The “communist” and the “last knights”:
depictions of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the FBI in the letters to John Edgar Hoover (1962-1971)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.46752/anphlac.37.2024.4189Keywords:
FBI, Martin Luther King Jr., anti-communismAbstract
This article aims to analyze the depictions of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) contained in letters sent by civilians to the director of the Bureau, John Edgar Hoover, between the 1960s and 1970s. Although celebrated by many today, King was harshly persecuted and criticized during his lifetime. Therefore, we sought to reconstruct the portraits created about the pastor and understand the anti-communist and racist articulations behind those depictions against him, as well as the role of the FBI and Hoover in this process. We argue that anti-communism and racism, far from being characteristics of certain political positions at the time, were in fact the very frames through which political reality was interpreted by a significant part of the country’s population.
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