Marked Man: Martin Luther King and the FBI

Background.

From January 5th, 1965, a package was delivered to civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

This time inside was a garbled audio tape.

King recognized his voice, and he remembered the hotel rooms where the conversations had taken place.

He was being watched.

There was a letter as well.

It labeled King an animal, a fraud.

And again and again it repeated the same words.

The letter encouraged King to commit suicide.

The letter said, King, look into your heart.

You are an evil, abnormal beast.

There is only one way out for you.

It's hard to interpret in any other way except saying that this material is going to be made public.

And the only other way out is Suicide.

King and the movie just represented everything that could change the very fabric of American society.

They were determined to destroy Martin Luther King.

They were afraid because it was a revolution in so many ways.

I mean, he was photogenic.

He was incredibly articulate.

He was.

I mean, the whole nine yards.

He could handle a room filled with people, and.

And he had something genuine to say.

His message of nonviolent protest had won him allies and admirers around the world.

One day, right man in Alabama, little black boys and black girls.

Will be able to join hands with the whole parade.

Boys and white girls and sisters and brothers, I have a dream.

But for others, he was a danger to the American way of life.

But he had been threatened, harassed and assaulted.

Or been hit so many times.

I'm immune to it.

But this letter was different.

It was not some disaffected prank or racist hate mongering.

This letter had been sent by the FBI.

It was a clash between two of the great figures in American history.

One was a civil rights leader, a minister fighting injustice.

The other was a lifelong bureaucrat of unrivaled power and influence.

The feud between Martin Luther King and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover lasted more than a decade.

Hoover was the FBI and the FBI was Hoover.

Presidents had a difficult time controlling him.

Attorneys general never controlled that.

He could bust anybody, I mean, anybody.

He was above the law.

He had a personal animus against King, and he had a personal animus against change.

There were public arguments and covert surveillance.

It would end only with King's death on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee.

At the heart of that confrontation, with differing visions of what America was and what America could be.

Hoover's America was an unequal, divided society.

In the South, the segregationist Jim Crow laws held sway.

Racist abuse and violence were common.

In the American Constitution, everyone is equal.

So after the Civil War, there were three amendments passed, mainly to ensure that there was no more slavery.

Everyone born on the soil of the United States was an American, and every American was entitled to vote.

However, the implementation and the definition of them was handed to the States.

And the American South.

You had a totally racist society and a racist, legal system.

And the dominant social order at that time validated there being the separation between the races, there being, you know, like a black America and a white America.

I can't even use the public library, except on the one day a week at the end of the week.

There is a system of segregation that was in place in the South.

So all the institutions that were created for blacks were created by blacks.

This was the America Martin Luther King grew up in.

His father was a Baptist minister.

Hopes in the family were high for the intelligent boy.

He was born to quite a prominent family.

His mother, Alberta Williams, came from a line of preachers.

His father was quite strict, and Martin seems to have been a quite sort of gentle kid.

King's father envisioned him taking over his legacy, taking over the church and taking over that tradition.

But as a young man, he wrestled with religious uncertainty.

For a time, he considered a career in the law.

Finally, however, he decided he would become a minister.

He became more attracted to the pulpit as a vehicle for social change.

Through that, he could do the things that he really wanted to do, which was put justice in action.

He found a meaning in his life that was very important for him.

King went on to Boston University to complete a doctoral study.

It was there, early in 1952, that he met another student named Coretta Scott.

18 months later, the young couple were married.

Daddy King didn't want him to marry her to begin with.

And I think Martin Luther King, he always wanted to please his dad.

But in this he was very clear.

And he told his dad, you know, this is the woman I want to marry.

I can't live without her.

She chose to be with somebody who she knew was a visionary.

And I would say that she very much liked being the wife of Martin Luther King.

King's teachers in Boston tried to convince him to pursue a university career.

But by now, the young man was set on his course.

He was given the pass to ship of a quite prestigious church, Dexter Avenue Baptist, in Montgomery, Alabama.

Martin was the minister at that church.

There was something about the preacher that drew people to that church.

Within two years of moving to the city, Martin Luther King was known far beyond Dexter Avenue.

His every move was watched by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.

On December 1st, 1955, 42 year old Rosa Parks was making her way home after a long day at work.

The Montgomery City bus was crowded, so the driver ordered four black passengers to give up their seats to the standing whites.

Rosa Parks refused.

Rosa Parks was a seamstress by profession.

That's what she did.

But she was also active in the NAACP.

