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Chain · Era 7 · Civil Rights
Civil Rights · 1955–1968

Martin Luther King Jr.:
What They Don't Teach You

Martin Luther King Jr. is the most misrepresented figure in American history. He has been converted — by the same institutions that opposed him in life — into a symbol of patient, acceptable protest. In fact: the FBI considered him the most dangerous man in America. J. Edgar Hoover sent him a letter urging him to commit suicide. His approval rating in 1966 was 33%. He opposed the Vietnam War, called the U.S. the 'greatest purveyor of violence in the world,' and argued for guaranteed income and economic redistribution. He was murdered at 39. He has been made safe in death by the people who feared him in life.

FBI wiretapping
began 1963, authorized by Robert Kennedy
1966 approval rating
33% — lower than the Communist Party USA
Murdered
April 4, 1968 — Memphis, Tennessee, age 39
The Central Argument

The sanitized version of MLK — 'I Have a Dream,' nonviolent, broadly beloved — is a political tool used to delegitimize the anger his actual positions expressed. King explicitly said in 1967: 'A riot is the language of the unheard.' He opposed the Vietnam War years before it was politically safe. He died organizing the Poor People's Campaign, which demanded guaranteed income. The FBI's COINTELPRO program surveilled him, wiretapped him, and sent him an anonymous letter with a recording of his extramarital affairs and the message: 'You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.' The letter concluded with a suggestion he kill himself. This was official U.S. government policy.

Montgomery to Memphis · 1955–1968
01
1955–1963

The Movement Years: What King Actually Did

Montgomery · Birmingham · Washington D.C.

King became the public face of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 — selected partly because he was new to town and had no enemies yet. The boycott lasted 381 days. His home was bombed. When the Supreme Court ruled bus segregation unconstitutional in November 1956, the movement had its first major legal victory. King co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957 and spent the next decade leading campaigns across the South with one strategic insight at their center: force the machinery of white supremacy to reveal itself in front of cameras.

The Birmingham Campaign of 1963 was the strategic masterstroke. King deliberately chose Birmingham — the most violently segregated city in the South, led by Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor — knowing that Connor would respond to nonviolent protest with dogs and fire hoses. The photographs went around the world. President Kennedy, who had been avoiding civil rights legislation, watched the Birmingham coverage and decided he had to act. King was arrested, and wrote the Letter from Birmingham Jail — one of the most important documents in American history — in the margins of newspapers and on scraps of paper, responding to white clergy who had called the campaign "unwise and untimely."

02
1963–1967

The FBI's War on King

Washington D.C.
33%
King's approval rating, 1966 — lower than the Communist Party USA
"Most dangerous"
J. Edgar Hoover's designation for King, 1963

After King's March on Washington speech in August 1963, J. Edgar Hoover wrote in the margin of the FBI's intelligence report: "We must mark [King] now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro in America." Robert Kennedy authorized wiretaps on King's phones. The FBI bugged his hotel rooms for years, compiling recordings of extramarital affairs. In November 1964 — weeks after King received the Nobel Peace Prize — the FBI sent him an anonymous package containing a composite tape of the recordings and a letter urging him to commit suicide before the recordings were made public. The letter read in part: "King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it." King showed the letter to his wife and associates. He did not comply.

03
1967–1968

The Radical King: Vietnam, Poverty, and Memphis

New York · Memphis, Tennessee

In 1967, King broke with the Johnson administration over Vietnam, giving his "Beyond Vietnam" speech at Riverside Church in New York. He called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world." Mainstream civil rights organizations distanced themselves. His approval rating fell to 33%. He began organizing the Poor People's Campaign — a multiracial campaign demanding guaranteed income, full employment, and a fundamental redistribution of economic power. In April 1968, he went to Memphis to support striking Black sanitation workers who carried signs reading "I Am A Man." On April 4, he was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. He was 39 years old.

"A riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened... It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met."

— Martin Luther King Jr., "The Other America," 1967

In 1999, a Memphis civil court jury found, after 30 days of testimony, that King's death was the result of a conspiracy that included Memphis police, the Mafia, the U.S. Army, and the FBI. The mainstream press gave the verdict minimal coverage. The King family supported the conclusion.

The Longer Chain

King was killed organizing for economic justice. That work was never finished.

The Poor People's Campaign, the guaranteed income demand, the opposition to the Vietnam War — the radical program King was building when he died is the program that never got its movement. It lives in the work of today's economic justice advocates.

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