Roy Exum: ‘King, You Are Done’

  • Sunday, November 16, 2014
  • Roy Exum
Roy Exum
Roy Exum

Beverly Gage, a professor in American History at Yale, has been doing research on a forthcoming book at J. Edgar Hoover and in an essay that appeared in the New York Times earlier this week, she unearthed the most damning document of our government at its worst that I believe I have ever read.

It’s called “The Suicide Letter,” an anonymous letter that was send to Dr. Martin Luther King allegedly by the FBI in 1964 just before Dr. King was scheduled to accept the Nobel Peace Prize in Sweden.

At the time MLK told close associates somebody wanted him to commit suicide and that he thought he knew who it was.

Up until now the famous letter has been heavily redacted, almost unreadable, but this summer Prof. Gage found the horrifying original in the National Archives and claims it is probably “the most notorious and embarrassing example of Hoover’s FBI run amok.”

As she wrote in the Times, “On Nov. 18, 1964 — 50 years ago this week — Hoover denounced King at a Washington news conference, labeling him the ‘the most notorious liar in the country.’ A few days later, one of Hoover’s deputies, William Sullivan, apparently took it upon himself to write the anonymous letter and sent an agent to Miami, to mail the package to Atlanta.”

She also found it odd Hooker’s vicious campaign against MLK flopped because the media was far more cautious back then. “The F.B.I. never succeeded in seriously damaging King’s public image. Half a century later, we look upon King as a model of moral courage and human dignity. Hoover, by contrast, has become almost universally reviled. In this context, perhaps the most surprising aspect of their story is not what the F.B.I. attempted, but what it failed to do.

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?”

It is believed a graphic tape accompanied the anonymous letter but the reflection of hatred is what I want you to see. Here is the entire transcript of what the original, single-spaced, hand-typed letter said that was delivered to Martin Luther King 50 years ago:

* * *

King,

In view of your low-grade, abnormal personal behavior I will not dignify your name with either a Mr. or a Reverend or a Dr. and your last name called to mind only the type of King such as King Henry the VIII and his countless acts of adultery and immoral conduct lower than that of a beast.

King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes. White people in this country have enough frauds of their own but I am sure they don’t have one at this time that is anywhere near your equal. You are no clergyman and you know it. I repeat you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. You could not believe in God and act like you do. Clearly you do not believe in any personal moral principles.

King, like all your moral faults your end is approaching. 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 inbecile. We will now have to depend on our older leaders like Wilkins, a man of character and thank God for others like him. But you are done. Your “honorary” degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you. I repeat you are done.

No person can overcome facts, not even a fraud like yourself. Lend your sexual psychotic ear to the enclosure. You will find yourself and in all your dirt, filth, evil and moronic talk exposed on the record for all time. I repeat – not person can successful argue against the facts. You are finished. You will find on the record for all time your filthy, dirty, evil companions, male and female, giving expression to your hideous abnormalities. And some of them pretend to be ministers of the Gospel. Satan could not do more. What incredible evilness. It is all there on your record – all the adulterous acts, your sexual orgies extending into your past. This is one tiny sample. You will understand this. Yes, from your various evil playmates on the West Coast to (redact) and others on the West Coast and outside the country you are on record. King you are done.

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 this (this exact number has been selected for you for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant. 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.

* * *

Then there is this: Robert Novack, a syndicated columnist at the time, had lunch with the letter’s author, William Sullivan, in June of 1972 and Sullivan confided Novack would probably would read about his death in some kind of accident, but not to believe it. It would be murder.

According to an account in Wikipedia, “"On November 9, 1977, days before he was to testify to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, twenty minutes before sunrise, sixty-five-year-old William C. Sullivan was walking through the woods near his retirement home in Sugar Hill, NH,  on the way to meet hunting companions. Another hunter, Robert Daniels, Jr., a twenty-two-year-old son of a state policeman, using a telescopic sight on a .30 caliber rifle, said he mistook Sullivan for a deer, shot him in the neck, and killed him instantly.

“The authorities called it an accident, fining Daniels five hundred dollars and taking away his hunting license for ten years,” the account reads. “Sullivan's collaborator on his memoir, the television news writer Bill Brown, wrote that he and Sullivan's family were convinced that the death was accidental.

“Sullivan was one of six current or former FBI officials who died during a six-month period in 1977, before they were to testify before the House Subcommittee on Assassinations, all men who were slated to give testimony about FBI circumstances related to the death of United States President John F. Kennedy, and the FBI role in the Warren Commission.”

"Sullivan's death did not prevent publication of the memoir, telling all about the disgrace of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. After Watergate, with all the principals dead or out of office, it received little attention."

Can you believe our country survived after what happened 50 years ago, or that six high-ranking FBI, died in just six months?

As Edmund Burke, the 17th century Irish novelist once penned, “Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.”

royexum@aol.com

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