The premier civil rights organization.

She was very quiet.

I don't think I ever heard her, her raise her voice as loud as my.

The laws in the state at that time was that if a white person came on the bus and they would they no matter what, you would have to give up the seat and you couldn't sit in the same row.

Even though she was legitimately sitting in the segregated portion of the bus.

And she just refused to do it.

She she just kept her seat.

Martin started getting phone calls.

They've arrested Rosa.

They've arrested Rosa.

It was almost like a whisper.

The black community in Montgomery had suffered years of mistreatment on city busses.

African-American passengers were frequently insulted, shortchanged and left stranded by the exclusively white drivers.

This became the perfect case in order to push for, you know, desegregation of the bus lines, because there is nothing to besmirch this woman's character.

She was a model citizen in every which way.

This was the beginning.

Going to boycott these busses were going to let the city of Montgomery know what it's like when we don't ride the bus.

You got to feel this.

What immediate results do you hope to achieve?

Well, we hope to achieve equal.

Rights for any human being.

The same.

That's what we've found working for.

At first, it was to last just a single day.

But when authorities proved unwilling to compromise, the boycott was extended.

Black taxi firms carry passengers for the cost of a bus fare.

When the city cracked down on this, community leaders arranged a car sharing system.

Hundreds volunteered to help.

A lot of people also like to think that King organized everything.

Okay.

And he didn't organize everything.

He came to this a little reluctantly, too.

They wanted to use the church as, a meeting place just to help plan to start planning the boycott.

And he was like, I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

He was scared to death, but he thought, look, if I'm like getting into this because I feel that I have a mission, I have to do this.

So he let it.

There's always been a question of did the movement create king or did king create the movement?

And I would say it lies in between.

But because of his ability to get to take Christian doctrine and make it social revolutionary doctrine, he was able to pull the heartstrings of people in ways that no other leader could.

The boycott and King himself gained national attention, but it was in the courts where the battle would finally be won.

This morning, the long awaited mandate from the United States Supreme Court concerning health segregation came to Montgomery.

This mandate expresses, in terms that are crystal clear, that segregation in public transportation is both legally and sociologically invalid.

The bus boycott came to an end on December 21st, 1956, and it lasted 382 days.

They not only won, but they won the court of public opinion as well.

There are people who started to think, okay, what can I do in my local community in order to like, help push?

The success of the boycott reverberated far beyond Montgomery.

It galvanized black citizens across America, but it also caught the attention of authorities in Washington.

I think it definitely alerted them, because this really spoke to a different a different era, a different America, a different social system.

And the establishment at that time was not about creating a different social system.

The country was in danger because of the Cold War.

So anything that disrupted American unity was also dangerous.

Far more attention.

But now we pay to the civil rights movement and especially the charismatic young Baptist minister Martin Luther King.

The 1960s was a decade of change in American old.

Certainties were challenged.

New leaders took to the stage.

Foremost among this new generation was Martin Luther King Jr.

While the civil rights leader was protesting inequality and segregation, he was also the subject of surveillance and intimidation by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.

The two men helped define the decade.

One of them was trying to change a nation.

The other was striving to preserve it.

John Edgar Hoover was born in Washington, D.C., in 1895.

He was a government man from the age of 22.

He was in charge of the FBI from the beginning.

He was somebody who was a powerful personality.

He could speak to the public very emphatically.

He knew how to create political support and protection for himself.

He sat imperious in the Justice Department as a man to be feared.

He ruled by fear, and he consolidated his power by accumulating secret information and using that information as a weapon of political warfare.

Under Hoover's leadership, the FBI established offices in major towns and cities across America.

It began national training programs for police, and it invested millions to advance the science of crime fighting.

But its constant driving focus was protecting the American government and preserving social order.

He started the Red scare, the Red witch hunt.

Although the Communist Party of the United States never had any more than 80,000 members at its peak in the 1930s, he felt that Soviet communism rose up from the battlefields of World War One.

Floated across the Atlantic like a toxic cloud and settled into the United States.

And that unmatched quarantine could destroy America.

In August 1956, the FBI began a covert operation to disrupt the American Communist Party.

It was codenamed Counter Intelligence Program.

Ho Co Intel Pro.

Con Pro was the ultimate iteration of the powers of government surveillance.

They did dirty tricks.

They, they infiltrated organizations, put agent agent provocateurs in there.

Cohen tell Pro could be used to destroy individuals as well as ideologies through relentless surveillance and through poison, pen letters, blackmail, and other criminal means.

