"King: A Life": New Bio Details FBI Spying & How MLK's Criticism of Malcom X Was Fabricated

this is democracy Now democracynow.org The War and Peace report I'm Amy Goodman we spend the rest of the hour with the author of the first major biography of Dr Martin Luther King Jr in decades Jonathan Ike's King alive was published this month and draws on unredacted FBI files as well as the files of the personal aid to president Lyndon Johnson that shows how he and others partnered with the FBI's surveillance of King and efforts to destroy him led by FBI director Jay Edgar Hoover I grew in a New York Times opinion essay about the book that the documents reveal how quote Johnson was more of an antagonist to King and a conspirator with Hoover than he has been portrayed by personalizing the FBI's assault on King Americans cling to a view of history that isolates a few bad actors who oppose the Civil Rights Movement including Hoover Governor George Wallace of Alabama and the Birmingham Lawman Bull Connor they thus failed to acknowledge the institutionalized well-organized resistance to change in our society that's Jonathan EIG author of King a life for which he also interviewed more than 200 people including many who knew King closely like the singer actor and activist the late great Harry Belafonte the book has also drawn attention for its Revelation that King was less critical of Malcolm X than previously thought Ike found the original transcript of an interview King did with Alex Haley who's the author who collaborated with Malcolm X on his autobiography the transcript shows how Haley misquoted and even made up part of King's response in fact King never said Malcolm has done himself for our people a great disservice and King's comment about fiery demagogic oratory was not related to Malcolm X to talk about all of this we're joined in Chicago by Jonathan ige welcome to democracy Now Jonathan this is an epic work congratulations on this years of research and writing Why Don't We Begin where I left off on this expose around what Martin Luther King really thought of Malcolm X talk about the significance of how Alex Haley shaped The Narrative for so many decades and who Haley was Alex Haley was one of the best known African-American journalists of his era he wrote for a lot of mainstream white Publications like Reader's Digest and Playboy and the Playboy interview that he did with Martin Luther King was the longest interview the longest published interview that that King ever gave so it had significant impact it reached a lot of white readers who were not otherwise going to be exposed to such a long interview with King and um it's because of the the comments that King made or supposedly made about Malcolm X it's it's been handed down for decades for Generations that this is what king actually thought about Malcolm X and it was as you pointed out in the introduction largely fabricated talk about how how he found this out and what you what you understand King really thought about Malcolm X they actually met in person once right in Washington DC although Malcolm X did go to Selma and talk about what he said to mount to Martin Luther King's wife Coretta Scott King yes the men only met once and um and Malcolm did go he was he was speaking in Tuskegee and some students told him that King was was in Selma they could drive there and be there um you know within hours so uh Malcolm X got in the car drove to Selma did not get to meet King because he was in jail but he did sit next to Coretta Scott King at a church rally and said to Coretta let your husband know that I'm here that I that I support him and and that maybe it's helpful to him in a way if everybody knows that I'm the alternative perhaps they'll be more willing to listen to Dr King and um that's the truth the truth of the relationship as James Baldwin wrote is that by the time of their deaths they were pretty much indistinguishable in their philosophies uh that may be a bit of an exaggeration but they were definitely moving toward each other and this quote in Playboy really um just really did a disservice it really misrepresented their relationship one of the things that I do in any um time I find a really good interview with with the subject of a book that I'm working on is I'll go to the archives and try to find the original tapes or the original transcript of that interview to see what was left out and that's really all I was doing when I went looking for the Alex Haley transcript of his interview with Martin Luther King I wanted to see what got left out because you know you can never really publish the full interview you have to choose the best parts but as I was reading through the transcript I was shocked to discover that whole parts of it were were moved around so that answers to questions were were changed in their meaning and some sections were completely fabricated and King never said that that he thought that he thought Malcolm's um fiery oratory was doing a disservice to the black community in fact he said that about the Nation of Islam but not specifically about Malcolm and when asked about Malcolm King actually expressed great open-mindedness he said I don't agree when when Malcolm X calls for violence but I'm also not so arrogant to think that I have all the answers and he's suggesting in this interview the part that wasn't published that he's open-minded to learning more and to talking more to Malcolm that's one of the great things about King he was always interested in in listening to the people who disagreed with him so if you can talk about that kind of research that you did Jonathan and why you chose to do a profile of King the uh not just a profile an epic work um talk about the other biographies that you wrote and how that brought you to King at this critical moment when um what Harry Belafonte just died he was 96. Dr King of course would have been in his 90s and what that means about those around him who knew him best about 10 years ago when I was working on Maya Muhammad Ali biography I was interviewing people who knew Ali and also knew Martin Luther