16,000+ pages of Martin Luther King's FBI file released

See here.

Why does an American hero have a 16,000 page FBI file?

If you were around "back in the day" you would know he was not seen as a hero when he was alive. Many people considered him to be a "radical" and if the word "terrorist" had been popular then, it too would have been used to describe Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was a challenge to the status quo and the powerful. He did not just fight against segregation and descrimination based on "race", he also challenged the United States to eliminate poverty, and to enforce laws fairly. He was strongly against the war in Viet Nam and publically rallied people. The FBI and much of the Washington D.C. establishment saw him as dangerous, including the Kennedys and LBJ.

Time to know your history, geneg. Or, as I suspect, you do know it and are asking a rhetorical question.

Yes, we all know how the Kennedys and LBJ just hated the idea of eliminating poverty and enforcing laws fairly. ( Vietnam was not yet an issue, by the way, and by the time it became one, Kennedy's stance was not materially different from King's.)

The real story is this: when the civil rights movement began in the early 60s, two of King's top advisors appeared to be Communist Party members or close sympathyzers.

For those who don't know, the Communist Party was a group of honest American patriots, fighting for freedom and democracy and liberty, hoping to bring the ultimate form of freedom, democracy and liberty, which they quaintly called "Communism", to the United States. Some of them entered government service in the 1930s, from which place they helpfully sent classified government reports and documents to the country where freedom, democracy and liberty had already been achieved, the Soviet Union. Concerned that good scientific brains would waste time duplicating research that was already completed, some of them sent the Soviets critical information about how to build nuclear weapons. This was because they believed in world peace. So of course only paranoid conservative witch-hunters could be concerned that some of these fine people might be in positions of influence.

The exact Party membership status of King's advisors at any given time is somewhat obscure. One of them, Stanley Levison, had certainly been a leading member of the Communist Party a few years earlier, donating substantial funds to it and funnelling money to it from other sources. (The Communist Party was, of course, financed by the Soviet Union directly. But it also raised money domestically.)

Levison began to have doubts about the CP after 1956, when in fact most of the Party membership left, after Khruschev's "secret speech" (revealed by the CIA) admitting that all the wicked imperialist lies about Stalinist repression had actually been ... err.. true. (Hey, I was just kidding about the freedom and democracy and liberty stuff!) The bloody crushing of the Hungarian Revolution a few months later was the icing on the cake.

The nature of Levison's doubts are not clear to me ... did he move in the direction of democratic socialism, as many ex-CP members did, or did he just conclude that formal membership of the CP was no longer a viable vehicle for his Marxist ideology? He certainly remained friendly to the Party for several years, although by the time the Civil Rights movement was really rolling, in 1963, this friendship had apparently chilled.

Of course, to the FBI, and especially to its leader J. Edgar Hoover, these subtle nuances were completely invisible. Or rather, I should say -- because the FBI had direct reports about clashes between Levison and the CP leadership -- Hoover chose to ignore them. Levision was a Communist and that was that. I doubt Hoover was mentally capable of processing the differences among different varieties of radicalism.

And, when the Civil Rights movement began, Hoover was hostile to it. (Later, the FBI would prove quite helpful, setting up a lethal ambush in which Klan members trying to plant a bomb at someone's home would be shot dead, using entrapment to develop informers inside the organization, etc. I don't recall much Guantanomo-style weeping by civil libertarians about this at the time.)

So Hoover went to President Kennedy with veiled threats to reveal King's Communist (?) connections. Kennedy pressured King to break with the two men concerned, and King did back away from them. Kennedy's concern was mainly that the Civil Rights movement, which he supported, could be discredited by its opponents if King did not do this. Robert Kennedy bugged the phone of an intermediary between King and Levison to try to find out the real situation.

The interesting question, to me anyway, about all of this is the following: why was it the case that only Communists were so outspoken in defence of Black rights? Where were the liberals? Liberals supported Black rights in theory, but why was it the case, when it was time for vigorous action and hell-raising, that it was mainly the radicals who stepped up? (As for conservatives, the less said the better: William Buckley supported Southern racial segregation, and Barry Goldwater -- himself a decent man with a good record on race in his home state -- voted against the Civil Rights Act on states' rights grounds. Shame, shame, shame.)

Time to know your history.

#3 My response at #2 was, indeed, a rhetorical question. I considered him a great American hero back in the day. I have experience working with the Civil Rights movement in the mid-60's, until I became disillusioned with the particular group I was working with. They became too politically radical for my taste. King demanded the dignity due each human being as a child of the same God. Some parts of the civil rights movement became radical politicos, denying that same dignity based on political beliefs.

#4 Doug, here is a good portrait of the sixties liberal.

#4, why was it the case, when it was time for vigorous action and hell-raising, that it was mainly the radicals who stepped up?

This sounds like one of those questions that contains its own answer :) That's what it means to be radical.

I get the impression, partly from one of Mr. King's essays that I unfortunately can't find anymore, that the general attitude of white citizens was "You have some good points, but now is not a good time to act on them, let's wait a while to see if anything changes" and his response was "Well that's easy for you to say".

Gene: I loved that song, at the time. People often are surprised to learn that the New Left of the sixties directed most of their anger at liberals, not conservatives, who were considered irrelevant at that point in history.

And I suppose you know this one, written at about the same period. If not, you should!