Within months, it expanded to include another group, Hoover, suspected of communist sympathies.

The leaders of the Civil Rights movement.

Martin Luther King was determined to build on the success in Montgomery.

He was just 27, but the young pastor had a maturity and bearing far beyond his years.

Martin was just one of my best friends.

He was an easy guy to work with.

The fantastic, sermonizing.

It was beautiful.

He could talk and he was propelled to the front.

He was there, rallying point and their voice.

Early in 1957, a group of church leaders gathered in Atlanta.

It was the first meeting of what would become the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

King was elected the group's president.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was Ralph Abernathy, and and Doctor King and a couple of other pastors who decided that the church, the black church, was going to lead this.

King, as a leader, was a cautious leader.

He always erred on the side of if this is going to move forward and create some violence and create some harm, he would back.

He would back away.

Doctor King decided and decided wisely that he was going to follow Gandhi's approach in getting Indian independence.

Satyagraha is what it's called, and it is, active nonviolence.

You don't fight back.

You take it, but you don't move.

Law enforcement was confounded.

Civil disobedience had a resonance that Billy clubs, subpoenas, arrests and government persecution could not easily defeat.

The early years of the SClc were difficult ones.

However.

King struggled to balance the demands on his time more and more.

He relied on a trusted band of advisers and aides.

Among them was a white attorney from New York named Stanley Levison.

Levison was involved with the SClc from the beginning.

In 1958, he helped write and edit King's first book, Stride Toward Freedom, and he was also a Communist.

That didn't necessarily mean that he was a lawbreaker, but it did mean that the FBI, under long standing protocols, could do almost anything to surveil a Stanley lover.

So I was keeping his eyes on him all the time.

Levinson proved to be a valued friend to King, and in some ways he translated the civil rights struggle to the moneyed in New York because he had a pulse on white America.

You know, in a way, because of he was on that.

And so he could say to him, well, this is going to fly.

This won't fly.

Maybe wait on this, maybe wait on that.

He funded parts of Doctor King's movements for rights movement.

He also co-wrote some of his speeches.

He was his mentor and also partner.

When he became one of King's most trusted advisors and aroused Hoover's suspicions, which he had, which was the civil rights movement was essentially something in league with communism and subverting American unity.

The FBI had watched Levison before in the early 1950s, but it was only in 1962 that they discovered how close he was to King.

Surveillance of the attorney began once again, but nothing incriminating was found.

That didn't matter to Hoover.

Once a communist, old communist.

Hoover came from a segregated Washington, D.C.

background.

He kept the FBI, a lowly white organization, as long as he could.

To him, there was a kind of a paternalistic attitude that if you had a white man and a black man together, the black man was a puppet.

And so as soon as he saw a communist in King's entourage to him, this could hardly be explained in any other way except Levinson was now giving orders to King.

King was warned by figures in government that people close to him had communist backgrounds.

The king trusted his friend and he needed him.

SClc continued to drift.

Other campaigns and leaders had seized the initiative.

King realized that change had to be made.

In 1963, the SClc launched a new campaign in Birmingham, Alabama.

Tactics would be different this time.

The protest would still be nonviolent, but they would also be deliberately confrontational.

Public spaces were occupied.

Unjust laws were flouted.

The Birmingham Police Department reacted vividly.

They got beaten up, arrested.

That king was arrested.

And they just turned the hoses on you or the dogs.

But the main tenant behind everything, of course, was nonviolence.

So for the protesters, no matter what was done to them, to not fight back.

And this is also, I think, part of the brilliance of the movement and part of the brilliance of King.

He understood the optics.

We knew that we had to break that system down, that system that didn't allow African-American folk to function like other citizens.

The footage became national news.

The head of the Birmingham Police Department was fired.

Businesses and public spaces in the city were forced to become more open to black citizens.

The SClc had a major victory to its name.

Greater triumphs were to follow.

They would drive the civil rights movement to new heights, and they would make King the most dangerous man in America.

I'm going to do what the spirit says do was bear, and so do.

I'm gonna do all, Lord, I'm gonna do what the spirit says.

Do.

There was something happened.

Yeah.

From Martin on down to the farmers in the field.

In 1963, Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference joined other civil rights groups in a mass march on Washington.

It was the largest gathering of protesters yet seen in America.

More than a quarter of a million people descended on the heart of government.

I don't think we've ever seen a march quite like that was peaceful on every level.

