AP: The FBI Spied Intensely on MLK’s Widow Long After Assassination, Suggested Intimidating Abernathy

The Associated Press ran a story today about new documents which reveal that the late Coretta Scott King was the subject of intense F.B.I. scrutiny following the assassination of her husband, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

    Federal agents spied on the widow of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for several years after his assassination in 1968, according to newly released documents that reveal the F.B.I. worried about her following in the footsteps of the slain civil rights icon.

    In memos that reveal Coretta Scott King being closely followed by the government, the F.B.I. noted concern that she might attempt “to tie the anti-Vietnam movement to the civil rights movement.”

    Four years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, the F.B.I. closed its file on Coretta Scott King, saying, “No information has come to the attention of Atlanta which indicates a propensity for violence or affiliation of subversive elements,” according to a memorandum dated Nov. 30, 1972.

    The documents were obtained by Houston television station KHOU in a story published Thursday. Coretta Scott King died in January 2006 at the age of 78.

    [...]

    There is also evidence that the Nixon administration and then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were kept informed of the F.B.I.’s nearly constant surveillance.

Perhaps the most appalling revelation in the documents, though, involved a suggestion for disorienting and intimidating Ralph Abernathy, Secretary-Treasurer of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Dr. King’s closest aide.

    The F.B.I. suggested that Ralph Abernathy, a close aide to Martin Luther King, be made aware of death threats against his life for the benefit of “the disruptive effect of confusing and worrying him.”

I would like to echo the Rev. Dr. Josephy Lowery’s statements, and say that I find the actions of the F.B.I. revealed in these documents to be “despicable and devious.” In one sense, this isn’t really news–the F.B.I.’s sordid history with the civil rights movement is well documented in books like David J. Garrow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, must-read masterpiece Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “The only surprise,” as King’s nephew Isaac Newton Farris, Jr., told the A.P., “is the intensity of the surveillance after his death. It appears it was as intense as the surveillance on my uncle.”

American heroes like Coretta Scott King and Ralph Abernathy deserved better than this.