Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/20/the-fbi-honors-mlk-jr-day-by.html
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To be fair, the FBI wasn’t already ne. Lots of people didn 't like him or the notion of desegregation.
If yiu were n the south to desegrgate, many white people didn’t like you. You could be hated, or beaten, or killed.
“To be fair, the FBI was just the enforcement wing of a racist autocracy.” /s
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The FBI has a long history of actively fighting progress. They routinely installed moles in environmental, animal rights, and civil rights groups to encourage illegal behavior so that they could then be shut down for the illegality. They also worked diligently to fight against MLK, the Black Pathers, the NOI, and any other group pushing for the radical idea of human equality.
Or in the words of the FBI “'Through counter-intelligence it should be possible to pinpoint potential trouble-makers…and neutralize them”
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I guess working for the FBI during the J Edgar Hoover era could be a real drag.
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In a better world J. Edgar Hoover’s many serious crimes against civil liberties would be a far more scandalous legacy than the still-uncorroborated allegation he engaged in occasional cross-dressing.
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Outside of the FBI document dump, did any other verification of the assertion that MLK Jr. was “a kind of kinky guy” ever emerge? I remember reading about this a few years ago, and found it just, well, a bit odd. Wouldn’t they have put this stuff out there, back in the day, if it was valid? If they were sending him anonymous letters suggesting he kill himself, why wouldn’t they have aired this stuff? It didn’t and doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
Maybe a bit more corroborated?
ROCCA: How was J. Edgar Hoover as Vivian Van dressed - which is really what matters?
GUNN: A stunning house dress.
KLEIN: If that’s the look he wanted, he got a good one.
GUNN: But I have to tell you this too, I wrote about this in one of my books - “Gunn’s Golden Rules.” It was published by a division of Simon & Schuster. The Simon & Schuster legal team went to task on that book. They spent two weeks with it and they contacted Vivian Vance’s two biographers - neither of whom knew anything about this visit to the FBI, and then they went to the FBI to look at their visitor logs - no Vivian Vance.
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And so it goes…
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WTF? To be fair? From that post all I can see is that you have some typing skills to work on and allot of reading up to do.
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“Being fair” is exactly the concept the FBI was fighting against when they spent decades working to destroy the Civil Rights movement.
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Reminder that this is not just history.
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That’s not very kind
I presume that the Nation of Islam was quite different before Farrakhan took over?
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There is plenty about the NOI I don’t support, but it was Malcolm X’s loudly calling for racial change that got the FBI investigating them. So in that context I included them
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Honoring this calendar day is easy for the FBI. All it takes is a little lip service, and their bases are covered.
If they were serious about honoring the man and what he stood for (stands for!) -they would open their books, expose ever dirty bit of political policing, and build in policies that would make future COINTELPRO actions structurally impossible to commit.
Not this year, but in the near future… I can see it.
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But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.
This points me directly toward the problems of discussing politics on the internet. The core assumption of the internet now, is “everybody knows you’re a dog”. And the assumption that anyone disagreeing with you must be insincerely yanking your chain… can be every bit as toxic as if that were the truth.
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Kellyanne Conway was asked how Trump planned to spend Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Her response:
Methinks some folks in Washington think that it’s totally unfair that Trump is being judged by the content of his character rather than by the color of his skin. (That is, assuming there’s white skin somewhere underneath that orange topcoat).
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Yeah, that woman could choke on her own tongue before I’d deign to pay attention to a single word that comes out of her mouth.
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