(people chattering)
- If you aren't out within 10 days,
you and your family will be killed.
Now in Montgomery, our home was bombed twice.
Today we still confront threats through telephone calls
and through the mail.
(eerie music)
- It's 1964 and a package has just been sent
to Martin Luther King Jr's house in Atlanta, Georgia.
The package contains reels of tape
and on that tape there's Blackmail
as well as this one page letter.
The letter is written in the voice
of one of King's supporters.
It's riddled with typos and corrections
and the letter tells King that he should,
"look into his heart,"
because he is, "a complete fraud,
a great liability to Black people."
It refers to the tapes that are in this package,
which is an audio super cut
of evidence showing King committing adulterous acts,
sexual encounters with his girlfriends and mistresses.
The letter calls him a, "Dissolute, abnormal,
moral imbecile, abnormal animal, a beast,
what incredible evilness, Satan could not do more."
The letter tells King that his end is approaching
and that he has just one thing left to do
and he knows what it is.
He has 34 days in which to do it.
This letter insinuating that Martin Luther King Jr.
should end his own life
was not sent by a disenchanted follower
and it was not typical hate mail.
This letter was sent by some of the most powerful men
in the United States, the top leaders of the FBI.
(eerie music)
- And of course I received numerous threatening letters.
You and your family will be killed.
- [Reporter] Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Was shot and killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.
(dramatic music)
- More than half of Americans don't buy the official account
that a lone racist gunman was behind the death
of Martin Luther King on
that day in Memphis in the late 1960s,
That number is more like 88% for Black Americans.
Those who don't believe it include the ones
that were standing next to him when it happened.
They include his family.
An exhaustive congressional investigation found
that King's murder was, "Likely a conspiracy,"
but there's actually a lot more to the story than
who pulled the trigger.
And thanks to recently declassified documents, thousands
of them that we've been going through,
we can now shed a light on the FBI in the 1960s,
what they were up to
and what that teaches us
about who really killed Martin Luther King.
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And with that, let's keep going on this story about MLK.
(typewriter typing)
So in the late 1960s here in America,
there was a secret war going on between these two men.
One of them wielded the immense opaque power
of the United States' Federal Bureau of Investigations.
The other man belonged to America's long oppressed minority
and fought this war using the weapons of compelling words
and a deep philosophical commitment to nonviolent protest.
- My feeling is that the vast majority
of Negroes in the United States believe in non-violence
as a basic tactic for social change.
Non-violent.
The non-violence is really the only way that we can follow.
That if every Negro in the United States turns
against nonviolence, I'm going stand up as a lone force
and say this is the wrong way.
(crowd cheering)
- In 1960s America, non-violence turned out
to be an incredibly powerful tool for waging this struggle
because it always resulted in the same thing,
the inevitable crackdown of excessive violence
by law enforcement and counter protestors.
And when that was then covered
and shown to the general population, it was so starkly clear
who was right and who was wrong in the situation.
- King felt from strategy in terms
of changing the hearts
and minds of America, watching young boys and girls
and teenagers and adults be beaten, hosed, shot, murdered,
maimed for simply wanting
to exercise their rights as citizens.
These images were very powerful.
- You've got to keep the white and the Black separate.
- A visual spectacle that represented
what Black Americans knew all too well was
how they were treated by the American system,
but now it was just public.
(soft music)
King led 40,000 to protest segregated buses
for over a year resulting in the desegregation
of public buses in Montgomery, Alabama.
He went to the most segregated city in America
to lead sit-ins in segregated restaurants
and lunch counters.
Protesters would peacefully kneel in churches and libraries.
They marched on City Hall
and King would always get up
with his powerful stirring words
to remind these protestors
about the importance of their core philosophy.
- We go back to the buses, let us be loving enough
to turn an enemy into a friend.
Nonviolent protest against injustices
and indignities experienced.
- That the idea that you were going to bludgeon your enemies
or destroy your enemies into some form of solidarity
where it wouldn't just be permanently armed camps,
he thought was an illusion.
Persistent illusion that we constantly make, that's one
of the objections about militarism
that is based on a fantasy.
- King and many of these protestors were arrested.
From jail, King wrote a letter
about why he was leading these demonstrations in Birmingham.
August 1963, letter from Birmingham Jail.
"We know through painful experience
that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor.
It must be demanded by the oppressed.
And that now was their time for, they had, "Waited
for more than 340 years
for their God-Given constitutional rights."
This is the only way to change
what was the status quo in America
where vicious mobs lynch your mothers
and fathers, hate-filled policemen curse, kick,
and brutalize and even kill your Black brothers and sisters.
