The US Federal Bureau of Investigation was so afraid of Martin Luther King that it urged King to kill himself in an anonymous letter.
The letter was written in 1964 by a deputy to the much-feared chief, J Edgar Hoover. The deputy, William Sullivan, purported to be a disillusioned civil rights activist.
The letter called Dr King “a filthy, abnormal animal”, claiming he had “sexual orgies” with “evil playmates”.
The letter has been published before but heavily censored. The full contents were discovered by a Yale University historian who was searching the National Archive for a book she was writing on Hoover.
Along with the letter was a recording of some of his extramarital liaisons. The FBI obtained these through illicitly wiretapping his hotel rooms.
The effort appears to have been a last effort to make use of the recordings after several newspapers had been offered the stories but refused to run them.
With deliberate misspellings and awkward constructions, it reads: “Lend your sexually psychotic ear to the enclosure.
“You will find yourself in all your dirt, filth, evil exposed on the record for all time … your filthy, dirty, evil companions, male and females giving expression with you to your hidious [sic] abnormalities.
“It is all there on the record, your sexual orgies. Listen to yourself you filthy, abnormal animal.
It concludes: “There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”
The letter was sent just about a month before Dr King was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Sweden.
He did not read it until his return when he and his advisers agreed it had to have been the work of the FBI.
A 1976 Senate hearing into the dirty tricks campaigns carried out by the FBI and other intelligence agencies concluded that the letter “clearly implied that suicide would be a suitable course of action for Dr King”.
Martin Luther King was assassinated four years later.
The historian, Professor Beverly Gage, said:
“One oddity of Hoover’s campaign against King is that it mostly flopped, and the FBI never succeeded in seriously damaging King’s public image.
“Half a century later, we look upon King as a model of moral courage and human dignity. Hoover, by contrast, has become almost universally reviled.
“In this context, perhaps the most surprising aspect of their story is not what the FBI attempted, but what it failed to do.”