Women, Wiretaps, and Smears: the FBI and Coretta Scott King

"This is a woman who basically was trying to raise four kids and honor her deceased husband...I don't know how that was a threat to anybody's national security."

--Isaac Ferris, Jr., Coretta Scott King's nephew and spokesman for The King Center in Atlanta (http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gdZ6WjVZ0RMNg6RHMfRBWm1t7f2Q)

Today's news of the FBI conducting surveillance on Coretta Scott King for years after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination sent my mind reeling. To think of anonymous, small armies of government bureaucrats, sitting in cubicles lit by dim, flourscent lights searching through Mrs. King's personal letters, reading logs of field agents meticulously recording the schedule of her comings and goings, and even having the audacity to critique her autobiography is like something out of a Terry Gilliam movie.

It's bizarre.

Unthinkable.

Yet, it happened.

Houston television station KHOU broke this story today: http://www.khou.com/topstories/stories/khou070830_ac_scottkingfiles.85e64faa.htm l. It shows the extent that certain elements in our society - including our own government - will go to when confronted with an eloquent, plain-spoken argument for social change.

In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech (http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm) delivered on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before he was assassinated, Dr. King argued that, "...A time comes when silence is betrayal...". In a relatively few short minutes he became one of the government's biggest domestic threats, more than the Black Panthers, more than Malcolm X. King was able in this speech to meld the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement and the movement toward economic populism together into one seamless garment, saying:

"...we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor..." (my emphasis added)

King's threat was real: he was already at this point working on the Poor People's campaign, a cause that would bring together working people and poor people of all races to use nonviolence to demand economic justice from our government. He was poised to bring together disparate factions of the left and right, rich and poor, young and old by articulating how our nation's dependence on the military-industrial complex and the foreign policies it spawns adversely affects normal, every day Americans from widely divergent walks of life.

The urgency to stop him was real. The tactics employed by our government through the COINTEL program were brutal (http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/cointel.htm). His voice being silenced exactly one-year-to-the-day of delivering this landmark speech has always looked suspicious.

But after being silenced, why did the government continue these tactics against Mrs. King? Why did they start a meme that literally hounded her the rest of her life, making her the butt of political cartoons (one where she and her children were depicted as pick ninnies) and encouraging right-wing radio talk show hosts to label her "the Black Widow"? As KHOU reports:

"...One agent even read and reviewed her 1969 book "My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr." and made a point to say Scott King's "selfless, magnanimous, decorous attitude is belied by.. (her) ..actual shrewd, calculating, businesslike activities." (http://www.khou.com/topstories/stories/khou070830_ac_scottkingfiles.85e64faa.htm l).

Why did the FBI employ these same tactics against close advisors like Ralph David Abernathy:

"...In the report the FBI details an uncertain and "shaky" Abernathy who was "concerned about his possible assassination as well as his position as President of the SCLC..." So the agent makes a recommendation: "It is felt that by notifying Abernathy directly upon receipt of information relating to threats against his life, some rapport may be developed with him..." The report also adds that doing this would give the benefit of "the disruptive effect of confusing and worrying him by reminding him of continuous threats against his life." (http://www.khou.com/topstories/stories/khou070830_ac_scottkingfiles.85e64faa.htm l).

The FBI was worried that someone might stand up in the void left by MLK, might continue the work that he started on a summer day in a quiet church nestled in the chaos and confusion of New York City.

So, in the midst of visits to the White House, where Mrs. King and her children posed for photo ops and were told what a wonderful man their husband and father was, our government was reporting to these very same men with the sympathetic eyes where Mrs. King was going, who she was talking with, and how to sully her repuation just enough to make her a less credible threat.

This story has an upside, as all stories do. The government ceased its surveillence of Mrs. King around November, 1972. The American Civil Liberties Union issued a press release today calling for an immediate re-writing of the guidelines the FBI uses to spy on people in public places (http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/315 30prs20070831.html).

And, a Presidential candidate paid tribute to King's seminal speech, illustrating its urgent, timely call to end our silence and finally be patriotic about something other than war:



If we want to stop the type of injustice Mrs. King experienced, it isn't enough to hold investigations or write better laws and policies (as important as these action are). We need to change who we are as a people.

Silence is a betrayal.

Stand up, speak out. Be the change you want to see.