Movement harassed by the FBI

By Jonathan Zimmerman

So it turns out that Martin Luther King Jr.'s most trusted photographer was actually a paid informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, passing along material about King and other civil rights leaders. Why did he do it?

That's the wrong question. Nobody will ever know why Ernest C. Withers - who was in King's motel room on the night of his murder - informed for the FBI, as a Memphis newspaper reported last week. Withers died in 2007, following a brilliant career that earned him the nickname of "Original Civil Rights Photographer." He had secrets, and he took them to the grave.

Instead, we should be asking why the FBI was paying people to spy on King. And, most of all, we should be asking why our kids don't know it.

Open up your son's or daughter's American history textbook, and try to find any reference to the FBI's decade-long effort to harass and discredit King. You'll search in vain. In our official version of history, it never happened.

But it did. With the approval of Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general and the president's brother, the FBI wiretapped King's hotel rooms. It then sent a reel of tape to King's offices in Atlanta, which contained his sexual conversations with several different female partners. It also included the sounds of King and these women making love.

The tape was accompanied by an anonymous, typewritten note, composed by the head of the FBI's Domestic Intelligence Division. "King, look into your heart," the note began. "You know, you are a complete fraud."

But there was more. "King, there is only one thing left for you to do," the note concluded. "You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation."

The package was opened by Coretta Scott King, King's wife, who called her husband. They listened to the tape together, which could not have been easy, and figured correctly that the FBI was behind it. "They are out to break me," Martin Luther King said.

He was right. Historians have discovered more than two dozen different FBI attempts to harass or discredit King. And King was hardly alone. The FBI spied on other civil rights leaders, most notably Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson. Abernathy's children once heard FBI agents talking on a malfunctioning wiretap in the family living room.

So why don't we mention these facts when our own children are in the room? Why do textbooks and courses still ignore the government's harassment of African Americans in the civil rights movement?

The answer, quite simply, is that this history challenges all our comforting assumptions about the movement. Our textbooks cast it as a multiracial campaign of like-minded liberals, joining hands to call Americans into fulfilling their highest ideals. So we celebrate black leaders like King and Abernathy and their supposed white allies in Washington, especially John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

But if Kennedy's brother approved the wiretapping of King - and if Johnson personally ordered the same, as we have since learned - then the narrative becomes much less reassuring. King and his followers were hardly the gentle warriors of textbook fame, urging America to make good on its founding promise. They were - quite literally - enemies of the state.

The civil rights movement wasn't liberal; it was radical. That's why King spoke out against the war in Vietnam, earning him yet more enmity in the White House. And that's why liberals spent so much time and energy devising ways to undermine him.

Today, even with a black president, it's a truth we still don't want to hear. It's so much easier to pretend that the lines were clean and tidy: King and Kennedy good; racist white Southerners bad. In fact, there was plenty of racism to go around. And it infected the very highest reaches of our national government.

So tonight, when your kids come home from school, don't talk about why Ernest Withers took money from the FBI to spy on King. Talk about why the FBI was spying on King in the first place. That's the real story here, and our children deserve to know it.