Home / Full timeline / James B. Adams, associate deputy director of the FBI, tells the U.S. Senate’s Intelligence Committee that there was no legal justification for the attempts by the FBI in the 1960s to discredit the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
James B. Adams, associate deputy director of the FBI, tells the U.S. Senate’s Intelligence Committee that there was no legal justification for the attempts by the FBI in the 1960s to discredit the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
1975 (Nov 19)
James B. Adams, associate deputy director of the FBI, told the United States Senate's Intelligence Committee that there was no legal justification for the twenty-five separate attempts by the Bureau in the 1960s to discredit the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as a civil rights leader. The FBI, he continued, was led to investigate King because of the possibility that Communist influences were being brought to bear on him and the civil rights movement. No such evidence, however, was ever uncovered. During its spying on King, the FBI installed a total of sixteen electronic bugs and eight wiretaps in an attempt to collect damaging evidence against the civil rights leader and even sent his wife an anonymous letter and tape recording that King reportedly interpreted as a suggestion for suicide.
References:
- • Hornsby, Alton. Chronology of African-American History: Significant Events and People from 1619 to the Present. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995.