by PETER LEE
IMAGE/Amazon
In the case of Martin Luther King, America’s deep state intersected with politics and civil rights and Thurgood Marshall’s strategy for African American legal equality in some ugly and dangerous ways.
And they intersect at a most unpleasant and unhappy point, one that is largely ignored when putting an optimistic, feel-good gloss over Dr. King’s struggle for civil rights: the infamous MLK sex tape gambit cooked up by the FBI.
The most uncomfortable issue raised by the existence of tapes is not the matter of Dr. King’s human appetites and deficiencies in the area of marital fidelity. It is the potential for blackmail, the leverage that the FBI and the US government could have brought to bear against Dr. King and his direction of the civil rights movement by exploiting the tapes.
And the case of the tapes also shines an awkward light on the relationship between America’s deep state and another African-American civil rights giant: Thurgood Marshall.
For background, I highly recommend Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America. Reading it in the context of Ferguson, Garner, etc. this book really f*cked me up, as they say nowadays. Based on my experience, I’d recommend just picking up the book and reading it, without googling “Groveland Boys” or looking at some reviews of the book. All I can say is that, despite that determinedly sunny subtitle, it will take you into some very dark places.
Actually, what I will say is that the book also offers some more fascinating insights into the relationship between J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, the political civil rights movement served by Dr. King, and the “lawfare” civil rights legal battle fought with similar dedication and personal courage by Thurgood Marshall.
As I wrote in a previous post, “Everybody Wants Their Own Stasi,” Hoover disliked and distrusted Martin Luther King as a troublemaker and, possibly, a communist asset.
One of the most interesting chapters in Hoover’s history is the lethal dance that the Kennedy brothers led with Hoover over the issue of Martin Luther King and, in particular, the purported Communist ties of King’s white advisor, Stanley Levison. Levison had apparently broken with communism as an ideology in 1956 over Hungary, before he started working with King.
Cognizant of the epic sh*train that would descend on anybody who irresponsibly alleged that King was acting on the advice of a Soviet agent, today everybody is extremely cautious and circumspect in their verbiage concerning this issue. [Here is an excellent, judicious parsing of the Levison matter, albeit from 2002, by David Garrow in The Atlantic. CH, 1/14/15] But not Hoover and the FBI in the 1960s. Hoover was determined to establish Levison’s current communist ties in order to discredit King and the movement, and Robert Kennedy as AG greenlit Hoover to blackbag, wiretap, and bug King, Levison and his associates to the nth degree in an attempt to establish the link. The smoking gun never emerged (Levison did get hauled before a secret session of a Congressional committee, where he denied “now or ever having been” and then took the 5th on all other queries), and the Kennedys did not allow themselves to get buffaloed into turning against King by Hoover and the non-stop stream of anti-King tittle-tattle that the FBI funneled into the Oval Office, and to their allies in Congress and the media.
Well, not completely. Hoover’s campaign had made Levison toxic enough that the Kennedys prevailed on King to break overt ties with him as a condition of White House support for King’s efforts. Levison continued to work with King through a cutout.
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