And the cameras were ready.

This was the first major televised made for television event on Earth.

It was a special bulletin.

This march came out.

So this was the first time this ever, ever happened.

Everyone who was on kind of a leader at this time was was speaking.

I have the pleasure to present to you, Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.

Finally, at the end was Martin Luther King.

And he had prepared remarks and he was doing his speech was beautiful.

And then legend has it.

Mahalia Jackson, the great, gospel singer, yelled out to them.

Martin, tell them about the dream.

And he went off script.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

Even to think about it now.

It was just unbelievable.

You know, you know, when there is a moment when everything comes together and he created something much more transcendent in the way that he spoke, that touched everybody's heart.

People felt like God was speaking through him and gave, a picture of America to itself that it never quite had before.

It really had a picture of integration, of what that could look like.

It's become a symbol of, of maybe the better America that we all hope that we can achieve at some point in time.

Not everyone was thrilled with the impact of the March and King's address to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

The civil rights movement was a revolutionary communist one.

Now he ordered his dirty tricks operation co Intel pro the focus on Martin Luther King.

The FBI director wanted him neutralized.

J Edger Hoover was determined, as he wrote, to prevent the rise of a black Messiah in the United States.

He was convinced that to the day he died that the civil rights movie was a commie.

Plot.

The civil rights movement was, in fact, a homegrown movement that rose out of the segregation, bigotry, and lynchings that occurred in the Deep South.

King did have views of American economics, which did come from a Marxist perspective.

But he kept that, you might say to himself and paid much more attention to using a Christian ethics in criticizing American society.

He was never a communist, okay?

He wanted a system in which the masses of people really could see a more equal reflection in the nation.

J Edger Hoover was convinced tha King was the most dangerous man in America.

Within weeks of the March on Washington.

The FBI made a request to the attorney general for a wiretap on Martin Luther King.

Hoover convinced the attorney General of the United States, Robert Kennedy, that King had to be placed under a 24 hour a day surveillance every day of the year to guard against this insidious force, the civil rights movement.

Technically, you have a legal kind of surveillance which is looking for evidence of communist control, communists involved in the civil rights movement.

That's one thing.

Cohen told Pro operation, which is what most people now associate with the FBI's relationship with King, was something completely different.

The case file was entitled Martin, run for King.

Security matter.

Communism.

His home phones.

His hotel rooms were bugged.

Informants around him were cultivated.

They were determined to discredit him on every level.

It was one of the highest iterations of the national security surveillance state that Hoover ever mounted.

The wiretaps uncovered no hint of communist conspiracy.

What they did reveal, however, was something Hoover prized.

Perhaps even more details about Martin Luther King's private life.

There's no question that King cheated on his wife.

There is also little question that this had very little to do with the civil rights movement.

It said what everybody thought black men were up to.

A black man's sex life, especially when in the public eye, is like the perfect archetype of the out-of-control black man.

Hoover realized that this was really a treasure.

It was a tremendous weapon to be used against him.

They wanted to make sure that people couldn't see King as a moral authority.

The contrast between King's public reputation and his private activities was a galling one to many in the FBI.

The hostility was deepened by criticism King made of the Bureau's operations in the South.

Hoover's response was scathing.

King, however, was now a figure of global renown.

He met the Pope in Rome, and October 1964 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The more the world praised King, the more disgusted and obsessed Hoover seemed to become.

Damaging material was passed on to other arms of government.

The IRS was urged to seek out tax violations.

Universities were discouraged from awarding King honorary degrees.

And in November 1964, the anonymous hate letter telling King to commit suicide was sent by an FBI agent in Miami.

He accompanied that letter with edited tapes of King in a hotel room in Washington, enjoying sexual Congress with a woman who is not his wife.

That package went off to King's home and his wife opened it.

King knew that this had to be the FBI, and it had to be Hoover.

Coretta Scott King knew who she was married to.

This was not going to interfere with their marriage because this was not about their marriage.

This was about, you know, the larger struggle and the larger picture.

They all sat down and listen to everything, and they then strategized.

What would they do?

The FBI's campaign to discredit King failed.

In 1966, a Senate probe began investigating electronic surveillance techniques.

Hoover grew nervous.

The wiretaps were shut down.

The civil rights movement had continued throughout.

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed legislation outlawing discrimination and segregation.

The Civil Rights Act is a challenge to all of us to go to work in our communities and our states and our homes and in our hearts to eliminate the last vestiges of injustice.

