Martin Luther King and J. Edgar Hoover

Martin Luther King, J. Edgar Hoover

The interaction in the 1960s of the FBI and its Director, J. Edgar Hoover, with Martin Luther King, is often told as a story of racist State officials persecuting an innocent man leading a movement asking for justice. The reality is a lot more complicated.

CIVIL RIGHTS AND COMMUNISM

From shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Communism acquired an intellectual influence over the emerging civil rights movement in the United States because of its ostensible universalism and the myth-image of Soviet Russia as a multiracial workers’ paradise.¹ The Communist Party USA (CPUSA), an entity wholly owned by the Soviet secret police, as all “fraternal” Parties were, became interested in the plight of black Americans in the late 1920s, when Stalin realised what a powerful propaganda item Jim Crow was in contesting claims of American “freedom”, and how potentially useful black Americans could be as a vector to export the Revolution. The CPUSA’s highly disciplined cadres spearheaded the civil rights movement in its early phase and even after the 1950s retained an influence out of all proportion to its small numbers,² as was true of the labour unions.³

This was the backdrop as Stanley Levison, born to a Jewish family in New York City in 1912, came of age. Levison joining the civil rights movement was not unusual: American Jews made up a disproportionate number of white civil rights activists.⁴ Levison would become one of the most senior white members of the civil rights movement, the closest—and most influential—adviser to Dr. King. From the early 1950s, Levison was treasurer for the Manhattan branch of the American Jewish Congress and a key financier of the CPUSA. He partook in, and his work financed, many Communist causes of the period, notably the defence of the Rosenberg spies,⁵ and agitating against the Internal Security Act.⁶ Levison’s role in the CPUSA was known to the FBI because of informants Morris and Jack Childs. In 1956, Levison turned to the civil rights movement.⁷

It is sometimes claimed Levison abandoned the CPUSA in 1955.⁸ That is not true. Levison formally stepped away from the CPUSA—he stopped appearing on their membership rolls, for instance—in late 1956 or early 1957, which made the FBI more suspicious of him, and for very good reason. By the late 1950s, the KGB knew the CPUSA was under close FBI surveillance and shot through with informants. Standard practice in such circumstances, as seen in Britain earlier, was for the Soviets’ most important agents to distance themselves from the Party, which is exactly what Levison was suspected of doing.⁹

Ironically, it was through Levison’s work at “In Friendship” with Bayard Rustin—who despised the Communists and their attempt to instrumentalise the civil rights movement for the Soviet Union’s ends—that Levison connected to Dr. King. Levison became a key organisational component for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), responsible for fundraising, was often the ghost-writer for King, and even did King’s tax returns. Levison refused to accept payment from King for his services.¹⁰

In 1962, FBI Director Hoover learned of the Levison-King relationship and took it to Attorney General Robert Kennedy (RFK). King was asked, via Harris Wofford, the Special Assistant to the President for Civil Rights, to cut ties with Levison, but he refused without proof of a threat to national security.¹¹ In February 1962, after King ignored a second request from the White House to drop Levison, this time delivered by John Seigenthaler, a journalist who edited the Tennessean in Nashville, RFK authorised electronic surveillance of Levison. In June 1962, Levison was detected recommending Jack O’Dell (a.k.a. Hunter Pitts O’Dell), a known CPUSA fundraising operative, as an assistant to King. Hoover’s FBI tried to reverse King’s recruitment of O’Dell by leaking to the press about the SCLC being infiltrated at a senior level by a Communist operative.¹²

After the appearance of a 2 November 1962 newspaper article identifying O’Dell as a Communist, King announced that O’Dell had resigned his role as administrative assistant. The FBI knew this was a lie since they tracked O’Dell regularly visiting the SCLC office in New York City.¹³ Worried about the political damage the public revelations of King’s Communist associates were doing to the civil rights movement—and by extension to the Kennedy administration—King was once again asked by the White House, through intermediaries, to expel these people from his midst. King agreed—then, as with O’Dell, continued privately meeting and communicating with them. This was quickly discovered since there was an RFK-ordered tap on Levison’s home telephone. In January 1963, King communicated to RFK that it was his Christian duty not to turn on a friend. With the civil rights movement gaining momentum, King also wanted to keep his trusted organiser around.¹⁴