And after trying many different ways
of addressing this, non-violent direct action
would build creative tension in the society.
It would dramatize these issues
so that they could no longer be ignored.
This was his strategy for change in equality for his people
and it was working.
Lunch counters, restrooms and drinking fountains
were desegregated across Birmingham
and as King predicted, the spectacle
of peaceful protestors being violently cracked down on
spread across the country, elevating the movement
to an unambiguous moral high ground
that couldn't be put down by force and arrests
and violence by law enforcement.
- Now I will continue to carry on our mass protest.
(crowd cheering)
- But Martin Luther King was challenging an old,
entrenched system and when you disrupt a system like
that, you create enemies.
- Either you give the Negro his God given rights
and his freedom are you face the fact
of continual social disruption and social chaos.
- His enemies included those
that you would imagine like the Ku Klux Klan
whose leaders allied with local police in the south
and who stated that killing MLK
would eliminate all racial problems in the south.
You also had pro segregation groups
like the White Citizens Council who tried
to convince the federal government
that King's growing movement had communist connections,
but it wasn't just these overtly bigoted groups.
His enemies also included business owners,
real estate developers, landlords, employers,
all of whom benefited from the status quo,
discrimination in hiring practices, housing and mortgages.
Then of course there was a whole bunch of lawmakers
and governors, most of them from the south, almost all
of them from the south,
but among King's Enemies was a Department of Justice agency
that was powerful whose job it was to protect Americans
and to enforce the laws of the country.
- [Narrator] J. Edgar Hoover served
as the agency's director for FBI building
houses the Bureau's Washington headquarters.
(dramatic music)
(soft music) (typewriter typing)
- So remember it's the 1960s, it's the Cold War.
There's an obsession with finding communist sympathizers,
anyone who is sympathetic to our big enemy,
the Soviet Union, and the director
of the FBI at the time was named J. Edgar Hoover.
He would be the director of the FBI for like decades.
So as king's movement grew, Hoover became suspicious
that the movement wasn't a grassroots rising up for equality
and racial justice,
but rather a communist plot
to sow division in American society.
So it's 1963, Martin Luther King
and his followers are planning this massive march
in Washington DC and Hoover tasks his head
of domestic intelligence, William Sullivan,
to go out and investigate
how much influence the Communist party has
over this movement.
And five days before the march on Washington,
Sullivan delivers this report.
(tense music)
The report concludes that
even though the Soviet Union had spent tremendous sums
of money and time
and issued lots of propaganda to try
to infiltrate this movement, that in fact there was,
"No known substantial implementation
of communism within King's movement."
The movement was about racial inequality in America,
a real pressing issue.
Communism had nothing to offer
and nothing to do with it says this report
that was delivered to Hoover five days
before the march on Washington.
But you can see right here, Hoover didn't like it.
You can see right here at the bottom of the memo he,
this is Hoover's handwriting in this declassified document.
It's kind of an angry moment.
Communism's influence on King isn't infinitesimal,
as Sullivan's report had concluded.
Sullivan says that Hoover was so mad
about this that he stopped talking
to Sullivan for months.
Sullivan had to, "Change our ways
or we would all be out on the streets, give Hoover
what he wanted or risk the consequences."
And what Hoover wanted was King to be tied to communism
so that he would have an excuse to spy on him.
- 99% of people, unfortunately, they don't go to their boss
and say, "You are a horrible affront to human decency.
I will quit this job rather than carry out your directive."
They go and they do their job.
They say, "Oh yeah, you were right, boss."
- And soon the FBI would give him exactly what he wanted.
- [Narrator] They called it the March on Washington for jobs
and freedom, in the lead, Martin Luther King.
- Today, many of these people are receiving millions
of dollars in federal subsidies not too far.
And they're the very people telling the Black man
that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.
- [Narrator] Determination that the American society
shall have no rest until it is a society
of free men whatever their color.
(tense music)
- Two days after the march on Washington,
Sullivan begins his repentance process
by delivering this memo from W.C. Sullivan,
August 30th, 1963.
Sullivan, who again just produced this big report saying
that King had nothing to do with communism,
has changed his tune Just a few days later.
Turns out that the Communist party does wield
substantial influence over Black people in America
and that in light of King's powerful demagogue speech,
oh and by the way, the demagogue speech he's talking
about is this one.
- I have a dream.
- King now stands head
and shoulders over all other Black leaders in the country
that we must mark him now
as the most dangerous Black person in the nation
from the standpoint of communism, race,
and national security.
The plan would be according to Sullivan,
to completely discredit him to,
"Take him off his pedestal."
The thing is they were kind of stuck.
