfare is about attacking purchasing and sellling of commodities. financial and economic warfare are the core existential territories wars are generally fought over. all other ‘ideologies’ are simply derived from the underlying quest for power, itself derived from the ability to tax and determine where and how commercial ‘free’ trade is permitted.

    the idea that the mobs will inform an evil government of its abuses upon a sole protester in prison, and then effect government change , can only be rooted in the mobs ability to disrupt commerce, taxation, or the status quo modus operandi .

    disruption is in its nature an attack on ‘the way of things’ and mere ‘consietious’ respect for the ‘law’ is a fantasy predicated on the false assumption that the law is actually a tangible firm ground of rules.

    the law is nothing more than abstractions of human will , set in language, and then written down to record in a manner that is supposed to be clear for all to see.

    our laws are anything but clear. they are NOT for all to see as they are buried in mountains of legal substantive codes, and PROCEDURAL codes opaque even to many of the lawyers who are the only ones legally permitted to give counsel on the meaning of these procedures. and then of course, all ambiguities are made further complicated by the set of ‘common law’ rulings made by judges whose general tenor results in further complicating, rather than simplifying, the proceeses by which the law is applied.

    in essence. ‘respect’ for the law is just another tactic and nothing more than evasive bullshit in the cannon of resistance, which can use any and all tactics, including co-opting of the law itself.

    after all, the american colonialist revolutionaries used legal language , indictments, bills of particulars, and other legal ‘documents’ , to help lay out their case for independence, all of which helped further the cause of raising french financing and english sympathy for the cause of a soveriegn revolutionary army OUSTING the colonialist government in the district of england.

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  5. Until the individual, in what ever country they live, take the conscious responsibility to remove or limit themselves from the systems and wicked individuals that don’t bring them joy, the systems and individuals will never change. Don’t try to blow up the giant bolder in your backyard with dynamite, which doesn’t diminish the bolder only spreads it out across your landscape, making it harder to remove without something being left behind. Instead, use other non abrasive means to rid the bolder. Chipping, pressure, dissolving. In the life of systems, don’t give your time, labour or monies to those systems. The demand goes away, the problem goes away. The problem is not in some faceless system, it is within the wickedness of the hearts of men and women that created these system. We no longer turn away from those who do evil, instead we invite them into our homes, to rape our children, wives and our wallets, eventually destroying any dignity we may have thought we had. Even resulting sometimes in that person finding their life not worth living, so they depart from us. Learn to defend your front at all costs, because in the end, if you don’t, you will be have what you did not desire in the first place. Do your part, be an example of it working and others without vision will see your vision and follow your example. Over 7 billion people doing what is best for others and themselves, will be the power that destroys the wicked class that wants nothing more than to devour all that you have. Take care and be mindful of your choices in this life.

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