Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was called “an evil, abnormal beast” in an anonymous letter FBI agents sent the civil rights leader in 1964 in an effort to get him to commit suicide, a newly published, unredacted version of the note, shows.
The disturbing missive, which details intimate knowledge of King’s extramarital affairs, was sent in the days before he was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize and is written under the guise of a civil rights supporter angry with the movement’s leader.
A deadline of 34 days is given before King is outed as a womanizer, the missive, filled with grammatical errors, threatens.
Long threatened by the rise of the powerful black minister, the efforts of former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to discredit King have since been revealed and shined a disturbing light on government overreach and misconduct during the Jim Crow era, Gage says of her research into a biography of the once-vaunted law enforcement head.
Though previously released in a heavily edited form, Gage found the original copy, free of redactions, among documents at the National Archives in College Park, Md.
