Martin Luther King, Jr. is an unparalleled figure in the civil rights movement, but less well-known are the civil liberties lessons of his life and activism.

As King came to national prominence half a century ago, the pre-digital technology of the era did not stop the federal government from prying into his private life with the goal of undermining his civil rights work.

King’s heroic advocacy of equality and opposition to the war in Vietnam put him on all kinds of government watchlists. The FBI called him the “most dangerous Negro of the future of this nation,” assessing him in terms that sound more reminiscent of a terror threat than a pastor leading nonviolent protests against institutionalized racism.

That “most dangerous” phrase is from an FBI memo penned immediately after King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. That memo also concluded that “it may be unrealistic to limit ourselves as we have been doing to legalistic proof or definitely conclusive evidence.” In other words, the FBI had decided that King was a dangerous communist, and it was determined to proceed with illegal efforts to discredit his movement regardless of the fact that there was no actual proof to justify its actions.

The agency discussed “how best to carry on our investigation [of King] to produce the desired results without embarrassment to the Bureau,” including “the avenues of approach aimed at neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader.”

And a few months after the dream speech, the FBI began, in Director J. Edgar Hoover’s words, to “intensify our coverage of communist influence on the Negro.” That took the form of wiretapping King’s phones and bugging his hotel rooms. The agency further disgraced itself by sending King a letter trying to badger him into suicide and harassing King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, in an attempt push her towards divorce.


The NSA spied on King, too, under a program called Minaret. Originally introduced as a way to keep track of terrorists and drug traffickers, Minaret evolved into a project for monitoring Vietnam War critics like King.