When Dr. King went to the White House on 22 June 1963—two months before the March on Washington—he was met by Burke Marshall, Assistant United States Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, who bluntly told King that Levison was “a paid agent of the Soviet Communist apparatus”, and he should not be in contact with him. Soon after, King next met President Kennedy, who said the same thing. Kennedy was irritated how lightly King took the Communist threat and tried to break through again on a walk around the Rose Garden later that day. Kennedy started by telling King he was under surveillance (which he was not), adding what his administration earnestly believed: Levison was a Soviet spy and the “handler” for O’Dell (albeit JFK’s statement that O’Dell was the fifth-highest ranking Communist in America was more dubious). King tried to laugh it off by saying that O’Dell didn’t have time to be a spy; he worked two jobs for SCLC. Kennedy tried again, begging King, “Get rid of them”. Appealing to King’s sense of mission, Kennedy noted even the appearance of Communist associations was enough to destroy them both, as the contemporaneous Profumo scandal had shown in Britain. King demanded “proof”. Kennedy tired of the discussion. A few days later, Marshall gave evidence to Andrew Young, a King associate, though it consisted of little more than a comparison of Levison to Rudolf Abel (real name: William Fisher),¹⁵ a British citizen and émigré Russian who set up the only functional post-war Illegal residency in the U.S.¹⁶

King wanted Kennedy administration support, but did not want to lose his useful advisor. It was at Levison’s initiative that an effort was made to square the circle: all visible ties were cut, while contact was maintained through intermediaries, usually Clarence Jones, King’s personal lawyer. Unfortunately for King, the wiretaps on Levison and Jones meant this arrangement was disclosed to the FBI and the White House almost immediately. King’s duplicity caused such worry about his true allegiances and intentions that it led to surveillance being placed on him directly.¹⁷ (Because of this surveillance, it is also known that around October 1965, King resumed direct personal contact with Levison.¹⁸) The FBI’s wiretapping of King’s home and the SCLC office in Atlanta began on 8 November 1963, exactly two weeks before President Kennedy was assassinated.

LEVISON RECONSIDERS

King never did cut contact with Levison; they remained close to the end. What is interesting is that Levison seems to have undergone an internal evolution around this time, becoming personally morally attached to American civil rights as an end in itself, not merely as an instrumental part of his devotion to the Soviet Union—and to the extent there was any conflict between the two commitments, he seemed to favour civil rights. In June 1963, Levison unilaterally removed himself from CPUSA political discipline and renounced all responsibility for fundraising for the Party on the grounds that they had done insufficient work to help Dr. King. That said, Levison still did not actually quit the Party, and the CPUSA shored-up its position by dispatching CPUSA National Secretary Benjamin Davis to liaise with Levison, and O’Dell was sent to work directly in King’s office.¹⁹

A crucial point where Levison saw his commitment to the Soviet Union and his commitment to civil rights diverging was over the Vietnam War. The Soviets had bolstered the 1960s “peace” movement,²⁰ as they had the 1930s isolationists (until Operation BARBAROSSA in 1941). The natural thing, therefore, would have been for Levison to be enthusiastically supportive when King proposed in 1967 to call for the U.S. to withdraw from Vietnam, something the Soviets dearly wanted. But Levison understood that fusing the civil rights movement with the anti-war movement would severely damage the former: whatever qualms most patriotic Americans had about the war, an overwhelming majority still supported it and associated the anti-war movement with student disorder and the loudest, most radically anti-American spokesmen, who openly supported an enemy that was killing four-hundred American soldiers every month.²¹

Thus, when King sought Levison’s advice about the speech, Levison told him not to give it.²² Levison was, for once, overruled. King delivered his “A Time to Break Silence” speech at the Riverside Church in New York City on 4 April 1967, which equated legal equality for black Americans and letting South Vietnam be enslaved by Communists as equally moral causes. King denounced “an unjust, evil, and futile war” that had, “like some demonic, destructive suction tube”, taken away the funds that should have been devoted to the Poverty Program.