They didn't have a great plan
for putting down this movement.
King had achieved the moral high ground,
and so they needed to fight morality with morality.
They could undermine him
and his moral philosophy then just maybe,
they could stop his movement
so that the African American community would be, "Left
without a national leader to steer them
in the proper direction.
(soft music)
So Hoover and his agents cook up some thin evidence
that Ty Martin Luther King to communism,
and they get approval from the Attorney General
to spy on King.
But what they don't tell the Attorney General is
that they're not actually looking for communism.
There is no communism here and they know that.
What they're looking for is whatever they can get
to take him off his pedestal.
(tense music)
Okay, what we are looking at here is a list
of every wiretap and bug that was put on Martin Luther King.
Side note, whenever I see these big blocks of redacted text,
I just have to know like what could have been so juicy
that they had to black it out.
Like we're already looking at like the sins of the FBI,
and there was something even more secret
that we just will never see, too bad.
We're looking at wiretaps, which is basically the ability
to listen in on phone conversations
at a variety of locations.
There's his home in Georgia
and then there's a couple hotels in California.
There's a home in New York City,
and then there's a bunch of microphones.
Microphone or bug is just when the FBI
trespasses into someone's space
and puts a microphone that then records everything
that happens in that space.
So you see them doing this at the Willard Hotel here
in Washington DC, hotels in California
and Hawaii, hotels in New York City.
So the main tactic here was to follow MLK
as he traveled around the country and to bug
and tap his hotel and telephone and spy
on everything he said, every person he talked to.
Here in the middle of all
of these memos, you have this handwritten note
to the director saying,
"Obviously these are particularly delicate surveillances.
We should be very cautious in terms of non-FBI people
who may from time to time necessarily be involved
in some aspect of installation."
Like we gotta really keep this under wraps
because it is totally not okay what we're doing.
In short, what they created was,
"The most complete surveillance imaginable."
Unsurprisingly, even after all of this spying,
they didn't find communism.
There was no communism here.
But what they did find is exactly what they needed
to, "Take him off his pedestal."
They found sex tapes.
(tense music) (typewriter dinging)
(indistinct chattering)
These FBI documents that were declassified a few years ago
contain the summaries of what the FBI agents say
that they heard on these tapes.
We don't have the actual tapes yet,
and they paint a picture of Dr. King
as a womanizer with girlfriends
and prostitutes in Las Vegas, New York, Washington DC.
These memos say that King would get excessively drunk
and sleep with women while using,
"The vilest language imaginable, excessive consumption
of alcohol, which served only as a backdrop to the acts
of degeneracy and depravity,
many of which committed in a communal atmosphere."
I mean, it's a lot of graphic descriptions, some
of which don't shine a good light on Dr. King.
Running naked, drunk white prostitutes up
and down the halls of a hotel in Las Vegas.
- They saw his alleged infidelity
as exactly the kind of deviance that would allow them
to stigmatize the broader Black community,
to undermine king's leadership, put his life in turmoil,
make him unable to do this job,
and it diminished his standing among the the broader public.
- This surveillance, which again was supposed
to be about communism connections, was used
to gather a whole swath of ammunition for this war
where Hoover and Sullivan were trying to knock King off
of his moral pedestal, to undermine the morality
that made King's movement so powerful and unstoppable.
But wait really quick, we can't really move on
before we talk about how to think about this evidence,
and we struggled with this a lot, we talked to a lot
of different people with different views on
how they interpret this, and here's my take.
Okay, these documents, in most stories that I do,
would be rock solid.
This is FBI intelligence declassified,
and usually these analysts are reporting dispassionate,
objective evidence that we can use.
The problem here is
that I know too much about the context surrounding
how this intelligence was gathered
and the motive for doing so.
Future investigations would clearly state
that the FBI was riddled with racism
and that it was a bunch of white agents all jockeying
for the approval of their leader,
J. Edgar Hoover, a man who we know now in Black
and white we have seen, was willing to ignore analysis
and intelligence that contradicted his own personal views,
and he was willing to drag the entire bureau along
with his theories.
Disagreeing with him meant being out on the streets.
The agency would produce what he wanted to hear
or there would be consequences.
So when I read these reports from agents who go out
with the mandate to collect evidence
that will knock Martin Luther King off of his pedestal,
I have kind of a hard time trusting how they interpret it,
especially when I'm not looking at the primary source.
I'm looking at agent's interpretation of audio recordings.
These aren't transcripts, these are summaries.
They're not visual, they're audio,
and to me, they're tainted with deep racist bias.
As someone who seeks truth
and looks for evidence, that's a problem.
