The Delicious Irony of the Federal Government Memorializing MLK

In all the celebrations going on this week over the (now-delayed) dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial, few have noted the irony that Dr. King was often at odds with the federal government, as well as a lot of state governments.  Only fifteen months after Dr. King’s famous speech at the August 28, 1963 march and rally, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover told a group of women reporters that Dr. King was "the most notorious liar in the country."  This came in reaction to newspaper reports of a mild criticism by Dr. King of the FBI’s handling of civil rights complaints in the South.

Indeed it was that very march that convinced Hoover that Dr. King and the civil rights movement were serious threats to his America.  He shifted the Bureau’s policy from observing the movement, while providing information on it to local law enforcement in the South, into actively undermining it.  Dr. King was his primary target.  At Hoover’s direction, the FBI not only harassed Dr. King, but did not even warn him when it knew of threats on his life.

I was not at that famous march in Washington forty-eight years ago; I was still a college student on the West Coast.  But that fall I was one of hundreds—nay, thousands—of students to become active in the civil rights movement from all over the country.  After graduating from Berkeley in 1965, I went South to work for Dr. King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).  In my eighteen months with SCLC I worked mostly in Alabama, but also in South Carolina, Mississippi, the Atlanta office, and Chicago.  After Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, I hitchhiked from Chicago to Atlanta because I needed to be present at his funeral.

While welcoming the memorialization of Dr. King at the seat of our national government, we should not forget that it and the civil rights movement had a very uneasy relationship.  The movement’s goal was a fundamental change in our culture regarding race.  Presidents Kennedy and Johnson agreed on the need for change, but it was not a priority.  They were quite aware that most of the important congressional committees were chaired by Southerners who could hold up their other proposals if they pushed the envelope on race.

Within the Department of Justice, movement demands created a contradictory response.  Attorneys General Robert Kennedy, Nicholas Katzenbach and Ramsey Clark were sympathetic.  FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was not.  Technically, Hoover reported to the attorney general.  Realistically, he had his own empire.  Attorney generals came and went.  Hoover had been in charge of the Bureau since 1924; by the 1960s 40 percent of DoJ personnel reported to him and he had extensive files on all the politicians he worked for, with, and against.

Hoover worked very hard to keep his people loyal to him, diligent in pursuit of his goals, and distant from the rest of the DoJ.  To further the cause of civil rights the attorney generals went around the FBI, using attorneys in the small Civil Rights Division to do much of the investigative work that should have been done by FBI agents.

Unfortunately, it was Hoover’s FBI agents who were the public face of the federal government in the South.  The fact that they only took notes when they watched civil rights workers being beaten, failed to investigate when local people were killed, and even informed on us to local law enforcement, did not generate trust in the federal government.  Few of us in the field were aware of the other side of the Justice Department—the attorneys who spent weeks gathering evidence for court cases to close down the institutions of white supremacy.

Dr. King saw both sides.  He also knew that presidents had many demands made on them and that public opinion could offset presidential deference to conservative congressional committee chairs.  He believed in America.  He knew that mass demonstrations that generated major national publicity was the way to reach the conscience of America.

Presidents Kennedy and Johnson did not like these demonstrations, arguing that they made it harder to pass new civil rights bills.  They were also concerned that publicity about racial discontent would be used in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union.

Yet we now know that President Kennedy revised the proposals that became the 1964 Civil Rights Act largely in response to the May 1963 Birmingham demonstrations, and that President Johnson accelerated passage of the Voting Rights Act by a year in response to the 1965 Selma demonstrations.

After Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, many commented that he had preached about his coming death only the month before, as though he had a premonition.  I heard him preach that sentiment in 1966.  All of us on the SCLC staff knew that he would not die a natural death.  Short of retiring to a monastery, it was only a matter of who would kill him, when and how.

Dr. King lived a life of sacrifice and died a tragic death.  He was at the forefront of one of the great revolutions of the twentieth century.  It is fitting that the nation should honor him with a memorial, near that honoring Abraham Lincoln and about a mile away from the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building.