HOOVER'S SLUR OF REV. KING STIRS BITTER RESPONSE
By Evelyn Sell
Rev, Martin Luther King, Jr., winner of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize as "the person who has done most for the furtherance of brotherhood among men,".. attacked an’ American institution recently and set off some very unbrotherly verbal fireworks, King sent a telegram to J, Edgar Hoover, chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] for forty years, in which he charged that the FBI was not making any arrests in: the June 1964 murder of three civil-rights workers in Mississippi, in the September 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church which killed four’ Negro children and in the cases of brutality against Negroes participating in the mass civil-rights meetings in Albany, Georgia, during 1962. King further charged that the FBI was not adequately protecting Negroes in the South because the bureau's agents . were racially prejudiced Southerners,
Hoover angrily retorted by calling King "the most notorious: liar in the country." Let's take a look at the record and see just who is the most notorious liar in the country. We don't have to go back forty years, just a few months,
J. Edgar Hoover paid an official visit to Mississippi at the beginning of the summer. He. arrived in Jackson on June 10 to open a new FBI field office, The: white and Negro students preparing to ~ launch the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project had appealed to the federal government agencies to protect them from the racists. Hoover went to Mississippi’ and spent a very pleasant..time with the political representatives. of the racists: Gov. Paul Johnson, Mayor Allen Thompson of Jackson,' Col. T.B.Birdsong of the state highway patrol and Chief Rayfield of the Jackson city police. .
In a press conference held that day, Hoover described Gov, Johnson as."aq man that I: admire." (It was Gov. Johnson who defied the federal marshals. attempting to enroll Negro James Meredith at the University of Mississippi. It was Gov. Johnson who called on the South to defy the recently enacted civil-rights bill.) Hoover also stated, "We most certainly do not and will not give protection to civil-rights workers. In the first place, the FBI is not a police. organization, It is purely an investigative organization. The protection of individual citizens, either natives of this state or com~ ing into:the state, is a matter for local authorities. The FBI will not participate in any such protection," rs
The FBI and the local authorities form a mutual admiration. society. A month after Hoover's statement, Police Chief Ben Collins of Clarksdale, Mississippi, stated, "The FBI comes in here every day and we:have coffee every day. We're good friends." Chief Collins is one of the leaders of the reign of terror against Negroes in his area. ae
It was about this time that Hoover made another statement that “lawlessness in the South is no worse than lawlessness in the North," Charles Evers, field secretary for the National Association for the. Advancement of” Colored People tance] in Mississippi, protested. Hoover's .statement in a letter he sent the FBI chief, nWe must feel that when the national director of the FBI can make statements such as this the lunatics who would deliberately destroy human life or. property are encouraged, " Evers wrote.
Certainly. ‘the events following Hoover's visit to Mississippi, and his comments that the FBI would not protect civil-rights workers, confirmed the fact that racists were encouraged from-many quarters to terrorize and murder at will.
Eleven days after Hoover left Mississippi three civil-rights workers disappeared, Two days later the charred remains of their station wagon were found in-a swamp. Hundreds of state and local’: police plus a detachment of sailors from a nearby naval base searched for six weeks for the missing youths, A number of other bodies were turned: up during this search. For example, on July 12 and 13 the mutilated bodies of two young Negroes were found in a river,
a The Negro comedian Dick Gregory, who has personally participated. in many civil-rights demonstrations, gave the FBI a letter and a tape recording sent to him... The letter * named the burial spot and the murderers of the three civil«rights workers, The FBI claimed the information was phony, the letter writer was just some crazy guy. However, on August 4, FBI.agents. brought an excavator to the center of a 250-foot long, 25-foot high dirt dam and scooped down 20 feet to the exact spot where the victims were buried. Then followed rumors that. the FBI was questioning "a preacher, a salesman and three cops," The. burial place and the persons being. questioned had all been detailed in the letter received by Gregory.