King and I was asking them about the couple of occasions when King and Ali met I was speaking to people like Harry Belafonte Dick Gregory Andrew Young Reverend Jesse Jackson and as I began talking to them I found myself just asking a lot of questions about King I was curious what he was like and that's when it occurred to me that in the last you know 40 50 years or so we've turned King into kind of a two-dimensional figure and I think especially with the Advent of the national holiday he's become kind of a Hallmark card and we've watered down his vision and these men were telling me that they considered King a radical as radical as Malcolm X in many ways and the public image of him has changed so much that I felt like this was a great opportunity to write a book that would correct that image and also an opportunity to write that book while so many people who knew King were still alive and I traveled the country over the last six years interviewing folks not just like the ones I mentioned but also Juanita Abernathy Dr June Dobbs butts Reverend James Lawson and Reverend Bernard Lafayette and asking them what was it like to be around King what was his message how have we lost sight of the real man I wanted to write a more intimate portrait and it had been you know a good 35 years since the last king biography had been published so I felt like this was an urgent Mission really Jonathan I want to get to his early years the descendant of enslaved people but I also want to talk about um what you discovered in the last years from Declassified FBI documents and also this personal secretary of Lyndon Baines Johnson kept her own archive and how that wasn't released until recently I want to talk about FBI surveillance from the Kennedys to Johnson and how it wasn't just surveillance but proactive attempting to drive Dr Martin Luther King to suicide it began with the authorization by Robert F Kennedy um to um begin to surveil King they began by putting wiretaps on some of his associates phones eventually they started wiretapping King's Home and Office phones and then they also began to put listening devices in his hotel rooms originally the the rationale for that was that they were concerned he was consorting associating with Communists and former Communists when it became clear that King was not interested at all in the Communists and the Communists were not influencing the civil rights movement in any way that that moved them toward communist beliefs they they acknowledged that but by then they had become obsessed with his personal life and trying to catch him in affairs with other women other than Carreta so uh his wife so it became really a personal Vendetta fueled in part by the racism in the FBI fueled in part by the insecurities of J Edgar who resisted and and really raged when King criticized the FBI for for being racist and then it became really the personal Obsession of people like Hoover and LBJ who I think just had a prurian interest in in keeping tabs on King's personal life and talk about how they weaponized that I mean you you talk extensively about Martin Luther King dealing with depression and I think this also goes to demystifying an icon it doesn't take away any of his power but for people um to who are who wonder if they themselves could have make a difference in the world who suffer from depression from his early sort of half-hearted attempts at suicide as a child to being institutionalized and yet accomplishing so much take us on that trajectory I think it's really important for us to acknowledge that our heroes have flaws and if we expect Our Heroes to be perfect nobody will ever rise to the occasion nobody will even try and King was deeply flawed he he meant as you mentioned he attempted suicide twice as a teenager jumping from a second story window of his home when he was upset about uh first an injury suffered by his grandmother and then later by her death and when he won the Nobel Peace Prize he was hospitalized at the time what for what he called anxiety but for what Coretta described as depression he was hospitalized numerous times throughout his life because the the the pressure had just gotten to him so badly and and of course the FBI knew about this and and attempted to weaponize it as you say they they took his personal life um it reported on it distributed that information not only to the president of the United States but to members of Congress and to members of the media hoping that somebody would go public with it and Destroy his marriage destroy his reputation and essentially destroy the Civil Rights Movement at one point they even planned for a replacement for King choosing Samuel Pierce to become the next leader of the civil rights movement once they managed to get King out of the way so this was a deliberate extended and really um mean-spirited campaign ad driven not just by their fear of King not just by their fear of of a race of a black man rising to prominence but really driven by a fear of losing the the power um as as was enjoyed by you know white at white people primarily at that time they wanted to maintain the existing power structure and when you talk about Distributing the surveillance transcripts when they were listening to him in hotel rooms when they were listening to him on the telephone talk about the role of the media in one sense being called heroic for example New York Times for turning those documents without reporting on them but not exposing the fact that he was being surveilled and wiretapped this is one of the great um Mysteries of the Civil Rights era why didn't anybody report on the fact that our government the FBI was in fact surveilling private citizens not just King but many of his closest Associates and as we later discovered in 1971 when some of these FBI documents were stolen during a break-in that the FBI was was conducting a massive campaign of trying to disrupt protest leaders trying to disrupt disrupt activists who were engaged in peacefully for the most part trying to bring change and expand the system of democracy but the real interesting part of