As a target of the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (CoIntelPro), I think the bureau would have been wiser to keep its Twitter trap shut on this day set aside to remember the wisdom, courage, and relentless intersectional activism of Martin Luther King Jr.
Perhaps if that quotation at Quantico included a line or three about the FBI’s despicable police-state behavior regarding King and other civil rights activists in the 1950s and ‘60s, this tweeted honoring might not leave such a sour taste. One quick-read at what the bureau was up to with King and other black people who dared to stand up for themselves and others can be found here.
Here’s one of the key examples. In 1964, the following letter was fabricated by FBI agents and sent to King. He told aides at the time he knew it was from the bureau. It was later discovered he was quite right. The bureau sent a letter urging King to kill himself. For years, only heavily redacted versions of this letter made it into the media. Then, five years ago, Beverly Gage, a professor of history and American studies at Yale, found a complete copy of the original:
Gage concludes her 2014 essay:
The current F.B.I. director, James Comey, keeps a copy of the King wiretap request on his desk as a reminder of the bureau’s capacity to do wrong. But elsewhere in Washington, the debate over how much the government should know about our private lives has never been more heated: Should intelligence agencies be able to sweep our email, read our texts, track our phone calls, locate us by GPS? Much of the conversation swirls around the possibility that agencies like the N.S.A. or the F.B.I. will use such information not to serve national security but to carry out personal and political vendettas. King’s experience reminds us that these are far from idle fears, conjured in the fevered minds of civil libertarians. They are based in the hard facts of history.