THE COMMUNIST INFLUENCE

The impact of the Communists around King was a source of debate for those who knew about it at the time, namely Hoover and President Lyndon Johnson, and ever since. FBI analysts continued to portray King as being rather sympathetic to Marxism-Leninism. Inter alia, the FBI had information that Levison, in what was effectively an intelligence report to CPUSA general-secretary Gus Hall, had said in February 1962 that King was “wholeheartedly Marxist … but because of his being a minister of religion does not dare to espouse it publicly”.²³

In truth, it seems King knew Bolshevism was incompatible with his faith. But organisationally this was less clear cut. For example, as King explained in a telephone call with Rustin in May 1965, which was recorded by the FBI, he had wanted to make a public statement “renouncing Communism in theory … We wanted to say that it was an alien philosophy contrary to us, but they wouldn’t go along with it”. “They” here was Stokely Carmichael and his absurdly named Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), with whom King was negotiating to form a common platform.

What is notable is that, while neither the dynamics within the civil rights movement nor the active attempt from one of King’s closest advisers could stop King speaking against American involvement in Vietnam—which, whatever else it was doing, was preventing the spread of Soviet Communism—King was blocked from making anti-Communist statements. It gives an indication of the balance of sentiment around King and the constraints Moscow’s friends were able to impose upon him.

THE FBI AND DR. KING

The FBI is often said to have been hostile to the civil rights movement. People will point to the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), but the reality is COINTELPRO targeted for infiltration, destabilisation, and where possible eradication Communists, the “urban guerrilla” terrorist groups like the Weather Underground, and violent racialist outfits (above all the Black Panthers). To the extent the civil rights movement was caught up in COINTELPRO and other FBI counter-subversive programs, it was an incidental fact of its own making, due to the movement’s overlap with the “New Left” radicals. The civil rights movement itself was not the target. All of that was also in the future. What COINTELPRO’s critics usually omit from their morality story of “political persecution” is that COINTELPRO’s most comprehensive and lasting impact was the destruction of the Ku Klux Klan in a campaign that began in 1964, years before COINTELPRO was turned against Leftist extremists.

The most infamous case of FBI abuse against King was a letter sent to King by an FBI agent on 21 November 1964, purporting to be from a supporter disappointed with King’s adulterous conduct. “You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes”, the letter said, asking King to lend his “sexually psychotic ear” to the enclosed tape of one of King’s trysts. The letter concluded by threatening to expose King’s “filthy” and “evil” behaviour if he did not commit suicide: “[T]here is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is.” A copy of the letter and the tape were sent to King’s wife.

This letter was not at all consistent with the FBI’s general approach to King. The letter was the act of an individual, probably FBI Assistant Director William C. Sullivan, and Hoover almost certainly did not know it had been sent.²⁴ So far from the FBI trying to destroy King, the discernible pattern is the Bureau trying protect the civil rights movement—physically, and from King’s missteps.

The FBI had known about the yawning gap between King’s public image as a man of God and his wild private life since 1963, when direct surveillance began. Hoover was certainly personally disgusted at what the wiretaps disclosed. After King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Hoover received the news clipping on 14 October 1964, and wrote in the margin, “King could well qualify for the ‘top alley cat’ prize”.

Beyond King’s “immoral” behaviour, the FBI surveillance discovered a most disturbing episode—if anything more so now, in a post-#MeToo situation. In January 1964, King was in Washington, D.C., for the oral arguments before the Supreme Court in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (a different Sullivan to the FBI deputy.²⁵) The FBI bugged the hotel room King was staying in, and found King and his friend, Dr. Logan Kearse, the pastor of Baltimore’s Cornerstone Baptist Church, assessing which of the female “parishioners” from Kearse’s congregation “would be suitable for natural or unnatural sex acts”, as an FBI memo from Sullivan’s personal holdings reports. The memo goes on: “When one of the women protested that she did not approve of this, [Kearse] immediately and forcibly raped her”. Someone, possibly Sullivan, has written in the margin, “King looked on, laughed, and offered advice”. There was a drunken orgy the next night, too; nothing non-consensual was recorded.²⁶

There was no effort to leak this information, which would have been devastating for King’s public standing. The FBI’s concern was that this double life left King open to blackmail, specifically of a kind that would bring him under greater Communist influence.²⁷

