J. Edgar Hoover Uncensored
BY Claire Potter ON November 16, 2014
Yale’s Beverly Gage has an essay in the New York Times about the famous letter sent to Martin Luther King on November 18, 1964 accusing him of being “a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that.” The letter, sent by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as part of its COINTELPRO operation intended to disable radical movements in the United States, catalogues a range of sexual misbehaviors. It uses the word “evil” multiple times, as Gage points out; and concludes with the well known phrase: “There is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is.”
We have known about this letter for years, but it has always appeared in redacted form, and those who have used it have always presumed that it was intended to push King to suicide. But was that actually its purpose, and under what circumstances would Hoover have imagined that a man schooled in non-violence, a man who had seen people beaten and killed before his eyes, would commit the ultimate act of violence against himself?
Looking at the document, Gage isn’t so sure that was the point, and previous historians may have assumed that under the black magic marker strikeouts, this suggestion had been made explicitly. “Even now, looking at a full copy of the letter, it’s tough to puzzle out just what the bureau wanted King to do,” she writes. “The largest unredacted section focuses on King’s sex life, recounting in graphic language what the bureau believed it knew. Another uncovered portion of the note praises ‘older leaders’ like the N.A.A.C.P. executive director Roy Wilkins, urging King to step aside and let other men lead the civil rights movement. And some maintain that they simply meant to push King out, not induce suicide.”
Extra history fun? The Times article includes a high-quality reproduction of the full letter.
There are two big lessons about the historian’s craft here. The first is: never assume. Excerpts from a document, even one as shocking as this one, can significantly alter its apparent meaning, particularly if we insist on reading into the document our own sense of projected shame about sexual accusations made public. The second lesson is some version of “seek and ye shall find,” a particularly important lesson in a day and age when sitting patiently with paper archives, particularly those you think are well thumbed, is a lesser known virtue. Gage found the document in a reprocessed file that has been available for years in redacted form. “I was surprised to find a full, uncensored version of the letter tucked away in a reprocessed set of [Hoover’s] official and confidential files at the National Archives,” she writes. “The uncovered passages contain explicit allegations about King’s sex life, rendered in the racially charged language of the Jim Crow era.”
Fifty years later, Gage also draws another lesson — a more reserved media made it possible for history to move forward, without King being derailed by scandal. Hoover resorted to the so-called “suicide letter” because no member of the press would publish what the Bureau had learned about King’s private sex life. “Looking past the viciousness of the accusations,” she reflects, “the letter offers a potent warning for readers today about the danger of domestic surveillance in an age with less reserved mass media.”
For more potentially field-changing reflections on the civil rights movement, readers might want to turn to Renee C. Romano’s Racial Reckoning: Prosecuting America’s Civil Rights Murders (Harvard: 2014). Although these trials have brought the perpetrators of notorious acts of murder to justice decades after the crimes, they have also functioned to cleanse the United States of coming to terms with its full history of white violence against blacks. (Full disclosure: Romano is an old friend and a collaborator, as anyone who looks at the sidebar would know, but the only difference that makes is that I brushed aside the Leaning Towers of Books waiting to be read and got to this one first.)
Cross posted from Tenured Radical, my blog at The Chronicle of Higher Education
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