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I mentioned this on Twitter yesterday, and promised to post about it today. The day’s kind of gotten away from me, so this’ll be as quick as I can make it.

In November 1964, weeks before Martin Luther King was to travel to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, an anonymous correspondent sent him a package in the mail. The package contained an audiotape, and a letter.

The tape was a compilation of material recorded via Bureau wiretaps over the previous year. It consisted of off-color jokes and remarks King had made in private, among friends, interspersed with the sounds of him having sex with someone other than his wife. The letter included the following challenge:

King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability … you are no clergyman, and you know it. … You could have been our greatest leader. You, even at an early age have turned out to be not a leader but a dissolute, abnormal moral imbecile. … You are done. Your “honorary” degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you. King, I repeat you are done. No person can overcome facts, not even a fraud like yourself. … The American public, the church organizations that have been helping — Protestant, Catholic and Jews will know you for what you are — an evil, abnormal beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done.

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]. … 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 was mailed 34 days before Christmas.

King did not receive the package until after he returned from Oslo, and after the 34-day deadline had passed. When he listened to the tape he quickly concluded that it could have come from only one source — the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

He was right.

The FBI had been wiretapping King for over a year by then, and Bureau chief J. Edgar Hoover made no secret of his loathing for the civil rights leader. The suicide package was prepared by Hoover deputy William Sullivan, an Assistant Director of the Bureau and the head of its Domestic Intelligence Division.

When you teach American history, as I do, you get asked about conspiracies a lot. As it happens, I’m skeptical about some of the biggest conspiracy theories out there — unlike nearly all of my students, for instance, I think it’s highly likely that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

But I’m not one to ridicule such theories, either, and I find the smug dismissal with which they’re so often greeted deeply obnoxious. Because forty-six years ago one of America’s highest ranking law enforcement agents launched a secret campaign intended to blackmail the country’s most prominent civil rights activist into committing suicide.

That’s not a theory, it’s a fact. And once you know that, it gets a lot harder to dismiss other people’s stories of shadowy government goings-on.

January 2014 Update | I don’t know why, but this post keeps spurring requests (here, by email, on Twitter) for proof of the story I recount here. It’s a little weird. I’m reproducing a letter, which is about the easiest thing in the world to Google — a Google Books search for the first five words I quote turns up no fewer than 272 hits, including a raft of well-respected scholarly works on both the FBI and MLK. I suggested this approach in comments a few weeks ago, but the queries keep coming in for some reason.

Maybe this will help.

Dozens of protesters have been killed and untold thousands have taken to the streets as Tunisia’s young people have begun to stand up to their government in recent weeks. Protests began in December after the suicide by self-immolation of a young college graduate, and have swelled to envelope the entire North African nation.

Here’s the latest:

Tunisia’s president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, declared in a speech yesterday that he would step down at the end of his current term in 2014. He also announced new constraints on police action and new internet freedoms while promising lower food prices, but his words were greeted by a deeply skeptical public and had little effect on public opinion.

Today Ben Ali went further, announcing that he would call new elections within six months. But again the protesters rebuffed him, marching on the capital demanding his immediate resignation.

Now word is arriving that Ben Ali is attempting once again to clamp down on protests, declaring a state of emergency banning public gatherings, imposing a nation-wide curfew, and authorizing the use of live fire by security forces against anyone defying police orders.

Things are moving very rapidly in Tunisia right now, and there’s a lot of rumor and unconfirmed information flying about. Follow the #sidibouzid hashtag on Twitter for the latest, but be sure to take what you read there with a grain of salt.

Update | Here’s a good overview of the Tunisia crisis from Mother Jones.

Update | Sources are telling Al Jazeera and Agence France Presse that President Ben Ali has left Tunisia and been stripped of power. Contradictory reports as to who is now in power.

Update | Tunisian Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi has gone on state-run television to declare that he has stepped up as interim president, pledging to respect the constitution and restore order. It’ll be a while before there’s much clarity about what’s going to happen next.

This one is so messed up in so many ways.

A student in a veterinary medicine class at UC Davis recently gave birth. Her delivery came near the beginning of the semester, and it was unclear how many classes — and quizzes — she would miss. Her professor wasn’t sure how to deal with this situation…

So he asked her fellow students to vote on what her grade should be.

Yep. He instructed the student “presidents” of the class to send around an email proposing six possible approaches to the problem, and announcing that the class would be conducting an online vote on which one to adopt. The choices were these:

a) automatic A final grade
b) automatic B final grade
c) automatic C final grade
d) graded the same as everyone else: best 6 quiz scores out of a possible 7 quiz scores (each quiz only given only once in class with no repeats)
e) just take a % of quiz scores (for example: your classmate takes 4 quizzes, averages 9/10 points = 90% = A)
f) give that student a single final exam at the end of the quarter (however this option is only available to this one student, all others are graded on the best 6 quiz scores and the % that results)

Isis, the blogger who broke the story, calls this a “shameful” act of “gender discrimination,” which it is. She also notes that the university has policies on incompletes and medical leave which would apply to this situation. Finally, she notes that making this kind of decision is a professor’s job:

The other part of this that bothers me is that it is not the responsibility or privilege of students in a graduate program to determine the fate of their peers.  This is why there are graduate faculty and if Dr. Feldman was truly so baffled about what to do with this student, he should have turned to his peers or more senior university officials for guidance.

This wasn’t a new faculty member or a grad student, by the way. The professor who did this, Edward C. Feldman, is a department chair. Reached for comment yesterday, he had this response to an Inside Higher Education reporter: “I don’t care what people say. It is between me, my students and my school.”

Grading fairly and ethically is one of a professor’s most serious obligations. To see it treated so recklessly is shocking to me, and I’m not easily shocked.

Update | I was too busy boggling to point this out in the original post, but four of the six options provided to the students strike me as pretty obviously unethical, however they were arrived at. To give a student an unearned grade (whatever that grade may be) is completely improper, as is flunking a student on a test missed for a legitimate medical reason.

“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”

–Martin Luther King, April 4, 1967

 

So no, I don’t think Dr. King would have been a big booster of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.