The. bombings, shootings, threats and beating of Negroes and civilerights workers continued throughout the summer and early fall. Criticisms of the FBI began to mount. In October Rev. Williams Banks, Supreme ‘Grand Master of the International Mason Lodges in the U.S., urged all members to write to President Johnson and demand the immediate resignation of J, Edgar Hoover. Banks wrote, "With no explanation for. the 40 bombings of schools and churches in Mississippi and no one having been arrested or punished, we feel the Federal Bureau of Investigation is. dragging its feet."
tr am-at a loss to understand,” Banks continued, "how such a competent organization as the F.B.I. is unable to solve these bomb-= ings of homes, churches and schools when they have built a reputation for solving many major crimes. There must be something wrong somewhere...
‘Then Martin Luther King, Jr., sent his telegram to Hoover, Hoover hastened to make the FBI look good, The FBI revealed that it
knew who the murderers of the three civil-rights workers were and, further, that it has identified the Ku Klux Klansmen responsible ‘for the: 1965 bombing of the Birmingham church. .
The FBI also listed arrests in the South: the arrest of Deputy Marshal Denver Short, Jr., in Georgia; the arrest of four white men charged with burning a Negro church near Dawson, Georgia; 11 arrests in McComb, Mississippi, involving bombings and other violence; 7 arrests in Natchez, Mississippi, involving shootings and beatings; 7 arrests -in Pike County, Mississippi, for racial violence; 5 arrests in Neshoba County, Mississippi, of law-enforcement officers charged with police brutality.
These arrests are only a drop in the bucket spilling over with racial violence in the South, Most of these arrests are really meaningless because the charged persons are then tried and acquitted by lily-white Southern juries, ‘The first arrest cited by the FBI was of Deputy Marshal Short charged with cursing voter registration workers and firing his gun at the tires of their cars, Short was acquitted © by a district. jury in Georgia. Byron de la Beckwith, accused murderer of NAACP official Medgar Evers, is still free and still participating in anticivil-rights groups because all-white juries have twice been unable to return a verdict. against him, The Ku Klux Klan, holding its national convention: in Georgia during September, was able to celebrate the recent acquittal of two Klansmen charged with the murder of Lt. Col. Penn, a 48=year-old Washington, D.C., Negro educator,
Negroes, well acquainted with the perversions of Southern Justice, are nevertheless correctly demanding that the FBI uncover and arrest all violators of civil and human rights, King's telegram unleashed a storm against Hoover, James Farmer, national director of’ the Congress of Racial Equality, demanded the resignation of Hoover because the FBI chief appeared to be “engaging in a vendetta against the civil-rights movement. . . It is an untenable situation for the Administration and the Justice Department to be saying and doing one thing and. the chief of the FBI to be saying publicly something quite opposed." (Farmer seems. to forget that the Justice Department, too, refused to protect civil-rights workers “in Mississippi this summer.) i Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, eriticized Hoover's statements which appeared in a recent-issue of Newsweek magazine, Hoover is. quoted as saying, "I have been one. of these states! righters all my life, Naturally, I get more and more- irritated when I see Congress passing along to us matters which should be handled at the state level. When you weaken. the state authorities you do a great disservice to daw enforcement all over the country.".
Wilkins commented, "Perhaps Mr, Hoover’ ‘needs to review nis position as FBI director in the light of that referendum [the Nov, 3 election] and to decide where his allegiance lies -=- not as to love of country, but as to Federal~state. velationship ‘and the issue of color=blind Americanism,"
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Wilkins was..ane:.of the Negro. leaders.who-met with President Johnson the day after Hoover called King a liar, The delegation of Negroes told the president: that: they sided with King and. that they, too, félt that the FBI had not provided proper protection for’ Negroes, Reporters asked how the president. responded to the statements. against the FBI. Wilkins answered, "The President simply listened to us. He did not give any answer or: comment . Moe
President Johnson» gave his comment and his answer last May. At that time he took the highly unusual step of exempting Hoover from mandatory retirement at the'age of seventy on January 1, 1965, Ata White House ceremony President Johnson told Hoover that "he could stay on the: job "indefinitely" and that. “the nation cannot afford: to lose you,".0": . =
Like the FBI agents, Johnson, too, is a Southerner,