Monday, January 29, 2018

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Lyndon B. Johnson, and Robert F. Kennedy with civil rights leaders, June 22, 1963










The FBI was under written directive from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy when it began tapping King's telephone in the fall of 1963. 
 Kennedy was concerned that allegations of communists in the SCLC—if they were made public—would derail the administration's civil rights initiatives.
 He warned King to discontinue these associations and later felt compelled to issue the written directive that authorized the FBI to wiretap King and other SCLC leaders.

 FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover feared the civil rights movement and investigated the allegations of communist infiltration.
 When no evidence emerged to support this, the FBI used the incidental details caught on tape over the next five years in attempts to force King out of his leadership position, in the COINTELPRO program.

King believed that organized, nonviolent protest against the system of southern segregation known as Jim Crow laws would lead to extensive media coverage of the struggle for black equality and voting rights.
 Journalistic accounts and televised footage of the daily deprivation and indignities suffered by Southern blacks, and of segregationist violence and harassment of civil rights workers and marchers, produced a wave of sympathetic public opinion that convinced the majority of Americans that the civil rights movement was the most important issue in American politics in the early 1960s.

King organized and led marches for blacks' right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other basic civil rights.
 Most of these rights were successfully enacted into the law of the United States with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

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