Earlier this morning, the UberFacts Twitter account posted the following tweet:
A letter was discovered in which the FBI urged Martin Luther King to commit suicide.
— UberFacts (@UberFacts) October 13, 2012
I learned about it a little while later because of a weird spike in my traffic — though the story is well documented and has appeared in a number of scholarly works it’s not particularly well known, and a post that I wrote about it earlier this year happens to show up near the top of Google’s searches for various phrases relating to it.
Anyway, like I say, it’s true. The FBI, under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover’s top deputy, sent Martin Luther King a blackmail package in November 1964 along with a letter urging him to kill himself to avoid the shame of the public disclosure of “your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self.”
The letter was timed to arrive shortly before King was scheduled to travel to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
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October 13, 2012 at 9:32 pm
Saturday Night Link Fever (No Cure) « Gerry Canavan
[…] * A bit out of their jurisdiction, don’t you think? It’s True: The FBI Urged Martin Luther King to Commit Suicide. […]
December 4, 2012 at 12:10 pm
Jesse Jane
“Filthy, abnormal fraudulent self”
Funny: now that years have passed and Julian Assange is trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy while Obama tortures Bradley Manning, held without conviction… all you have to do is accuse someone of sexual misconduct and *poof* — they are “filthy, abnormal, fraudulent.”
Hence, nobody talks about it. And you have personally campaigned for the continued incarceration of Assange and helped the propaganda that acted like the dubious claims against him somehow justify the empire’s persecution (and death threats) against him.
Amazing how old tricks never change. The same folks who demanded the Central Park 5 be imprisoned, if not executed. The same folks who celebrate Pussy Riot but ignore the Grand Juries on the West Coast of the US targeting anarchists. The same folks who think Assange is guilty of a crime despite never being charged.
The enablers of that smear campaign share culpability.