The FBI Sent MLK an Anonymous Letter Urging Him to Kill Himself
Read the letter the FBI sent MLK to try to convince him to kill himself (2014)
After Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, the FBI launched massive surveillance of him, with J. Edgar Hoover fixated on proving communist ties. The wiretaps found no communism but captured recordings of King's extramarital affairs. In 1964, domestic intelligence chief William Sullivan mailed King an unsigned letter alongside a package of those sex tapes, written to push him toward suicide. Yale historian Beverly Gage unearthed the unredacted version, published by the New York Times in 2014.
We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.