The following year, King led a voting rights movement in Selma, Alabama.

And in 1966, he campaigned against housing discrimination in Chicago.

But the conflict with Hoover was far from over, and King soon opened a new front.

He saw the Vietnam War as interfering in a space that just we did not belong.

It wasn't just our king, but almost the entire left was coming to a radical critique of the war as something that was not only a foreign policy disaster, but somehow revealed some of the inequities and injustices in American society.

The war was being fought with a predominantly black army, showed up a critique of the racial situation in America.

Their party of American foreign policy began to work together.

One must never overlook the fact that our nation is obsessed with the guns of war in Vietnam, and it has created a climate of violence, a climate of confusion, a climate of division, and even a climate of hatred.

His sense of justice for people and his sense of this is just another level of exploitation of us in so many ways.

It was obvious to him that something had to be done.

He was proof to Hoover that King was a dangerous communist because how could you be an American opposed to the policies of your government and not the Communist Hoover and the FBI began to, see their role as investigating and critiquing and subverting and disrupting a whole antiwar movement.

So as King began to embrace that movement, this put him even more at odds with the FBI.

The FBI recruited an informant in the SDLC.

The organization was added to an internal list of black nationalist hate groups.

King persevered.

However, he saw the gains made, and civil rights had not transformed the lives of African Americans as he had hoped.

In 1968, he began a new campaign.

His target this time was the whole American system.

Doing the same thing wasn't going to work.

King knew that the struggle was not just about black America.

It was about America and a fundamental change had to happen.

If you're going to fight for civil rights, you also have to fight for people's ability to live where they want to live, how they want to live.

We will get together and be together.

Black people, Mexican Americans, American Indians, Puerto Rican, Appalachian whites all working together to solve the problem of poverty.

He began speaking more as a radical.

The whole political environment had changed to the extent that he wasn't the only one speaking his radical terms.

When King became the head of a war on poverty, that was one bridge too far for the establishment of the United States.

The campaign was a political threat to the government.

The FBI stepped up its disruptive efforts.

It smeared leaders, national and local, and it spread false rumors about the dangers of taking part in the campaign.

You have to understand that Hoover saw the civil rights movement not only as controlled and directed by communism, but as a threat to every bit of the established order of America that he represented.

The King was not deterred.

The Poor People's Campaign would go ahead.

He spent the early months of 1968 touring the Deep South to recruit demonstrators.

He declared that a strike by sanitation workers in Tennessee would have his support.

As part of the campaign.

In the spring, he traveled to Memphis to join the protests.

Out in April 1968, Martin Luther King had come to Memphis, Tennessee, in support of striking sanitation workers.

Some say, without his presence in the city, was known to the FBI, although the days had passed when agents would bug King's hotel rooms.

The Civil Rights leader remained under surveillance of King's Poor People campaign targeted the government in a new, far more direct manner.

The FBI was hard at work to disrupt it.

Well, I don't know what will happen.

Now, but it really doesn't matter with me now because I've been to the mountaintop with all and I've seen the Promised Land.

But I may not get there with you.

But I want you to know the night that we as a people will get to the Promised land.

King's last speech in Memphis would be prophetic.

After the rally, he returned to the Lorraine Motel, where he and his team were staying.

King rose late.

The next morning, an afternoon of meetings with SClc staff followed for King and his associates prepared to leave the Lorraine Motel for dinner.

Shortly after 6 p.m., they stepped outside.

Room 306, a single gunshot rang out.

He was shot right in the cheek.

He's on the balcony, turned, gets went to get his coat.

And that was that.

Martin was just one of my best friends.

I remember I was looking.

In the mirror and I had a transistor radio.

In those days, and on the sort of edge of the sink.

And it came, the news came over the radio that he'd been shot.

It was deeper than a shock.

I remember thinking, oh, this is it.

This is over now.

You know, this whole nonviolent thing.

So I says over.

It's all over.

It wasn't going to be nice anymore.

It was.

It was finished.

I never talked about him since that night.

I never listened to him.

I can't hear his voice.

It was a time.

Of unbelievable sadness.

President Johnson declared a national day of mourning on April 8th.

Coretta Scott King led a march of 40,000 mourners through Memphis.

The following day, more than 100,000 people gathered in King's hometown of Atlanta for the funeral.

There were less peaceful responses as well.

Riots broke out in more than 100 cities.

Dozens were killed and many more injured.

I remember this a feeling that the country was coming apart at the seams.

Chicago particularly went up in flames.

