King: A Biography

Postscript: Reflections after a Decade

Postscript: Reflections after a Decade I may not get there with YOll, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land. -MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. TEN YEARS HAVE PASSED since Martin Luther King, Jr., was slain. It seems much, much longer, for the time in which he lived, the sixties-by any measure the most revolutionary since the upheaval of the Civil War-is now as remote as the Progressive Era or the Great Depression. Even more remote , perhaps, because its institutional traumas and psychological spectres are still so much with us that they induce a becalming collective amnesia. It is unlikely that future generations will mature in ignorance of Martin King's name, but it is even now true that college history majors are hazy about his significance. Year by year, with each January 15th commemoration of his birth, Martin Luther King recedes deeper into the mists of his mountain top. He is in danger of becoming a man for all reasons, an elastic fetish as potent for one cause as for another. If this has been the inevitable fate of historic figures whose lives and messages transcend the parochialisms of their times, the nation's canonization of Martin King has, nevertheless, been rushed to the point of disservice. In a sense, we have sought to remember him by forgetting him. Postscript 399 There are also problems with King's assassination. William Bradford Huie glimpsed for a candid moment the plural culpability behind King's assassination when he gave his book the preliminary title, "They Slew the Dreamer," before changing the pronoun to "He." \Vhat transpired between J. Edgar Hoover and Martin Luther King at FBI headquarters fourteen years ago may never be known. Did the director warn the SCLC leader of the dangers of Communist infiltration ? Did he threaten to release electronic evidence of sexual activities involving SCLC officers? Or did he, as the surviving participants swear, delay King's departure for Oslo to debate civil rights and defend the FBI's efficiency? Whichever scenario appears more likely, what we now know with unnerving eertainty is that Martin King, the nation's champion of human rights, left the Justice Department marked for relentless vengeance. Martyrdom that seemed to afford both a respite from soeial turmoil (once the urban fires were banked) and a symbol to mediate social change has become, in recent days, a source of genuine malaise going far beyond the obligatory display of white guilt. The refrain, "White America killed Dr. King," is still heard, but Americans, black and white, are now as deeply troubled by the less encompassing certainty that there were whites who plotted the destruction of Martin King's reputation, if not his life, and acted on orders from the director of the FBI. The full story remains to be told; there are reasons to believe it may never be. Key witnesses are dead. For many, the fine edge of memory has dulled with the years. Others have shifted from one contradiction to another. Some are undoubtedly afraid. Evidenee has been destroyed or doctored or hidden away in federal and local agencies. It is even difficult to know what we know because of the abundance of plausible conspiracy hypotheses abroad in the land. Nevertheless, this much appears documented: when Martin King publicly questioned the investigative vigor of the FBI in southern locales King late in 1964, he earned the remorseless hatred of J. Edgar Hoover; orders given by the director resulted in constant physical and electronic surveillance of King ("Zorro," in Bureau parlance) and of the officers and personnel of the SCLC-duly authorized by the Attorney General upon the absolute insistence of Hoover. This surveillance was not initiated by Robert Kennedy, as the FBI caused to be believed later through planted news stories. Proposals were transmitted back and forth between FBI headquarters and field officers to plant agents provocateurs in SCLC demonstrations, to falsify SCLC documents, and to alter electronically obtained messages and conversations for unattributed release to the media; in at least one instance, an "improved" tape recording of sexual activity ambiguously involving Martin King was anonymously forwarded to SCLC headquarters in Atlanta; finally, at the behest of the FBI director, an anonymous letter was sent to Martin King suggesting he forego the Nobel Prize and instead choose suicide: "King, there is only one thing left for you to do...