the story to me is that dozens of reporters were being leaked these documents dozens of reporters were being beseeched by the FBI to publish the news of King's personal life to write about his his sexual Affairs and they patted themselves on the back for not reporting that story protecting King's privacy but none of them picked up what should have been the much bigger story which was the surveillance in the first place why was our government doing this why was it engaged in this kind of conduct against a private citizen in fact one of our great moral leaders and talk about how that went back to the Kennedys both President John F Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy what was their relationship with King on the one hand calling Coretta being deeply concerned about him being jailed and on the other hand authorizing the wiretaps Martin Luther King did not endorse JFK but a lot of people felt like his his tacit endorsement his his um his words of approval for for Kennedy really helped Kennedy swing the election and after that King was really disappointed that King didn't that Kennedy didn't move more quickly to enact civil rights legislation he felt like Kennedy was hemming and hawing playing politics trying to conserve to preserve white votes in the South not wanting to take any chances so the relationship was was a complicated one at the same time it was the Kennedys who authorized the FBI to begin these wiretaps the Kennedys were at first truly concerned that King's connections to Communists might have damaging political effects that if the news got out that King had these com these former Communist party members and perhaps some some current Communist party members in his Circle that the that it would damage any chances they had of passing civil rights legislation nation and the Kennedy's warned King and asked him to to get rid of these people um King ended up getting rid of one of them but but keeping his relationship with the other because he truly believed that this was a good man and that his former ties uh to Communists were irrelevant so King was was was not playing politics he was doing what he believed was the right thing morally standing by a friend and an important Ally and the Kennedys didn't seem to understand that they didn't understand why he wasn't more concerned with the the political Optics and then going on to uh Johnson the fact that he understood he had to keep these memos of FBI director Jaya go Hoover's secret who was sending as many as one a week detailing Dr King's private life who knows filled with facts filled with lies and the putting this through a whole different Channel with the private Secretary of uh Lyndon Baines Johnson and when that those documents came out Jonathan just last year really within the last year year and a half I um petitioned the LBJ Library to open up the files of Mildred Stegall who was lbj's personal secretary because we've known for a long time that that Johnson kept his most important papers in Mildred Stegall safe he kept his private business papers there he kept recordings that he made unbeknownst to others that he was recording all the phone calls from the Oval Office he kept the tapes in Mildred steagall safe so I asked them to check to see if there were any FBI files in the state in the safe in Mildred stegall's files and in fact there were hundreds of pages of documents directly from J Edgar Hoover to the White House with the most personal details really shockingly odd in in how personal they were really gossipy things that could not have borne any really importance when it came to that comes to National Security but it just appeared that LBJ and Hoover enjoyed gossiping about the personal details of King's life and also about any kind of criticism that King might have had for LBJ it was raised to the level of of high National importance at least in Hoover's mind if if King said something critical of of LBJ and LBJ at this by this time was becoming consumed with the Vietnam War um it was giving him nightmares literally causing him nightmares and um when King began to speak out more aggressively against the war LBJ took this very personally so LBJ seemed to join in the Vendetta with Hoover in this attack on King and and I think it's important to recognize that that has consequences you know when when LBJ took office he viewed King as one of his most important allies they worked together to pass some of the greatest act greatest legislation in this country's history the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and I think their partnership was was an amazing one maybe the greatest partnership we've ever seen between a president and an activist but J Edgar Hoover helped to really spread cancer into that relationship and you can hear it in their phone calls you can hear how he goes from calling him Martin in those early calls to referring to him as Dr King and Reverend King and really losing that the the warmth of that relationship and to the point where they are really antagonists LBJ becomes an antagonist of Dr Kings so I'm going to go through a chronology after FBI director Jay Edgar Hoover called Dr King quote the most notorious liar in the country a reporter asked Dr King for his response Dr King what is your reaction to the charges made by J Edgar Hoover well I was quite shocked and surprised to learn of this statement from a Mr Hoover question in my integrity and very frankly I don't understand what motivated the statement not long after J Edgar Hoover called Dr King the most notorious liar in the country on November 18 1964 Dr King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize this is an excerpt from his acceptance speech on December 10 1964. I must ask why this prize is awarded to a movement which is beleaguered and committed to unrelenting struggle into a movement which has not yet won the very peace and Brotherhood which is the essence of the Nobel Prize after contemplation I conclude that this award which I receive on behalf of that movement you know is a profound recognition that