(ThyBlackMan.com) The debate is sharp over whether the movie Selma got it right about Lyndon Johnson and his relationship with and to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A counter argument challenges the film’s depiction of Johnson as at best wary of King and his mass street action campaigns in Selma in 1965 and the South for the passage of a voting rights bill, and at worst outright hostile to King’s actions. This debate will likely rage for years to come. But even more worrisome, Selma strongly hints that Johnson aided and abetted if not an active plotter in the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s dirty, illegal and covert war against King.
Whether Lyndon Johnson knew every gruesome detail of Hoover’s assault on King is not known. However, there are tell-tell clues that Johnson’s involvement with Hoover’s covert campaign went deep. The first tip was his executive order on New Year’s Day, 1964 which in effect assured Hoover his tenure as FBI Director for life.
He reaffirmed that in November 1964 in a meeting with his then Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. Katzenbach had pressed Johnson to rein Hoover’s wiretapping excesses in. Johnson made it clear that he would he not take action against Hoover. He considered him a much valued source for information. That information was the steady stream of illegal wiretaps on the sexual antics and personal activities of any and every one from entertainers to Johnson’s political foes. The biggest haul of tapes though was those that Hoover had stockpiled on King. At the same meeting, Katzenbach explicitly told Lyndon Johnson that Hoover was trying to peddle the tapes on King’s private doings to cooperative journalists.
At a follow-up news conference, Johnson feigned indignation at both Hoover and King and pledged to damp down the friction between the two. Hoover took that as a tacit endorsement and green light to step up his by then virtually open assault on King. That campaign went beyond simply collecting salacious tapes on King. As Selma graphically showed, Hoover sent one of the tapes purporting to show King in an adulterous sexual liaison to his wife Coretta Scott King. The tape was recorded and sent to Southern Christian leadership Conference headquarters in late 1964 just about the time that Lyndon Johnson again declared his support of Hoover.
Hoover’s brutal and systematic covert campaign against had a two-fold aim. One was to discredit King as the nation’s paramount civil rights leader and to discredit the entire civil rights movement in the process.
Hoover, and other top FBI officials routinely spit out these choice expletives about King “Dangerous,” “evil,” and a “colossal fraud.” They didn’t stop at name calling. They talked ominously of “neutralizing” him as an effective leader. And even more ominously they sent him a poison pen letter flatly saying “King you are done” and suggesting he kill himself.
Hoover assigned Assistant FBI director William Sullivan the dirty job of getting the goods on King. Sullivan branded King as the “most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation.” In his book My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI, Sullivan described the inner circle of men assigned to get King. The group was made up of special agents mainly drawn from the Washington and Atlanta FBI offices. Their job was to monitor all of King’s activities. Much of their dirty tactics are well-known. They deluged him with wiretaps, physical surveillance, poison-pen letters, threats, harassment, intimidation, and smear sexual leaks to the media, and even at the time of his murder, Hoover had more plans to intensify the spy campaign against King. Decades later, Sullivan still publicly defended the FBI’s war against him, and made no apology for it. The FBI patterned its spy and harassment campaign against King on the methods used by its counterintelligence division and internal security sections during the 1940s and ’50s. The arsenal of dirty tactics they used included unauthorized wiretaps, agent provocateurs, poison-pen letters, “black-bag jobs” (breaking and entering to obtain intelligence) and the compiling of secret dossiers.
In the 1960s, the FBI recruited thousands of “ghetto informants,” for their relentless campaign of harassment and intimidation against African American groups. The bureau even organized its targets into Orwellian categories agents gave such labels as “Rabble Rouser Index,” “Agitator Index” and “Security Index.”
By the time Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, Hoover’s obsession with and campaign against King was in high gear. And the few times, Hoover’s campaign of slander and vilification of King was hinted at publicly, Lyndon Johnson would shrug it off and reaffirm either publicly and privately Hoover’s absolute invaluable importance to him. What Lyndon Johnson knew or worse authorized Hoover to do to thwart King will never be fully known. But as Selma pointed out, Hoover’s gutter campaign against King happened on Johnson’s watch, and he did nothing to stop it.
Written By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
One can find more info about Mr. Hutchinson over at the following site; TheHutchinson ReportNews.
Also feel free to connect with him through twitter; http://twitter.com/earlhutchins
I think that the phone recordings have established that the movie “Selma” did not “get it right” about LBJ. I think that the African Americans who say that the movie “got it right” about LBJ are really just expressing their overall general hatred of ALL white people. It’s African Americans who want to whine that ALL white people are no darn good and that even the white people who are considered to be decent are not really decent. That is the point behind the false portrayal of LBJ’s character, it’s the point behind Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s above article, it’s the point behind why some black people support say the false portrayal of LBJ is accurate. It’s just another way that the portion of African Americans who hate white people the most express their hatred of white people.
I get it Earl Ofari Hutchinson you hate white people…all white people. I get it Cassandra Jackson you hate all white people. I get it Boyce Watkins you hate all white people. I get it Oprah Winfrey you hate all white people. I get it Ava Duvernay you hate all white people. You all are a bunch of whining racists.
A more careful analysis of history is needed to understand this period of time , DR . KING was not hated by LBJ contrary to all belief in fact DR.KING had him eating out of his hands and they were literally on a first name basis.
OF course HOOVER who was the most powerful man in the country because he had dirt on everybody including LBJ, hated DR KING and wanted to kill him all along.
IT was when DR.KING came out against the war in VIETNAM that LBJ withheld his protection he was providing DR KING because he felt DR.KING had betrayed him because he had did everything DR. KING asked him on the civil rights issues!
ALL this is on record in the LBJ library in AUSTIN TX !
http://theafricanspear.com/
Finally, someone tells the truth about Lyndon Baines Johnson – the movie, “Selma,” and this article (thank you). The movie got it right. LBJ hated Dr. King. And thanks to Oprah for to making a film that shows what a dirty so-and-so LBJ was. I recommend a book that tells the truth about LBJ, it’s NY Times bestseller, “The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ,” by Roger Stone. The author details facts about LBJ that have been overlooked by many writers. Stone calls Johnson “the most sadistic, corrupt, greedy, coarse, abusive, ruthless, psychopath to ever occupy the White House.” It’s worth reading, a good companion to the movie, and – like the movie – may be shocking to many who remember Johnson only for the pro-civil rights measures that were enacted during his administration. http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Killed-Kennedy-Against/dp/1629144894/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=