After a series of accusations from King that the FBI was collaborating with segregationist governors in the South in the violence against civil rights protesters, on 18 November 1964—days before the package to King encouraging his suicide was mailed—Hoover blew up at a press conference, calling King “the most notorious liar in the country”. Hoover’s horrified staff tried to declare the statement off-the-record, but the Director told the journalists: “Feel free to print my remarks as given”.²⁸

What had incensed Hoover was that he had done the exact reverse of what King alleged. Hoover sent FBI agents to shadow King, guaranteeing his security during the “freedom summer” of 1964 in Mississippi after receiving intelligence that white supremacists were planning to kill the minister. In Alabama, in the hours after the conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery march at the end of March 1965, a (white) civil rights activist, Viola Liuzzo, had been murdered. Such crimes usually took months to investigate and many were never solved at all by the racist state governments in Dixie. Liuzzo’s killers, three Klansmen, were in police custody the next day because of the FBI’s infiltration of the Klan. When the local all-white jury acquitted the murderers, Hoover was among those who pressed for the use of Reconstruction-era statutes to bring Federal charges against the three men for violating civil rights: they were convicted and imprisoned.²⁹

Apart from this physical protection, Hoover had worked hard to defend King’s reputation, not only ensuring the information about King’s sexual behaviour remained secret, but—when King was accused of being a Communist tool by Southern governors like Mississippi’s Ross Barnett and Alabama’s George Wallace—it was Hoover who, despite the FBI’s internal worries about King’s relationship with Communism, leaked the information to the newspapers refuting these charges.

Under pressure from LBJ, Hoover publicly apologised for his outburst and met with King for their one and only face-to-face meeting on 1 December 1964. “I want to assure you that I have been seriously misquoted in the matter of slurs against the FBI,” King told Hoover. In turn, Hoover explained that any contact his agents had with Southern policemen was to gather information so the Federal civil rights laws could be enforced and violations punished. Hoover underlined that the FBI was waging an all-out campaign against the Klan, was prosecuting racist policemen who attacked civil rights activists, and could be contacted at any time about misconduct from Bureau agents. Hoover went on to say: “One of the greatest things you could accomplish for your people would be to encourage them to register and vote. Registrars in the South now have to be much more careful than in the past, and there are fewer attempts to prevent Negroes from registering. We’re monitoring registration and voting procedures very carefully.”

King was murdered in April 1968, aged just 39. Hoover died in May 1972, aged 77, having led the FBI since 1924. Levison died of cancer, aged 67, in September 1979. O’Dell, though only ten years younger than Levison, outlived him by decades, dying in October 2019, at age 96, after continuing on with progressive causes, notably being one of the intellectual and organisational forces behind the Presidential candidacy of Jesse Jackson in the 1980s.

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NOTES

1. Many black intellectuals, most prominently W.E.B. Du Bois, travelled to the Soviet Union and were impressed. Part of the “Great Migration” out of the South in the 1920s and even more so in the 1930s, during the Depression, included thousands of black Americans settling in the Soviet Union. Most of them were consumed in Yezhovshchina. See: Robert Robinson (1988), Black on Red: My Forty-Four Years Inside the Soviet Union.

2. Glenda Gilmore has a good write-up of this dynamic in, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (2009).

3. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin (1999), The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, p. 279.

4. Jews remained prominent in the civil rights movement all the way through. As just one example: an important event in providing the public support for the signing of the Civil Rights Act on 2 July 1964 was the terrible murder two weeks earlier of three civil rights activists in Mississippi. The three victims were: James Chaney, a local black man, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, both white Jews from New York.

5. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, recruited by the KGB’s predecessor in 1942, had, among other things, betrayed MANHATTAN Project secrets that significantly hastened the Soviet Union’s ability to build atomic weapons, and passed to Moscow designs for military systems (including then-cutting-edge radar technology) that assisted the Red Army in enslaving Eastern Europe and helped enable the Soviet attempt to conquer South Korea, getting three million people killed [see: Steven T. Usdin (2005), Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley, p. 99]. The Rosenbergs were arrested in the summer of 1950, went on trial in March 1951, and were executed in June 1953, the only U.S. traitors put to death during the long Cold War.