Now, in 2027, all of the tapes will be released,
and at that point we will have the opportunity to listen
to those tapes and assess whether
or not they change in any way our legacy
and our view of Martin Luther King as an individual.
But for now, this is not conclusive evidence for me
of anything other than the abuse of power at the FBI.
(tape whirring)
(typewriter dinging) (tense music)
So it's 1964,
the FBI has been spying on King's every move.
They have all these reports of his adulterous behavior,
and this is when Hoover's nightmare comes true.
Martin Luther King Jr. is selected
to receive the Nobel Peace Prize,
the ultimate moral high ground.
Hoover writes a letter to Sullivan saying, now is the time
to act, to expose him,
and it's just a couple days later when the FBI sends
that package to King's House in Atlanta
with the tapes filled with sexual blackmail
and a letter insinuating that it was time for King
to end his own life in the next 34 days.
We know for certain that this letter came from the FBI.
It's like not speculation.
A copy of the letter was found in Sullivan's files,
though he claims that it was planted there,
but what we don't know is exactly what was on those tapes.
The tapes were also sent to the media
who didn't end up publishing them,
but they also didn't expose the fact
that the FBI was spying on Martin Luther King.
It was a different media environment back then,
but what we do know is that Hoover's plan to end King
by gathering all this blackmail
and sending it to his house didn't work.
King was distraught.
It was his wife who opened the package, heard the tapes,
but King didn't stop.
He was not knocked off his pedestal.
(dramatic music)
King continues to Oslo.
He receives his prize, suddenly he's Person of the Year
on the front of magazines,
and he continues to lead a variety of social justice causes.
His list of enemies continues to grow,
especially as he joins the chorus
of anti-Vietnam War protestors.
- And we have been wrong from the beginning
of our adventure in Vietnam.
We have been detrimental to the life
of the Vietnamese people.
That is something about a war like this
that makes people insensitive.
It dulls the conscience.
It strengthens the forces of reaction,
and it brings into being bitterness and hatred and violence.
- [Johnny] His movement expands into representing poor
and underserved people of all races.
He plans to lead another march on Washington,
this one bigger than the last.
(crowd clapping)
(tense music) (typewriter dinging)
About a month before this next big march
on Washington was to happen.
King was in Memphis, Tennessee supporting the strike
of mostly Black trash collectors protesting the lack
of safety standards and their low pay.
And that night, Martin Luther King gave his last speech.
- We've got some difficult days ahead,
(audience clamors)
but it really doesn't matter with me now.
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life.
Longevity has its place,
but I'm not concerned about that now.
I just want to do God's will
and he has allowed me to go up to the mountain,
and I've looked over and I've seen the Promised Land.
(audience clamors)
I may not get there with you,
but I want you to know the night
that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.
(audience cheers)
So I'm happy tonight, I'm not worried about anything.
I'm not fearing any man.
My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
(audience cheers)
- That night, he returned to his hotel, staying in a room
that he stayed in so often
that it was actually named after him.
And at 6:01 PM on April 4th, 1968,
while he was standing out here on this balcony,
a single shot rang out, hitting King in the jaw.
He was rushed to the hospital
and pronounced dead an hour later.
- [Narrator] The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King,
39 years old and a Nobel Peace Prize winner,
and the leader of the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement
in the United States was assassinated in Memphis tonight.
The sniper's bullet cut down Dr. King
as he stood on a hotel balcony in Memphis.
Within an hour, Dr. King was dead.
That happened at 7:00 PM Eastern time.
(indistinct chattering)
(tense music)
(typewriter typing)
- [Johnny] The FBI launched an investigation which led them
to this man, James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old fugitive
who had escaped from a Missouri prison
in a bread truck a year earlier.
Ray had rented a room across the street
from King's motel earlier that day.
Ray allegedly aimed
and shot his rifle from this bathroom window.
Shortly after the shooting, Ray fled to Canada,
then England, then Portugal and back to England.
His end goal was a country in southern Africa
called Rhodesia, which is modern day Zimbabwe.
But he was apprehended at the airport in England
and sent back to the United States where he was arrested.
- He said that Ray was carrying two Canadian passports
and a fully loaded pistol
when he landed at London from Lisbon.
- He immediately pleaded guilty,
presumably to avoid the risk
of the electric chair,
and then he was sentenced to 99 years in prison.
Three days later, Ray went back on it saying that actually,
no, he didn't kill MLK, claiming that he was set up,
that he was a part of a larger conspiracy to kill King.
(tense music)
Those close to King didn't accept the official explanation
that Ray was the lone gunman who did this.