They tore down everything.

We were at war with ourselves in a way that we had not been since the Civil War.

I think people went a little crazy because you already had, you know, Malcolm X dying.

You had, you know, JFK now, King.

And it was just I think that it was too much for so many people.

But amid the tears and the fury, there were questions.

Who was Martin Luther King's assassin?

Where has he gone?

Did he work alone?

Leading the investigation was J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.

His hostility toward King created an impression that the FBI was not serious in tracking down his killer.

The Bureau in hot pursuit of King's assassin failed.

They lost a threat.

Shortly after the shooting.

Witnesses had seen a man running from a boarding house opposite the Lorraine Motel.

A package was found close to the scene.

It contained a rifle and binoculars.

Fingerprints on these were traced to a man named James Earl Ray.

A manhunt was launched weeks past, however, with no sign of King's assassin.

James Earl Ray was a penniless drifter.

James Earl Ray simply managed to escape in a way that nobody could have predicted from someone like that.

The fact that King's assassin could elude an FBI manhunt boggled the mind then, and boggles the mind now.

It was two months before James Earl Ray was found.

He was apprehended far from Memphis.

News of Ray's arrest came first from the FBI chief Edgar Hoover in Washington.

He said that Ray was carrying two Canadian passports and a fully loaded pistol when he landed at London from Lisbon.

Ray was extradited back to the United States the following year.

He confessed to the murder of Martin Luther King.

He was sentenced to 99 years in prison, but questions remain.

Days after his conviction, Ray recanted his confession.

He insisted others were involved in the crime.

The King family believed that James Earl Ray did not do it to elude.

The pursuit of the FBI, made the FBI look horribly amateurish, if not complicit.

How do you get the gun?

How do you do all this stuff?

No King was going to be there at that particular time.

You can't pick up a high powered rifle and aim and shoot somebody in the head.

That's not easy to do.

The suspicion that Ray had help from white racists in this country is great.

But again, we'll never know.

But other secrets did come to light.

In 1971, a group of activists broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania.

They managed to loot the files, and enterprising reporters looking over this noticed a stamp on some of them Cointelpro.

And they didn't know what this meant.

It was just something that they hadn't seen before.

And so they began filing requests for this program to find out what it was.

Americans learned that the FBI had been an instrument of political warfare in this country beyond anyone's imagination.

American people, I think, was so jaded, so disbelieving, so set up for the government not being on this side for them.

People aren't terribly surprised.

And I think they weren't shocked.

Shortly after the disclosures, J. Edgar Hoover shut the program down.

It would be among his last orders as FBI director.

After almost 40 years at the helm of the Bureau, Hoover died of a heart attack at his Washington home on May 2nd, 1972.

He was 77.

Hoover's legacy.

For better or for worse, is encapsulated in Cointelpro.

Hoover was an American Machiavelli.

No man should ever have that kind of unchecked power in America ever again.

His opposition to civil rights has put him in the indefensible position of someone who stood for some of the worst things in the American national character.

His legacy we live with every day.

It is the national security state.

The surveillance powers of the FBI are immense to this day, but to a great extent they are now controlled by law.

The FBI put itself on a good track as far as reserving its efforts for the most important crimes against the country.

Agents of the FBI are schooled from the beginning not to repeat Hoover's mistakes.

Over half a century has now passed since Martin Luther King's death.

The years have not dimmed the brilliance of his rhetoric, nor have they diminished the relevance of his words.

The struggle for equality, which Martin Luther King represented, goes on.

Martin Luther King stands as an unrealized ideal.

The civil rights movement is properly seen as a moral crusade that appeal to the best aspects of the American character.

King's legacy of freedom, of liberty, of justice is part of our heritage.

Now.

He belongs to the agents.

The whole object of society itself is to find equality with people of all colors and and all ethnicities and all.

Religions.

And the American Dream in particular is not fulfilled until this happens.

This was a man that believed in what he was trying to do.

He always saw what could be better.

And he said, I'm going to push for that better.

I was with him everywhere.

He going to preach.

I'm going to say we could be in a car going to our next gig or whatever.

And and Martin is back there telling jokes and laughing.

And it was easier to be with.

He got people to look at their shared humanity, accept it and move it along.

Everywhere I go now, I'm going to let it shine.

Hallelujah.

Every where I go now I'm going to let it shine I say now, everywhere I go.

Now I'm going to let it shine.

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

Oh, okay.

Don't get me singing and I won't stop.