non-violence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression that's Dr King in his Nobel acceptance speech there's so much to talk about here Jonathan Ike as you said when he learned he was going to win the Nobel Peace Prize that announcement comes in October he was hospitalized for depression talk about his response at the time and then that quote of J Edgar Hoover who knew all of this was going on was right after the announcement and knowing that Dr King had been hospitalized and the response of Dr King to hearing Hoover colonists yeah I think um Taylor Hoover was Furious that Dr King had won the Nobel Prize it he took it personally you know here's this this black man this man who's attacking American values as Jay Edgar Hoover sees them Jagger Hoover is deeply committed to his version of white Christian nationalism and for for King to win the Nobel Prize was a personal affront to him I think and he redoubled his efforts at that point to try to damage King to try to destroy his reputation at the same time the Nobel Peace Prize becomes a calling to Dr King and to Coretta Scott King both of whom say we have a greater responsibility than ever now and that responsibility includes not limiting our work to the fight in the South not limiting our work to integration but to look at racism throughout the country to look at poverty to look at militarism to look at materialism and he really begins to expand not just his his vision but his activism his work he begins taking on more fights in the North he begins speaking out more against the Vietnam War and he um broadens his his role and becomes you know a much greater moral leader and this in turn get further infuriates Edgar Hoover and we see the campaign to destroy King just um growing and growing so what we have here sadly um as as the Nobel Prize helps to crystallize we recognize that that janitor Hoover is actually one of the few people who understands that Martin Luther King is presenting a massive threat he's calling for a new kind of American democracy he's calling for a vision of America that gets us past some of our materialistic militaristic habits and and brings in a new dawn of a new day and and that is a huge affront and a threat to J Edgar Hoover and the way he sees the world I want to go to that address Dr Martin Luther King April 4th 1967 a year to the day before he was assassinated in Memphis the speech he gave at Riverside Church explaining why he opposed the war in Vietnam as I have walked among the desperate rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action but they ask and rightly soul what about Vietnam they ask if our own Nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems to bring about the changes it wanted thy questions hit home and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed and the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest pervade of violence in the world today my own government Jonathan EIG the significance of what he said going Beyond civil rights in the United States the attack on him not only by those who opposed him but by his closest allies saying he was risking the entire civil rights project and then the corporate media you had Life Magazine calling the speech demagogic slander sounding like a script for radio Hanoi The Washington Post saying King quote diminished his usefulness to his cause country his people talk about how King both was deeply affected by this but doubled down because he said it was his moral obligation to me this is my favorite King speech because it summarizes his entire life and everything he's believed in from childhood this is a this is a man remember he he came to fame at age 26 leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott he was assassinated at age 39 a very short career 12 and a half years of activism but it all began with the lessons he learned before he knew how to read which lessons he learned from the Bible that said all men are created equal that said that said war is wrong war is a sin against God and that all men are brothers and he sums it all up in this speech on April 4th 1967 at Riverside Church in New York sums it up so beautifully really crystallizes everything he's been saying all his life and doubles down at a time when he could have backed off when he could have stepped aside when he was under attack from the left and the right he was not conservative enough for for the for the conservative he was not liberal enough for the Liberals um he was he was getting it from all sides he he really just keeps marching keeps going forward and plans for this poor people's campaign in Washington where he's going to basically occupy Washington DC until the government agrees to fundamental economic reforms and fundamental changes in how we we feed and and care for the poor fundamental changes in how we view our our militarism and and he is battered for this the New York Times Life Magazine The Washington Post they all attack him and we have transcripts of his phone calls we can even hear him on the phone with one of his best friends and closest advisors who says to him that speech was a mistake it's going to cost us funding in the north we're going to lose our liberal supporters you're going to have no relationship anymore with LBJ and it's painful to read these transcripts you can just your heart goes out to King because he has to explain to one of his closest friends don't you understand me don't you know what I've been saying all these years it's not out of pragma autism I may have been wrong politically but I was not wrong morally and that is King that is what makes him a hero for our day because he never backed down he never gave up on his true beliefs and he continued to insist even when it would have been a lot easier for him to step back

Channel: Democracy Now!

Views: 89,001

Keywords: Democracy Now, Amy Goodman, News, Politics, democracynow, Independent Media, Breaking News, World News

Id: edeykIROZRM

Length: 27min 39sec (1659 seconds)

Published: Tue May 30 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/4x4is16Legs]

That was good. Buying the book.