Perhaps they were all too familiar
with the horrifying tactics used
by the United States government to spy on, intimidate,
discredit, and threaten Martin Luther King.
Over the course of reporting this story, we opened up a lot
of rabbit holes when it came
to the conspiracy theories surrounding this assassination.
We wanted to really confront them
and try to understand what evidence exists
and what evidence doesn't and what is valid and what's not.
The lack of faith in the FBI
and scrutiny into this case has revealed
some pretty significant holes in the explanation,
some unexplained things, fishy circumstances,
destroyed evidence, timelines that don't add up,
witnesses that contradict the real story.
A lot of things that make it hard to accept
that a 40-year-old fugitive
could pull off a sophisticated assassination in one shot
and escape through three countries.
But the investigations done since then have concluded
that it was Ray who fired the shot.
This includes the House Select Committee,
a congressional investigation that concluded
that Ray did it.
Though they say it was likely a conspiracy,
that there were other people involved.
Funders, though they say it wasn't the government.
The King family continued to sue and search for answers.
Then in the nineties, this man comes forward
and says that he was a part of it, that he was given money
to hire someone to kill King.
The King family took him
to court under a wrongful death suit.
It was a civil case, so there wasn't any like jail time.
The jury concluded that the assassination was a conspiracy
that included others, including government agencies.
But to be clear, this lawsuit from the nineties
with this guy named Jowers was not a legitimate piece
of proof for this.
It didn't include a real defense,
and it didn't include any consequences.
There was a symbolic $100 payment to the King family,
but what it did is shine a light again on the fact
that a lot of people aren't satisfied
with the official story of who killed Martin Luther King.
The fact is that even after all of these lawsuits
and investigations and a mock trial
that was like live on TV, there is no conclusive evidence
that ties the FBI
or any other government agency
to the assassination of Martin Luther King.
And I'm saying that as somebody
who feels like it wouldn't actually be outlandish
that the FBI did this.
After all, the next year, they showed that they were willing
to assassinate Black men who were subversive in their eyes.
(soft music)
- We know that there were threats on King's life
that they did not share with him.
We know that they didn't insist on protecting him the way
that it is their obligation to do so.
One of the only reasons to have an organization like that is
to protect people who are subject to secretive threats
and conspiratorial action.
They didn't do that.
- After looking into all of this, really grappling with it,
understanding the reality of the FBI at this time,
I think the real reason why people think
that the government killed Martin Luther King is
because in a sense, they did.
What I've shown you today, all of these FBI transcripts
and evidence from the sixties is rock solid proof
of one thing.
J. Edgar Hoover and his Bureau
of powerful, unelected men wore their badges of justice
and then used their power to threaten the life
of Martin Luther King.
They did so the moment they saw a Black man
getting too powerful and threatening the power
that they relied on to keep themselves on top,
and they couldn't stand it.
Hoover and his FBI used the sacred levers
of justice given to him by the American people
to carry out a personal racist vendetta against King
and his movement, a movement that used morality
and words and ideas
and non-violence to try to level the playing field
for the oppressed class in this country.
But to Hoover, all he could see in this was a Black man
that was threatening his power.
- I would say that the FBI certainly did help
to set the atmosphere around King,
that he was someone who was dangerous
and who was trying to destroy the country
to help solidify the way public opinion
began to turn against him.
- [Johnny] Not only did that congressional report find
that racism was rife at the FBI,
but they also note
that the FBI's campaign against Martin Luther King
didn't end after he died.
When Congress was discussing whether
or not to make MLK's birthday a national holiday,
the FBI sent people over to lobby the Congress
to vote against it, and luckily they failed.
Today here in our nation's capitol between Thomas Jefferson,
Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln,
King has been resurrected in granite,
30 feet tall, a stone of hope that is breaking
through a mountain of despair.
(soft music)
And yet, right down the road,
not too far away is the headquarters
of the FBI, a building named after J. Edgar Hoover,
commemorating a man
who professionalized the bureau during the Cold War,
who fought against organized crime,
but who was also the architect of racist corruption
and governmental overreach, not just against King,
but also against many American people.
He implemented widespread domestic spying,
including on politicians and presidents.
He had dirt on them, the power to blackmail,
the power to control.
He hijacked the most powerful tools of justice
to attack the movement that changed the world,
and yet, here his building sits.
It's perhaps the perfect symbol of how comfortable we are
with maintaining old broken systems
that keeps certain people powerful.
How we let those structures remain in our capital,
in our streets, in our politics,
in our memories, and in our minds.
- [King] I say tonight to white America,
there will be no rest.
There will be no tranquility in this nation
until the Negro has his freedom.
(audience clapping)
(tense music)