Julius had done so much damage, the U.S. government was determined to make an example of him. Despite it being clear Ethel was a full partner in her husband’s treachery, the State was not all that keen to see her executed: it was an era when being a relatively young a woman (she was 37, two years older than Julius) with two children induced paternalistic sentiments. Ethel, however, was a fanatical Communist and remained defiant to the last, refusing to recant her faith and mitigate her treason by cooperating with authorities; she left authorities no choice but to send her to the electric chair alongside her husband. The sad truth, one Ethel’s two sons struggle to accept all these decades later, is that she “loved Stalin more than her own children”, as one expert on the case summarised so well.

6. The Internal Security Act (ISA) or Subversive Activities Control Act passed in late 1950. The ISA banned Communists and fascists from entering the U.S. and demanded the registration of all organisations seeking to establish a totalitarian government in America. Those who registered under ISA by definition opened themselves to prosecution under the Smith Act (Alien Registration Act of 1940), which had been signed into law around the time of the fall of France, when the Nazi-Soviet Pact was still operational. The Smith Act made it illegal to advocate the forcible overthrow of the U.S. government. It was the Smith Act that was used to suppress Nazi and other Axis advocates in the U.S. during the Second World War, and then to prosecute Eugene Dennis (real name: Francis Xavier Waldron), the head of the CPUSA, in 1949. Once the Dennis conviction was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1951 (Dennis v. United States), the FBI went after the rest of the CPUSA and essentially drove it underground for the remainder of the 1950s [see: The Sword and the Shield, p. 164]. The Warren Court’s sharp turn to a more absolutist reading of the First Amendment, culminating with Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) overturning Dennis, opened space for the CPUSA and other KGB assets to begin restoring the Soviet espionage apparat in America.

7. Clayborne Carson, “Levison, Stanley”, appearing in: The Civil Rights Movement in America: From Black Nationalism to the Women's Political Council (2015), edited by Peter B. Levy, p. 178.

8. Evan Thomas (2013), Robert Kennedy: His Life, p. 251.

9. Declassified FBI files, available here (pp. 22-23).

10. The Civil Rights Movement in America, pp. 178-79.

11. The Civil Rights Movement in America, p. 179.

12. Robert Kennedy: His Life, pp. 251-52.

13. FBI Memo from James F. Bland to Assistant Director and head of the Domestic Intelligence Division William C. Sullivan, 6 September 1963, FBI Archives (p. 27).

14. Robert Kennedy: His Life, p. 252.

15. Robert Kennedy: His Life, pp. 252-53.

16. The Sword and the Shield, pp. 146-48.

17. The Civil Rights Movement in America, p. 179.

18. Declassified FBI files, available here (p. 34).

19. Declassified FBI files, available here (pp. 26-7).

20. Stanislav Lunev (1998), Through the Eyes of the Enemy, p. 78.

21. James F. Dunnigan and ‎Albert A. Nofi (1999), Dirty Little Secrets of the Vietnam War, p. 260.

22. The Civil Rights Movement in America, p. 179.

23. See: FBI Memo from James F. Bland to William C. Sullivan, 6 September 1963, FBI Archives (p. 27), and, Declassified FBI files, here (pp. 24-5).

24. The Sword and the Shield, p. 236.

25. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan was a case before the Supreme Court arising from an advert placed by pro-King activists in the Times in 1960 that contained numerous inaccuracies in the course of accusing the Alabama police of abusing civil rights demonstrators. The Montgomery police commissioner L. B. Sullivan had sued for defamation and won; the appeals had then worked through to the Supreme Court. Ultimately, the decision in Sullivan’s favour was overturned, 9-0, in March 1964, holding that newspapers cannot be sued by public officials for defamation unless they can demonstrate “actual malice”.

26. Declassified FBI file, available here (p. 18).

27. FBI Memo from James F. Bland to William C. Sullivan, 6 September 1963, FBI Archives (p. 27).

28. The Sword and the Shield, p. 236.

29. Henry M. Holden (2008), FBI 100 Years: An Unofficial History, pp. 114-15.